Flight Simulator 2020 Is Finally Out, But Many Can't Install It

SmartAboutThings writes: Microsoft released Flight Simulator 2020 but many people who bought it online are having problems downloading it, installing it, or simply running the new game. Some users simply didn't get to download the game even if they tried several times to do so. When the download was finally complete, they received an error while trying to install it. Even if some users also got through the installation, they faced another problem: the game freezes at the starting screen. Microsoft didn't present a solution yet but Windowsreport.com wrote first about these problems and offered some workarounds and possible solutions.

Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

Even Microsoft doesn't know how to make a proper installer for a windows program

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

I bet they throw a bit of spyware in there too.

I'll stick with FlightGear [flightgear.org]

Re:

[Kisai]

You should see the cluster**** that installing PSO2 was.

Re:

[arglebargle_xiv]

Some users simply didn't get to download the game even if they tried several times to do so. When the download was finally complete, they received an error while trying to install it. Even if some users also got through the installation, they faced another problem: the game freezes at the starting screen.

Sounds a lot like the Windows 10 experience. You'd almost think the two were made by the same company.

Re: Interesting

[fod_dzug]

Didn't know Microsoft and Boeing were related....

Re: Interesting

[tsa]

Microsoft is famous for not getting things. Their installs were always anything but straightforward. Remember having to reboot like 7 times installing Windows XP? I also had a lot of problems just getting a MS account so I could use Teams. Itâ(TM)s almost like they do it on purpose to be able to get data on how you act when youâ(TM)re frustrated and angry

Re:

[gweihir]

Microsoft is famous for not getting things.

Well, to be fair, there is almost no customer pressure. People still want to use their 3rd rate crap, despite all the screw-ups, insecurities and incompatibilities. Hence MS has absolutely no reason to even try to do things right. "Barely functional" apparently offers the best value proposition.

Re:

[Mattcelt]

People are still forced to use

FTFY.

Many people (myself included) desperately wish to never have to touch a MicroSloth product ever again. But unfortunately they are so entrenched (thanks in very large part to their abusive monopolistic practices) that it is nearly impossible to work in IT without having to work with their software.

Re:

[tsa]

This. Everybody who has worked or works at an office has had to deal with MS's crap. OK, it's not as bad anymore as it was in the 1990s and 2000s when MS was at their absolute worst but it's still amazing how they can copy neat features from Apple and Linux and manage to completely miss the point so it's at the brink of unusable.

Re:

[gweihir]

Well, with the mess MS is making and perpetuating, what do you expect? They cannot even reliably install updates in their own products. Just like you would expect from a 3rd rate software maker, really. Which they are.

Re:

[Bigbutt]

Which third rate software maker would you recommend. Apple is shit and linux can’t seem to properly recognize my monitor setup, assuming it will boot at all and aside from neither having the games I play.

[John]

Re:Interesting

[DThorne]

Yep, not only that, but the package delivery system is brain dead as well, handling everything like a 90G linux package update from 15 years ago. It's astounding the level of their incompetence especially since they knew this would be a hit. I waited until the next day assuming it might be a bit better, it took me about 4 hours. Bonus points for looping 30 seconds of mind melting elevator music the entire time with no way to disable I could see. As a comparison, on the same system I downloaded and installed the entire Death Stranding in about 10 minutes. For anyone who still has this ahead of them, a pro tip I got from Steam was to kill the installer when the blue bar comes up and nothing seems to be happening. That puts you in "repair" mode when you restart it, it behaves like a proper installer then, showing you progress. Christ.

My experience (for what its worth)

[jools33]

I got my refund from Steam overnight. The package delivery kept hanging at the blue bar, and I tried many many remedies. It seems the only thing I have not tried is a full windows reset, and that I was not really prepared to do. Steam support could not help, just advised me to update everything, which I already had, then they referred me to microsoft support who kindly reffered my straight back to Steam Support, so instead of following this infinite support loop I opted for the refund, which to Steams credi

Re: Interesting

[SuperDre]

That has got more to do with the complexity of an OS which runs on uncountable different configurations. Any application will have problems on some users computer, even a simple Hello world.. if you only have to deal with one specific hardware/software configuration it's much easier to have less problems. So yeah, with a million+ users installing your game from at least 2 different platforms (ms store/steam) it was to be expected it would have problems for at least 1% of the users..

Same problems here, ALL of them!

