Is the world lighting and atmosphere finished ie. final state?
Yes × 1000.
I have owned 2020 since 2020. I was in the sim basically every day for three years, and I only have 317 flight hours on my profile. On paper, it looks like I’ve done nothing at all in 2020, but it’s because I was perpetually in dev mode reproducing everybody else’s bugs. Basically, I did somebody’s job, and I paid for a sim that I hardly ever used for fun. They owe you a huge thank you, and they owe me a huge thank you. We’re never going to get it.
There are 2020 bugs that are still rotting in the forums. They don’t have a handle on what all the bugs are, nor do I think they care, either.
Gotcha. 
Yeah, at least a receipt with the product name would be nice instead of for “20 Sim Credits” or whatever 
I want to know why the Jörg claims that the server issues are resolved when they most definitely are not for many of us. Almost two weeks in I still can’t use the sim without using a VPN. And even that starts to yield diminishing returns, as more and more people seem to use the VPN servers for FS2024 as well.
If things remain the way they are FS2024 will have limited usability for many of us. I don’t see any reason why it shouldn’t work the same as FS2020. The content streamed hasn’t changed THAT much. And once the aircraft and tree models have been streamed, they should remain in the memory without getting unloaded and restreamed again. Cache them on the harddrive if you must, but the current situation is just not acceptable.
yeah… VRAM consumption is a mess… it will define if the game is playable or not .
"In a recent developer stream, Jorg said, “We can’t affect what you already have… But we’re not going to turn on the Marketplace because we’re trying to avoid that people buy things that are not quite ready.”
Given the overall incompleteness of MSFS2024, would that qualify as unintentional irony?
Yes! It took me a few days to notice the irony in that. So I might be a little slow.
But I really don’t get the closure of the Marketplace. He said that there were some Marketplace items that nearly came out clean. So why not release them? Why keep them from being sold? In past dev streams, Jörg has talked about flight sim being people’s livelihoods. So wouldn’t they like to keep the Marketplace open for them?
It doesn’t add up. I think there are other reasons the Marketplace is being kept turned off, and they are not being straightforward with us.
As an open-source software developer who is used to purpose-built public-facing issue trackers, I can confirm that using forum posts and templates for bug tracking is really not industry best practices.
I know they have an internal bug tracker that they don’t let us see, but having zero visibility into the state of things is really frustrating as a paying customer who would be more than happy to help diagnose and fix issues if they would work with us.
Good luck with that! As you can see, it worked out great for me.
(If I sound bitter in some of my posts, it’s because I am.)
Yes, Aerosoft made multiple statements like (see below) at the announcement of the LCE, which was one of the things that convinced me to purchase it. And then they acted like they never said it.
At this point it’s spilled milk, I did finally receive it, over a week after launch (it was finally shipped on the 21st), and I was glad I didn’t have to get involved in the launch week debacle (I haven’t had a single issue starting the game, and only one CTD; actually, a complete computer reboot). But it would have been nice if they acknowledged what they said. I’m still miffed about it, and they’ve confirmed the expectations of them as a company. Obviously, not that my continued business matters to them. That’s ok.
I’m a little skeptical about us having the ability to ‘download’ any default planes to be honest. I mean they work (mostly), but I do sometimes feel like I’m flying an avatar.
I do have to be hopeful that that isn’t the case.
I have a rather prosaic question: Why did the devs toss out 4+ years of muscle memory and completely re-do all the default FS2024 keyboard commands?
As you’ve probably noticed, the whole interface is now built around the Marketplace. For instance, you’ll notice if you go into the livery section of planes, there’s a button to purchase more liveries. That functionality has to work before they’ll turn on the Marketplace, and, the content you will be able to purchase has to work in the sim. Non-Microsoft and Asobo content I purchased in the Marketplace is already being streamed to me, like the Carenado planes I purchased that are Carenado content. So streaming your existing purchased content is not related to “turning on the Marketplace”.
Long story short, at a minimum, they can’t turn the Marketplace on, or stream ALL the content you have purchased, until there’s an option to turn off content. There’s so many issues, people have to be able to turn off their existing content. And they don’t have time to test all the content to 100% compatibility, and, no matter what, some content will crash some people’s machines and not others. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg they’re dealing with. You should actually be happy the Marketplace is turned off and they’re not streaming 2020 content into 2024 yet, or offering users the option to purchase Marketplace content.
Long version:
So, one issue is issues with 2020 aircraft and liveries. This has nothing to do with operational bugs. There’s a pretty major consequence of changes they’ve made and issues created due to working as designed. As they’ve said, to improve performance and make the code more efficient, they completely changed they way aircraft are constructed and liveries are applied to planes. They even changed the image format textures used (some .kx2 format or something). 2020 planes still support the old .dds format, but 2024 conversions must use the new format. The result of the changes is if they allow 2020 liveries to be installed, you’ll end up with pink (missing) textures. The organization and quality of liveries in 2020 was pretty haphazard, and, now that 2024 is more strict in it’s expectations, the result of that will be issues will be even more noticeable.
