I ended up on that screen when it closed itself down after I went to check on its progress. The bar didn't seem to be moving so I rebooted and am back on the initial progress bar now.
Yeah that screen means it's not working. Closing and reopening a few times fixed it for me. Or maybe try the Reddit link I posted. When it ended up working it actually switched to window mode for some reason so not sure if that has something to do with it.
When it eventually works I highly recommend setting a humourous callsign. ATC clearing "BIGDICK6969" for taxi makes me chuckle much more than it should.
Shit, deffo some issues going on. Most solutions seem to be restarting the thing, you could also try updating Windows and graphics drivers if you haven't already, FWIW. Hope yous lot can get it going alright soon, I'll keep an eye out on articles/posts to see if there's a more definite solution. Mine seemed to work ok, I did have to restart it at one point to finish downloading like half the game, but that might have been my fault by closing it accidentally at some point.
A quick tip for those not used to flying in realistic games: There are difficulty settings for flying which add some assists to keep you going in a straight line, if you want to feel like a legit pilot and turn those assists off you will want to get used to adjusting trim and flaps, two basic controls that aren't in most games.
The use for flaps will become apparent as you mess with them, and by default you'll get some handy hints that pop up telling you to adjust the. Basically flaps down a bit for takeoff, raised in fast flight, and flaps down again for landing, down to the full setting as you near the runway. You will probably need to increase power a bit as you lower them to not stall.
Then there's trim which once you've figured out will make level flying much less hard work, especially on a controller where you can't so easily make and hold fine adjustments. By default on a controller it's the Y button + up/down/left/right on the dpad for elevator and aileron trim. Basically as you go faster you will generate more lift that will cause you to tilt upwards, which then causes you to slow down or even stall a bit which leads to less lift and the nose dropping which means you pick up speed again etc etc. What you should do is use the trim to gently nudge and 'calibrate' the control surfaces so that you can keep the craft level, this will make sightseeing flights much much easier as you won't have to fight the plane so much. There's also rudder trim which can be useful for staying straight in crosswinds.
I have it on steam and initially got the blue bar screen.
After 20 mins of no obvious progress I killed the app and got the proper downloading window.
So it's not just game pass.
Half the time mine asks for another update patch of 50 GB but it sticks. The other half the game starts ok and i can select a flight plan etc but it won't let me fly. I suspect it's still trying to load stuff in the background.
Yeah I was able to get in the menus with it half downloaded. After a couple of restarts it realised there was more data to get and it finished the rest.
I think demand for this is probably a little greater than they anticipated.
Sometimes it asks for an update but sometimes not. It sticks though when it tries to download the update. I was wondering if it's downloading in the background and I should just leave it on our try to restart and update.
This is not MFS fault and more one of the pc xbox app. mcc runs IMMACULATELY on my PC but everyone they drop a new title it seems I have to reinstall the whole thing.
Something they really need to fucking fix if they're going for the everythjng ecosystem.