[darkain]

Almost every issue described here I've ran into with FlightSim 2020

Additionally, you cannot download on more than one device at a time. I have a gaming desktop and a gaming laptop, and wanted to get it going on both, so I have it ready for my weekend trip. *CANT*! DRM only allows one INSTANCE of the downloader, but after one is completed (and not playing the game), the files can THEN be downloaded on the other.

To add to that, the error message telling me I couldn't download on the second system was horribly broken. It would force me to try again with no option to exit. Clicking the "X" that would close the window didn't actually close the installer, it just started over at the beginning, and went to the error screen... endlessly. Had to force kill the app.

Before all that though, Microsoft claimed I wasn't online while using the app store (hard-wired desktop with gigabit internet, HAH!), then after that, they claimed I no longer had the XBox Game Pass PC subscription, which was used only a few days prior to download and play games from the store on the same machine.

I've yet to actually get INTO the game, as I'm having the same crashing issue upon loading as other people are expressing.

Re:

[ELCouz]

One of the reason I always wait a few days on game release before purchasing. Many times things get buggy or worse a total flop! I would be mad to have paid 130$ for deluxe version and cannot use it!

Re:

[darkain]

That's why I went XBox Game Pass PC route instead. $1 first month for the subscription. If this sucks, I just ditch it, and am out $1, that's it.

Re:

[mobby_6kl]

Yep signed up for that too. There's really no way I'll be willing to spend enough time on the game to justify the full purchasing price. But I'd certainly love to fly around some familiar places and crash some planes into Trump Towers.

But it still didn't fucking work. First time the download got stuck, but after nuking it and reinstalling, it instead hangs about 30% into loading the actual game. knew you couldn't trust the French!

Re:

[rtb61]

Check windows versions. M$ has been raging dicks for a few months now, paying publishers to ensure games only run on windows 10, requiring a missing DLL, not that it is used for anything, it is just windows anal probe 10 specific and crashing the game if it is missing, on purpose. Now that is hard for M$ to do publicly because it is a fraudulent criminal act, so they do it surreptitiously purposely crashing the whole process on anything but windows anal probe 10, you are paying for the privilege of being bu

Re:

[AmiMoJo]

Some people on Twitter are saying that the time the installer is running counts as "play time" which affects refunds too.

Yeah yeah yeah Graphics are good and all that

[Jarwulf]

Its really great that it looks good and all that but how is the flight model? Is the accuracy great compared to Xplane and what else is out there?

Keep trying...

[Temkin]

Keep trying... My teenage son managed to get it running, but it took half the day. He did say he had to manually delete the files in the program folder. He eventually got it working, and did a test hop in a Cessna from our local airport and cruised past our house at 500' AGL. The car and SUV were parked correctly in the driveway, but my truck was missing... So I grounded him.

Obviously they added the new 737 max.

[Fly Swatter]

Now it is Microsoft Crash Simulator, working as intended.

-did you try disabling the boing explosion pack?

Not as great as advertised

[NewtonsLaw]

I checked out our airfield on the new version and it's pretty bad.

We have hangars that don't exist, the tower is in the wrong place and there are a bunch of trees that have magically grown where no trees exist at all. That's kind of a shame because at least one other flight simulator has gotten our airfield almost perfect.

I guess that's the problem when they're using Bing maps instead of a more definitive reference for this stuff. The guys who wrote the other sim actually came to the airfield and took pictures as well.

Just because it says "Microsoft" on the box doesn't mean it's best in class :-)

Re:

[fluffernutter]

You are just too small to be important. If your airfield was "Chicago O'Hare" your concerns would be logged and fixed in due time.

Re:

[MessageDrivenBean]

Microsoft "on the box" means that sales and marketing agreed that the reputation damage releasing the product is lower than the profit they are making from it. Bad software quality never was a reason for Microsoft not to release a product...

Re: Not as great as advertised

[SuperDre]

Ok, but I'll bet the simulator you're referring to doesn't have the whole world available, and only a few airfields are probably as detailed as you say. Just like with this new sim from MS, but they will fix these kinds of problems on a regular basis, but expect bigger airfields and popular venues to be enhanced first.

Re:

[slashdot_commentator]

Its supposed to have every documented airfield in the FAA database. What it doesn't have is the exact image of each airport. It uses computer algorithms to randomly recreate terrain image, including buildings. That's why you have the "handcrafted" airports, different ones accessible depending on your purchase tier.

