I think that is the latest ‘stealth’ aircraft
I just want to point out that MSFS 2020 and 2024, the intention of Microsoft from day 1 was that it would be designed to run on Xbox Just look at the interface. It was completely designed around the Xbox user world.
Unfortunately, Microsoft was originally confused, and also wanted people to be able to use their FSX addons seamlessly in the sim (The SDK used to reference that requirement in the Flight Model introduction). Unfortunately, the powers that be didn’t understand you couldn’t do that and use the sandbox approach for security purposes. So that requirement very quickly fell by the wayside. Also, they knew they couldn’t rewrite the whole sim in one shot even if that wasn’t a requirement, so at the start a substantial portion of the sim was still FSX code, and they kept it PC only for a good while.
They have replaced a good portion of the FSX code over the last 6 years, though I imagine a good bit is still in there. But, as you can tell from the interface, it was always meant to be run on Xbox. In fact I a lot of the upgrades they added for 2024 were specifically to improve how it performed on Xbox. Too many features for me to list are specifically to reduce the memory and disk space footprint of the sim. Unfortunately, it’s just still wayyy too graphics memory intensive. It’s really hard to simulate the whole world on a little Xbox.
I’ll keep disagreeing with the “interface was made for Xbox” argument for all time. Do you have any idea how much of a pain it is to navigate that without a mouse?
Do you have any idea how much of pain it is to navigate with a mouse? It certainly wasn’t designed as a mouse interface, unless their UI folks are just completely incompetent and these “UI Professionals” Jorg spoke about well, maybe they were just out of college and hadn’t ever actually used a program. (sure, a little hyperbolic, but, not really).
Be that as it may, my real point is that Microsoft planned to release MSFS on Xbox right from the very start. Now, maybe it could be argued they weren’t quite sure how at first given what a sad state the code was in when released memory efficiency-wise? But I’m sure they believed they could get there. The program doesn’t make any sense business-wise for Microsoft without that plan.
I mean, who designs an interface where, when you click your mouse on the scroll bar, the scroll bar jumps to the middle of the scroll space, and the icons your scrolling through, it jumps all the way to the end??? General interface design knows what the extents of the scroll space are, knows how many windows are available in that scroll space, remembers where the scroll space is in the list, stays at that point, and the full length of the scroll bar knows the full length of the list. And if you want to get more advanced, you dynamically size the scroll bar so as you get close to the bottom it just keeps on scrolling.
Who designs a window for icons that doesn’t preload the spaces off screen, or doesn’t know how big the window extents are, and you end up with half the screen space with empty icon spaces?
Absolutely ridiculous. And 2024 couldn’t be a bigger waster of screen real estate, worse than 2020.
The only reason to design it the way it’s designed is the expectation of using a game controller to control the interface, and a strict adherence to following some set of rules for “consistent game interface design”. Either that or they only tested the interface on a 15" screen and a phone and called it a day. “Eh, good enough. We have to design for the smallest screen size. Why bother spending the time to make the interface scalable to any size screen and font size?”
All that being said, I’m not disagreeing with you about it being hard to control with a gamepad. But I’m no gamer and therefore can’t be a judge of that. Not to mention the number of different commands that have been programmed into the gamepad by default with so many different button combinations, the only way that’s useful is if you’re an expert gamepad controller user with an infinite amount of muscle memory for all the different types and assignments of game commands.
The UI in general just sucks, more so in 2024 and more so via controller
That’s the thing, I don’t even mean that the sim is hard to control with a gamepad. They actually did a pretty great job there. I mean that the UI is terrible to use with a controller.
An interface meant for controllers cannot require pointing and clicking, at all. 2020 and 2024 do. That’s because they were made for PCs, which always need a mouse anyway.
I have absolutely no difficulty whatsoever in navigating the UI of 2020 or 2024 with a mouse. 2020 wasn’t horrible with an xbox controller as there was a cursor that behaved like a mouse and you used the stick to move it and A was your left mouse button and B was your right one - simple
But 2024 UI is mind-blowingly bad on Xbox. No cursor means you are navigating essentially using up, down, left and right keys on a keyboard. And then you need to press specific keys to move between the different menus on the page. It could not possibly be more complicated. I’ll bet if stats were available, sales of mice skyrocketed when 2024 released and window/TV repairs also skyrocketed with people throwing their Xbox controllers through them in frustration
Quite right - it’s only non Xbox users who get this idea in their heads that the MSFS2024 UI was somehow optimised for Xbox, 5 mins with a real Xbox would convince you otherwise…
You’re making the posts I couldn’t be bothered to make.
