This past week, I’ve managed to squeeze in some long haul flying. However, I started to notice that after a few hours of flying, my sim would begin to micro-stutter until I reloaded the sim. During flight, it wasn’t so bad, but when on the ground, it would be a second-stutter every 2 or 3 seconds. As you can imagine, it was very annoying. Let me show you what I mean (thanks to Youtuber touchydafish)
In this video you can see he’s departing Hong Kong – perfectly fine. No stuttering.
Several hours later, here he is again landing in Los Angeles. This time, you can make out that every few seconds, there’s a stutter.
After doing a bit of research, it appears that the culprit is actually Navigraph’s Simlink. Certainly not ideal if you’re using their amazing charts app. Whilst it doesn’t render the charts useless, it does mean you won’t be able to track your aircraft relative to the chart itself. Bit of a catch-22!
Me, personally, I’d prefer to have a smooth sim experience, so I decided to remove Simlink.
Despite what the forums suggest, you need to actually delete it fully from your PC in order for your sim to be fixed. To do this, it’s pretty simple:
- Head to Control Panel -> Uninstall a program -> Uninstall Simlink
- Go to your P3DV4 Add-On folder (typically DocumentsPrepar3D v4 Add-ons) and delete the entire Simlink folder.
- For good measure, restart your PC.
Load up your sim and go for a long flight and hopefully the issue has gone away.
Edit (thanks to Maarten for the information).
I just want to clarify what I meant about why I suggest fully deleting Simlink from the PC.
Based on what was said in the forums, simply ‘quitting’ the program (before or after you have turned on the sim), the impact will still be there. You can disable the add-on through the sim itslef so the DLL doesn’t run. However, in the interest of keeping my sim ‘tidy’ and hopefully avoiding issues in the future, I feel deleting it completely is the best thing to do. The choice is yours, so do whatever works best for you.
Keep an eye on the Navigraph forums for any updates to the problem and hopefully a fix so we can enjoy side-by-side again!
We’re unsure if this is having an impact on other sims. Any comments, let us know in the section below.
