I’ve really enjoyed the alpha: new ground dynamics, the light, the very promising career mode, the seasons, etc…
There was one aspect that disappointed me a bit: the height of the trees. I found them still very tall and large. The pines, typical of areas like the PNW, were very well done, with a lot of density in the forested areas, but many other species, especially those specific to inhabited areas and particularly those of dryland, were too big IMHO.
The feeling that things become smaller as you gain height is still being lost for this reason. This effect was very well achieved in the original IL2. The trees and houses look small from up there. I remember that this topic was commented in one of the devs streaming. They said that they had been scaled down, but my experience during the alpha is that they are still too big.
I understand that this has been an alpha version, but since this new feature has been included in this build, I think it’s reasonable to talk about it. It might even be useful for the devs to receive this input.
Hmmm I didn’t really measure them, they didn’t seem too tall. But remember that trees can be very tall, people often misjudge the height of trees. I live next to a park in an apartment building of 11 floors. I’m at the 4th floor (ceiling level is at 15m) and almost every tree in the park is quite a lot higher than my ceiling. Some of the trees tower at least a few floors above the roof of the buildings.
When you ask people how high a tree is they will often answer something like 6 to 9 metres and that’s only a low estimate for medium sized trees. Tall city trees can grow over 33 metres while some trees in the wild can easily grow much higher.
Anyway, I at least encountered some small trees in MSFS24 too that I can remember. So there is a lot of variety for sure. Everything felt very natural, except for trees growing where there aren’t any in reality.
In the current sim, a lot of things are too short – residential PG buildings especially – and also lots of trees in the USA. The good news though is that the newer PG techniques include more accurate LASER scans as I understand it – which is why the houses look better. I do wonder how LASERs will handle Long Leaf Pines though.
P.S.: Yes, many autogen trees are currently too large. Many are also too short. Hopefully things will improve.
I didn’t note if they were too tall or too short now, but I did note that one of operational aspects of the trees - specifically being too close to runway ends - was resolved at least at my home airport which is a stock non-PG field.
Yes as far as I could tell they are the same size as in 2020. This is one of the bugs from the 2020 alpha that has not been addressed at all in all this time and has carried over the 2024… Looks like we will need mods again to make trees realistic sizes
Hello,
As in 2020, there’s an invasion of trees. I flew over Iceland, and it’s obvious: there are even fir forests on the beaches.
I hope we won’t have to use customs modes to exclude trees again.
I guess they wanted to show the new (beautiful) trees this time, but they couldn’t adjust the size again. Hopefully release version will reduce the size and quantity.
I have a bad feeling that the tree height will be an issue again. Certain things in FS2020 they completely ignored, such as the tree height, having a Fly by view or Control Tower view. I just hope mods will be able to affect the trees, specially since the sim is generated in the cloud and not on your hard disk anymore.
Yes, well that’s an entirely different thing, I still saw that happening in the alpha build. The entire area around the Teide on Tenerife is full of trees where you can only find shrubs in reality.
Personally I don’t think you can fully rely on satellite images to plant trees. Now you can override things like this with scenery, but that may be a bit overkill.
They have this World Hub that allows users to post updates to airports for inclusion in the base scenery. I really think this should include changing the biomes for regions too. And maybe it can also let users change smaller areas so that they can specify what grows there (like only shrubs instead of trees).
In the end a lot of the world can be fine tuned by people living in an area once they allow people to submit changes to the world too. People could submit changes to building heights, choose from a selection of textures for the buildings, replace them with a custom model, etc. The building I live in and the buildings around me are way too low for example, if I could easily click on them on a map to change the height and texture I would certainly do so.
Perhaps differentiate between actual forests which could be plotted specifically, and use a bit of intelligence/chance for the rest ; a rectangular area of trees is likely to be a forest, a straight line is likely to be a hedge. At present, it’s a little annoying, as the trees can obscure things for VFR flight by landmarks/roads or whatever. There are some decent mods that make it better
X-Plane is the other way round ; they tend to go for sparse trees, which I think looks better.
My experience has been completely different during the alpha. The problem is I didn’t take any screenshot. I guess I’ll have to wait to the release to prove my point.
I don’t agree with that argument. Since the arrival of autogen to Flight Simulator (FS2002), size has been a major issue because, as has already been mentioned, the priority was to achieve a greater density of objects, and the simplest way to avoid penalizing performance was to make them larger.
Obviously, there are large and tall trees (like sequoias), but I don’t think that’s the best way to justify the size of all of them in the simulator.
In any case, it will be better to wait for the release, with the final assets and the help of the screenshots, to continue this conversation.
Although I’m glad that it has been confirmed that there are ways to modify the size through addons.
Agree, it’s of little use to argue about the tree height in MSFS2024 before release. I’ve downscaled the trees myself too using REX AccuSeason, so it’s not like I’m totally denying the problem. But I’ve seen many people mentioning that it’s unrealistic to have trees as big as 10 story buildings too while this can be and actually is the case in many places.
The point is that you can never really say which tree grows where and how tall it is. So there always has to be a balance between reality and artistic impression. The ground isn’t totally sharp in many places and then it might be better to cover it with a little denser trees than to show the blurry underground for example.
Personally I’m more disturbed by the overgrown look of the ground than by the actual height of the trees. The trees seem to be everywhere, like the cities are built within tropical rain forests. Might be looking better artistically, but it’s just too far away from reality for a sim.
But I’ve put this next to me because I know how hard it is to get this right for every place on the planet. What works in your area, will break mine and the other way around.
There were so many topics for so long about trees being ‘laughably tall’ that Asobo took away very realistic and fun flying challenges in many parts of the United States. Here is real life airport in New Hampshire followed by the sim version: its NH53 Moultonboro (might be 53NH)
The preview shots Ive seen give me some confidence but reality must be the goal and in much of the USA - and I suspect many parts of the world, tall trees that block runways and make things challenging are a very real thing.
If no one believes ten story tall trees – the building on the left is twelve stories tall and you can see there is a tree right beside it that is about as tall. Where I live was surrounded by them until a recent hurricane:
Yes, I think it will always be a hit an miss situation if they try to only rely on satellite data for this. I really think they should come up with a solution to gather crowd data, like by adding features to the world hub to set the height of groups of trees or to place individual trees with a specific height.
In some places there are not enough trees while in other places there are complete forests where you can only find shrubs. Even in some places there are trees where nothing grows (the harbor entrance for Scheveningen is an example of this).
Same goes for wrong biomes in places and for wrong building heights.
I think the only way to really get things right is if we gain at least some control over these things through an easily accessible interface where people can change things just by drawing and clicking.
With the menu world map showing the actual game world this should now be way more easy than before. It could actually become possible within the game itself.