I think there’s this idea, that this sim would be so much better, “if only it wasn’t made for consoles”. Then you apply any issue this explanation, logic doesn’t matter. Ground textures blurry? Because Xbox. Clouds ugly? Xbox. UI clunky? And so on…
To be clear, what I meant was it was designed to be implemented on Xbox all along, not that they were able to figure out how to fit the sim into the memory on an Xbox S and give people full detail.
I’m going to imagine if people turned down their options to the simplest graphics levels, they’d be able to use the Sim on Xbox S (with 100% FOMO)?
I couldn’t agree more. Although I am on Xbox, I always use both a mouse and keyboard. But out of curiosity I’ve tried to use only a controller and you are 100% correct, it is mind-numbingly difficult. 2020’s virtual mouse cursor wasn’t too bad, but this button pushing to move to a different area of the screen is awful. Who thinks up this stuff, and moreso, why? You had a system that worked okay and everyone was already familiar with it, so you decided to change it to something completely different and arguably much worse for no apparent gain.
This is typical of Microsoft. They do this all the time with their Office products. Perhaps they imposed it on Asobo. I wish developers would realize that there is great value in legacy knowledge and muscle memory. There’s no need to change things simply for change’s sake.
You’re doing a whole lot of imagining there.
The GUI doesn’t work on Xbox at all - it’s not just the sim. If you were going to implement a GUI that worked on Xbox you’d need to understand the Xbox. There doesn’t seem to be that expertise in the team.
To navigate the GUI on an Xbox you need a mouse as well as a controller - Xbox wasn’t designed to use a mouse so you have to purchase a third party product and hope it works (some don’t). Try navigating the GUI with a controller on Xbox, the way it’s supposed to be used will leave you angry and frustrated.
I think someone probably tried to make a GUI touch screen friendly rather than for Xbox.
There are too many PC users who
Inline up to blame everything that’s wrong with MSFS2024 on it being made available to Xbox. That is just not true - it’s a bit like populist politics - none of its grounded in facts. We are all in the same boat and MSFS2024 is in a bad place with a very poorly thought out GUI - for everyone, whatever the platform.
Regardless of whether the interface is more or less comfortable to use in 2024 with an Xbox controller (just get a wireless mouse and you’ll be fine navigating), I believe the biggest problems lie elsewhere.
Currently, with Beta SU5 1.7.30.0, seeing the LOD of the landscape, the cabin, and the plane’s exterior is simply embarrassing.
It’s fully at 2020 level, perhaps even lower in some scenarios. At least 2020 ran well, but it’s unacceptable to have to endure such a graphical downgrade, which I hope doesn’t become the standard for 2024!
Blurry and minimal textures, clouds that look like they’ve been painted on the water, details that disappear and reappear at random, and the cockpit’s definition is low.
I own a 77-inch 144 Hertz OLED, and it’s immediately clear how much the graphical experience has deteriorated in this build.
As I’ve already written in another section of the forum, they need to rework the entire software structure, assuming it’s even possible to run decently with only 16 GB of RAM, but we’ve seen that in some past builds!
I’m not a computer scientist, and maybe I’m talking nonsense when I think it would be enough to set up a routine that constantly cleans the RAM of unnecessary elements, freeing up resources.
For example: what’s the point of keeping track of all the ATC conversations from the start of the flight that clog up memory and slow everything down?
I don’t think it’s complicated from a computer perspective, but then again, I’m certainly not an expert.
Oh absolutely, I think simmers still overlook this as we seem to just put up with it by buying better components which is absolutely not the way forward. The sim absolutely needs a rework if you’re not going to rework is (properly this time) at least fix the lod of blurry textures to extend them out to what’s being rendered. Horrendously optimised sim and I’m surprised so many people just put up with it to be honest
It’s fair to aim for smooth flight, perhaps by sacrificing graphics performance. But if that were the philosophy, it would have been completely pointless to release 2024 on consoles, touting next-gen graphics. Instead, we could all be content with 2020, which now boasts even better graphics than the current 2024 beta build and, above all, is stable and fluid.
Let’s remember that Microsoft has a huge responsibility towards us console users, who trusted us to buy a product at the same price as a PC, which wouldn’t even boot up at first (!) and still runs poorly 19 months later!
Flight enthusiasts who perhaps bought the console because they can’t afford to spend $5,000 on a PC to run the simulator.
I trust in the company’s seriousness, which will have to make up for this by guaranteeing the full functionality of 2024, but time is running out…