Secondly, they changed the way planes are organized in your library. They looked at it like Spock would, and thought, “why in the world does the coding work like this? WE know better, we’re going to change it, and in turn better support Marketplace purchases”. In doing so, they didn’t realize the data they chose to organize on isn’t very consistently implemented in 2020 content. I think they still don’t understand the consequences of their change. The change is actually more logical in a way, but, it creates chaos in 2020 content and resultant organization of that content. Look at the 2020 Carenado aircraft for an inkling of the issues on Library organization.
IOW, for whatever reason, they didn’t look at how many aircraft and liveries people purchase and want to use, nor did they study how well the existing aircraft were written, how meticulously developers followed the 2020 SDK. For small numbers of liveries or aircraft, there’d just be a little inconvenience. But, when people own hundreds… eek! Had developers understood the SDK, and those earlier developers updated their planes when the SDK content regarding aircraft.cfg was added to the SDK, it wouldn’t have been a huge problem. Unfortunately, as many who care know, developers paid no attention to the details of writing an aircraft.cfg, and older planes were never updated.
The same with scenery. Somehow, they didn’t catalog or understand how much scenery users had purchased. With the complete change in scenery development they made, I have no idea what affect people’s scenery purchases will have on 2024. I think performance won’t be too poorly affected by 2020 scenery, assuming that scenery is relatively uncomplicated. I haven’t tried a complex 2020 airport in the sim yet. That comment only works, however for scenery that was developed strictly to the SDK with proper consideration of organizing files in the VFS to avoid crashes.
Unfortunately, developers like MSFScenery paid no attention to proper structure, and I bet Asobo/Mocrosoft is discovering tons of scenery is causing crashes in FS. And not just because they’re not developed with the new LOD structure concept. These packages were a problem before, too, but, the VFS was so loose in it’s expectations, that, unless you paid attention, you’d only occasionally get CTD’s due to poor development practices. I’m talking about the modellib.bgl issue for instance, that was fixed by Addon Linker for many people, and it only caused inconsistent crashes. I’m pretty sure it’s been said that the VFS now is much more strictly enforcing rules.
The point being, they originally committed to saying “your 2020 content will convert seamlessly into 2024”. I’ll bet when they started to ready Marketplace content for the Marketplace, they started seeing a lot of issues with the content. I think, just like when they released 2020 and thought people were going to be able to easily convert FSX aircraft and use them in 2020, and that was a complete disaster (in regards to their intention; in the end, they just stopped supporting it), the same thing has happened in 2024. There was not an understanding of the consequences all the changes they chose to make, for very good reasons, would have on our previous content. I’m not arguing that the changes they chose to make were wrong. Only, I think they thought developers had a better understanding of the SDK? I think they thought developers were meticulous in the code they wrote? I think they though addons had been updated to the latest versions of the SDK? I dunno.
So I think they had to shut the Marketplace down until the ability to turn off content was added to the sim. I think it’s due in the December 9th update. Which is why I think Jorg said they expect to turn on the Marketplace again in December.
Given what I’ve seen, it’ll be interesting what happens when they do. Asobo and Microsoft teams are working really hard to address compatibility bugs, and developers are realizing that their customers will be better and more quickly served if they update their software rather than depend on the “2020 content will work” commitment.
What content will work in 2024 when they do? The planes should work ok, and developers and Asobo are working hard to make that happen. I think the Marketplace livery vendors are going to have to go through all their liveries and update them to some standard that works in 2024. They’ll need to be given access to the aircraft.cfg and livery.cfg files. And they’ll have to know which aircraft are 2020 and which are 2024 format.
Sorry freeware 2024 livery creators, you’ll have to wait for more information to be available. I did try importing some of the liveries I have and I created, in an attempt to fix the library organization of the Carenado planes (which hopefully Carenado is already working on, so, my work in that regard is most likely moot), and it was pretty funny what happened to the organization of my Carenado planes 
, and a couple had pink textures. With some work, I’ll be able to get the liveries to work, but you can’t use liveries to reorganize your library anymore like I used to hack the system to do. As PC users, unless we get to replace Aircraft.cfg files and Livery.cfg files in the VFS, we’ll be stuck with whatever developers choose to name their planes, and whatever organization results from that. Xbox users… sorry.
Would love some information, anything, about what are the plans for the Marketplace. The last we heard was when the marketplace team outlined stages for the Dev Alpha that never happened, since then, zero communication from Marketplace team. Still no possibility to submit 2024 packages.
What sort of information are you looking for? To me, they want to allow people to stream their 2020 content they purchased in the Marketplace, and they will eventually be, and are, I think, taking submissions of updates to existing content and new content.
Are you wondering what the timing is of when you’ll be able to do that?
Yes. Firm dates would be best.
Again, like for the people who wanted Microsoft to communicate when they’d be able to get into the sim, they can’t communicate that which they do not know. I’m 110% sure they want to communicate that information.
I want to know when I will receive my product, for which I paid $70?
Which product is that?
It’d be cool if we got an update something like this:
“We found that servers were overloaded in the following regions: [list of regions] and provisioned X% increase in capacity, which is now / will be in the future available to handle the load.”
and/or
“We found that some customers are having trouble reaching our servers even though they appear to have available capacity. We’ve contacted Azure services who are working with the local ISPs on resolving the issue. We’ll post more when we know more.”
or
ANYTHING of any kind of detail