Why am I seeing 3 colorful dots?

It's essential that you reboot your computer after installing or updating your Flight Panels profiles. Please ensure that you've done this, before carrying out any of the suggestions listed within this article.

Understanding the issue

If you're seeing three dots (waiting for data), when Microsoft Flight Simulator is fully loaded and sitting on the runway (not in the menus), this indicates that there's a communication issue between your simulator and Stream Deck. There can be multiple causes of this issue.

Potential Cause: Applications running as 'Administrator'

To ensure that third party plugins are working properly with Microsoft Flight Simulator it is important to run the game as a standard user and not as an 'Administrator' (i.e by right clicking and selecting 'Run as administrator'.

If you're a Steam user, by following the steps outlined in this article, you can ensure that the game is running as a standard user and allow for proper communication with third party plugins.

- Open your Steam Application and navigate to your library

- Locate Flight Simulator 2020/2024 and right click > Properties

- Navigate to 'Installed Files' and select the 'Browse' button

- On the window that appears, right click on 'FlightSimulator.exe' and select properties, followed by the 'Compatibility' tab. Ensure that 'Run this program as an administrator' isn't selected. If it is, untick the option and select 'Apply' followed by 'OK'.

- Reboot your computer

Potential Cause: FSUIPC7 isn't running

FSUIPC7 is an application that allows other programs to communicate with Microsoft Flight Simulator. When you launch Flight Simulator, an FSUIPC7 splash screen should appear momentarily while the game is loading and the FSUIPC7 icon should also be present in the system tray. The system tray is located in the lower right-hand corner of your monitor beside the clock.

If you can't see the FSUIPC7 icon in the system tray and the splash screen didn't appear, try launching FSUIPC7 manually by double clicking on C:\FSUIPC7\FSUIPC7.exe once the game is loaded and you're sitting on the runway (not in menus).

If this resolves your issue, you may be missing the FSUIPC7 auto-launch entry within your Microsoft Flight Simulator EXE.xml file, which controls which applications automatically launch with the game.

Hot Fix: Flight Panels have developed a hot-fix which will add the required configuration entries to your Microsoft Flight Simulator EXE.xml file. This hot-fix can be downloaded from here

Potential Cause: Connection timeouts

If your Simulator is slow to load due to a large number of addons or general underlying PC performance issues, FSUIPC7 may be timing out. To confirm the cause, when sitting on the runway (not in game menus), quit out of FSUIPC7 and re-launch it via C:\FSUIPC7\FSUIPC7.exe. Please allow 30 seconds for buttons to populate.