Re:

[SuperDre]

So they DO have every documented airfield in the FAA database... it might not look like it 100%, but the airfield is where it's supposed to be.. But now you know what the difference can be between the 'handcrafted' airports and the autogenerated ones.. As I said, I'm pretty sure in the long run all those airfields will be replaced with more detailed versions..

Re:

[slashdot_commentator]

The handcrafted airports should look like the real ones. Therefore, the buildings will look as their supposed to, and will be located in the same locations around the landing strip. Other natural features will look the same as satellite photos.

The randomly generated features around a non-handcrafted airport will mean the area around the airport will not look like "real life". In the long run, who knows how many decades and versions will be released before most airports look like they're supposed to from

Re:

[SuperDre]

Funny thing is, when I look at google maps, a large portion of the city where I work is also available in 3D, but the district where I actually work which is near the airport is still in 2D (more than only just the airport), so I guess they do need some extra imagery/data to support a 3D view. So I can imagine that for a lot of areas there still isn't enough data to accurately (or closely) do 3D.

Alternatives

[Randseed]

I''m sticking with X-Plane. First of all, I won't have to buy all new addons, scenery, and planes. Second, FS2020 seems to be more of a download simulator than anything else at this point. For example, if you buy it on Steam, it pulls down a 500MB (I think) download which is just an installer. When you run the installer, it then takes half a day or more to download 90GB or so which is the actual simulator. Unfortunately, it seems that they did this deliberately because when you run the installer it starts counting as "play time." After two hours, you're no longer eligible for a refund. Then there's reportedly a long list of problems with it as well. Reportedly the flight models aren't as good as X-Plane either. So I see no reason to even try it out, and sure as hell not for $130.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

graphics are significantly better in MFS2020 compared to X-Plane. X-Plane while I like it better is just a money pit. definitely leaning towards FS2020 at this point.

Re:

[AmiMoJo]

Never needing to buy scenery packs is attractive. The whole world is there and seems to be getting free updates.

Only thing is you need a monster GPU to play it so I might give it a while for them to come down in price.

Re:Alternatives

[Taelron]

Its even worse than that. I had to pause and unpause the download 3 different times. Even exit and restart the program twice to get it to finish downloading.

Then after downloading and installing the 531mb, then 90.1gb, it turned around and needed another 3.9gb patch.

it doesnt recognize my Saitek Pro Flight Pedals, though it does my ThrustMaster WartHog controller. (Never had an issues with FSX or XPlane.)

And the market store inside the game still tries to sell me the whole Premium upgrade which I have installed for another $99. I could see someone getting confused and trying to buy it a second time and getting screwed out of their money.

Finally, unlike previous versions of Microsoft Flight Simulator and XPlane, there is no recording of your flight so you can review it later to see how you did from the outside or from other angles after your landing. And if something fails or you crash it just puts up a box and says something broke and dumps you back into the main menu.

Its visually appea0ling from the sky, but the face on visuals of buildings are often not that great. Its more of an arcade like game than a true flight simulator at this point. I'm actually disappointed that i wasted the money.

Re:

[CoolDiscoRex]

ThrustMaster WartHog controller.

Thank God I’m not the only one who payed $500 for a flight stick + throttle.

Starving African children shit in our general directions.

Re:

[tlhIngan]

ThrustMaster WartHog controller.

Thank God Iâ(TM)m not the only one who payed $500 for a flight stick + throttle.

Nothing wrong with that. It's one of the better ones.

I have a HOTAS Cougar as well, and got the F/A-18 stick addon. Considering I bought all of that over the span of 15 years or so, it's not too bad an investment.

People have spent hundreds of thousands making a home theatre. ANd people have made their own simpits spending countless hours and money, so in the end the $1200-odd I spent is bar

Re:

[munehiro]

I am a pilot too. Please explain. It seems quite accurate to me, at least for the extra 300

Re:

[Ormy]

...it pulls down a 500MB (I think) download which is just an installer. When you run the installer, it then takes half a day or more to download 90GB or so which is the actual simulator. Unfortunately, it seems that they did this deliberately because when you run the installer it starts counting as "play time." After two hours, you're no longer eligible for a refund..

