Support .pln for mission and activity products

Ideas
1

Please support .pln in the MSFS Marketplace. Why?

  1. They are reliable
  2. They are not buggy (see above)
  3. They allow the user to choose time of day
  4. They allow the user to choose weather
  5. They allow the user to choose aircraft
  6. The flight plan works well with the inbuilt MSFS map (v key)
  7. The flight plan works well with popular 3rd party progs like Little Nav Map (see image below)
  8. They are a simple and compact file format with no reference to external xml files (see 1 and 2)
  9. My existing customers love them.
  10. I have spent a year developing 500 World Tour flights for the sim. 250 are published already in 10 volumes as pln.
  11. The reliability of the pln has been pretty ruggedly tested shown in the 2,000 hours plus I have spent flying with them in the sim and partially documented in the more than 700 videos I have published. (MiGMan’s Flight Sim Museum at YouTube)

My workstation, seen here has been running pln files in MSFS, and displaying
the plan in a physical cockpit networked from MSFS > Little Nav Map > Cockpit
(upper right display). Absolutely. Reliably. Many of my clients have similar
home builds. To run these on a single Windows PC makes you acutely aware of
interactions between software. This setup requires 10 programs to run at once.
Why can’t we keep it simple and allow the pln to coexist with the flt format?

1000×793 167 KB

2

The SDK
documentation
supports the .pln format. Yet I am told that “the SDK team” does not support
the .pln format. Would anyone from Microsoft or Asobo care to weigh in here
and clarify?

3

Having been instructed by the support team to pursue an answer here, I can now
quote them directly:

“SDK team does not think missions using .pln files will work, and to not
allow them.” This conclusion is 100% incorrect: “…does not think using
.pln files will work”.

“Does not think… (pln) will work…”

So, the SDK team is quite open that they have not tested whether .pln
will work? They rather ‘think’ they will not work. What is going on please?

4

It’s very unfortunate that the only way to provide flights on Marketplace is
with a specific aircraft, predefined weather and without the ability to
customize any of it. I hope the new mission system they’re working on will
allow such customizations, will match and even go beyond what a PLN allows.

5

runshotgun: “It’s very unfortunate that the only way to provide flights on
Marketplace is with a specific aircraft, predefined weather and without the
ability to customize any of it.” I agree, although I would say ‘unfortunate’
is a mild assessment. This decision seems to be informed by ’ game
development ', rather than ‘sim development’. Surely the strength of this
franchise since the 1980’s has been to provide a sandbox where the customers
can employ a wide range of playing/flying styles? runshotgun: “I hope the
new mission system they’re working on will allow such customizations, will
match and even go beyond what a PLN allows.” It would be nice if that
happened.

6

A majority of the money comes from gamers, not simmers. This is obvious by the
existence of MSFS on Xbox and the importance they attribute to it. It is
logical for MS to gamify MSFS as much as possible to bring more people to the
platform that way. That being said, I think what we need in terms of
flexibility will come over time. If they wanted to get this right from the
start, the sim would still be behind closed doors being developed 1.5 years
later.

7

@runshotgun Sorry, just saw this. Yes I
understand your point. In this case though I am asking for no more features
in the sim but to allow pln in the marketplace. I’m glad the sim is out now
too, having racked up over 2,000 hours flight time in it…using .pln files! ;
< )