Doesn't steam have some small print to deal with this? If not that's a horrific loophole that Valve need to close right now. Much of their success depends on the trust they have built with gamers through, among other things, a decent refund policy. If they're going to allow certain games to end-run around that policy they could see lots of future sales lost to competing game stores or back to piracy. I'll bet the version of flight simulator 2020 likely available on the torrent sites works with far less

Re:

[Randseed]

I have two 8TB external drives over here that I store most of games, torrents, and other bulky stuff on. So I have no problem with large download sizes or anything like that, aside from the amount of time it may take to download them, which compared to what us old-timers had to deal with is not significant these days. The philosophical issue is that if you download a Steam game and get it refunded, it simply won't work until you buy it again. The data hangs around unless you delete it, but it won't run. Mo

Re:

[thegarbz]

Unfortunately, it seems that they did this deliberately because when you run the installer it starts counting as "play time."

Don't attribute to malice what can be attributed to bureaucracy. MS doesn't give a shit about Steam refunds. The reason for this is that it's not a "Steam" game, but rather a "Windows Store" game. They only publish an installer so they can control updates from their own unified platform without having to republish updates to every platform every time. No company out there even the true shitbags consider refunds to be of any relevance to their revenue stream.

The fact that Steam counts this as play time is al

Re:

[AmiMoJo]

To be fair if you email Steam and ask about a refund and explain that the first 8 hours of play was downloading they will usually issue the refund.

Re: Alternatives

[SuperDre]

Oh please, they did not do it deliberate to go beyond the refund limit. Steam is already extending it for this game. The problem lies with steam actually, it starts counting after you start the installed game executable, so any game which would start downloading extra data from an external server is impacted by such a method. It would make no sense for MS to have the actual world data also be available on the steam service as an update.

same old story

[Anonymouse Cowtard]

MS is using its customers as beta testers. Again. Surely there's a FOSS flight sim that is at least up to the standard of FS2000 by now?

Re:

[cephalien]

They've been using people as beta testers since Windows 1.0

Re: same old story

[SuperDre]

Oh please.. with such a large userbase and windows having an unlimited amount of configurations software and hardware, it was bound to have problems for some users.. that's with any windows application, even a simple hello world.

Per M$, doesn't support Windows LTSC 1809

[Indy1]

I would of bought it, but the stupid fucks who wrote this demand you have Windows 10 1909.

Sorry Bill, but I don't run consumer dogshit versions of Windows that like to auto update and eat itself.

Oh well, their loss.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

*SMACKS HEAD*

"Sorry Bill"? Bill gates hasn't been CEO of Microsoft for 20 years! Do you even know who Satya Nadella is?

It's OK for you to Dislike Microsoft's business decisions, but at least get your target right!

Re:

[Indy1]

I know Bill hasn't been there in a while, but his shitty half assed approach to product design and support will live on forever in M$ land. Hence he still gets the blame :)

Easy fix

[tphb]

You have to run installer as admin (Run-as). Fixes the install, problem. Pretty silly issue for a big release.

Itâ(TM)s spectacular, but it will crush your PC.

Re:

[hcs_$reboot]

So the soft doesn't do the admin request on your behalf... Well done MS.

Classic "works on my machine" issue

[drnb]

You have to run installer as admin (Run-as). Fixes the install, problem. Pretty silly issue for a big release.

Developers and gamers are notorious for running in admin mode all the time. The only reason they even use passwords is to hide the porn stash from mom. User mode is for spreadsheet jockeys. ;-)

Classic "works on my machine" issue most likely.

Re:

[AC-x]

I would hope that developers know better than to run everything as "root", especially on Windows. I certainly don't!

Re:

[drnb]

I would hope that developers know better than to run everything as "root", especially on Windows. I certainly don't!

Many developers view anything short of having admin access as an impediment to their work, truth is its more of an affront to their ego. "User Mode", ew, QA will test that so I don't need to.

Re:

[AC-x]

But I do have admin access, I just have to give my software the admin password before it can go off and do whatever it likes*.

* I know Windows UAC is supposed to do that too, but because everyone complained about how annoying it was in Vista it got toned down and more rights granted implicitly...

Re:

[jools33]

admin did not fix it for me, but it has for some. I suspect the main issues are with the cloud delivery, and different experiences due to different cloud instances with different packages available and or corrupted.

Maybe you need a genuine IBM PC or a Compaq

[Don Bright]

I have heard that this program will not run on a clone PC, it requires an original IBM PC or a 100% compatible clone, like a Compaq.

Re:

[NXIL]

Can confirm. Will not run on HP Vectra, even with upgraded 20MB "The Tough One" Winchester Hard Drive.

No, just turn off turbo mode

[drnb]

I have heard that this program will not run on a clone PC, it requires an original IBM PC or a 100% compatible clone, like a Compaq.

No, it works just fine on clones if you deselect turbo mode. Turbo mode screws up the game's timing.

Re:

[Cmdln Daco]

It won't run on my Columbia Data Systems PC clone. I guess I should have gotten an AT&T 6300.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

One question

[hcs_$reboot]

Did the MS folks test the soft, at least once?

Re:

[NXIL]

No, they have paid testers--the sim enthusiasts who paid, that is.

My GTX970 cries at the screenshots

[BLToday]

I highly doubt my Haswell system with GTX970 would be able to handle this game at an enjoyable framerate regardless of the listed hardware requirement.

missing runtime Library?

[PinkyGigglebrain]

I have lost count of the number of times some new program I'm trying to run, or even one I've used for years that just got updated, just flat out failed to start with some error message that tells me nothing other than "missing function in ...." or some other totally useless info.

all because the developer didn't test their code on a vanilla install of the target OS and just assumed that EVERYONE had the latest versions or the same run times and developer's libraries installed on their systems.

and this is ju

Re:

[thegarbz]

I have lost count of the number of times some new program I'm trying to run, or even one I've used for years that just got updated, just flat out failed to start with some error message that tells me nothing other than "missing function in ...." or some other totally useless info.

I am not normally one to blame the user, but the last time I saw this kind of error was a decade ago when 32bit versions when MS made a mess of the 32bit vs 64bit VC++ redistributables. I literally haven't seen such an error in the past decade, never on a Windows 10 machine which makes me wonder what you're missing, if something at some point attempted to install but crashed and left your computer in a broken state.

Pretty much every installer verifies you have the latest required libraries. Every single one

Re: missing runtime Library?

[SuperDre]

Well one problem might also be, what is a vanilla OS? With windows 10 you still gave a 32bit version, but standard is 64bit, you have home, pro and enterprise. You have different feature updates (you know, the big w10 updates which rakes about a half year to be pushed to every w10 machine, and even then as a user you have to explicitly tell it to install it). So now I have my dev machine, w10 but I'm using vb6 and default windows dlls, but MS fucked it up with a newer dll, and I cannot install the older ver

Boeing Bam Bam

[AndyKron]

Good thing Microsoft doesn't make software for real airplanes like Boeing.

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Crashes my machine

[RedMage]

I got it installed - had to run it as Administrator in the end.
It starts fine, I can fly around. The autopilot is a disaster on the 172. Planes disappear from the hanger randomly.
And then --- BOOM. locks up my machine. Video goes black. Power-button reset time.
Nothing else I have (including heavy GPU/CPU users like rendering) does this, so it's probably not resource related.
Next time I feel like being aggravated I'll try with lower graphics settings and see what it does, but even if
for some reason that

Config.sys

[clinko]

Did they try adding himem to config.sys? Worked for me on my 486sx 33.

DEVICE=C:\Windows\HIMEM.SYS
DOS=HIGH,UMB

Re:

[RitchCraft]

I had to add: FILES=30 Then it worked just fine.

And then there's the 90-150GB download

[Lisandro]

Apparently a number of Steam users are complaining about this. FS requires a lot of data to be downloaded before you can even run in, which Steam counts as play time. Meaning, the refund window is closed well before the game is even playable.

Re:

[jools33]

They are now offerring refunds ignoring the play time, Gabe Newell has commented on this too to indicate a relaxation in policy as they are aware of the issues it seems. pc gamer article [pcgamer.com]

I Bought It

[CoolDiscoRex]

93GB download took awhile. Seems to work, but it’s slow even on my i9-9900k + 2080TI + 64GB. I couldn’t download it without give MS a phone number. Latest scam they have going to get personal info.

I love Flight Sims, but do not love MS. It’s like buying a really cool game from Hitler.

You’re both happy and disgusted at the same time.

So, I Just Found Something Out

[CoolDiscoRex]

Microsoft tries it's best to hide the location of the executable. You can't open the location from the start bar, and if you click the executable and do "Open File" or "Properties" from the Task Manager ... it simply does nothing.

Windows 10 refuses to show you or take you to the location.

Microsoft is so weird. Serious, these companies are so damn paranoid and customer hostile, something is going to give eventually. Maybe not in my lifetime, but I can't imagine that it won't happen.

Weirdos.