Let me get disclaimers out of the way first.
I am not an avid flight simmer or modder, but I was so astonished MS could release a flight sim without the ability to save and load in progress flights I have been tinkering a bit with it and made an interesting discovery that I havent seen mentioned on the internet so far.
Also I am very limitied in time to experiment with this as I am using the £1.00 game pass trial and today is my last day before I am going to have to cancel game pass.
Can someone else try this procedure and see if it works for them too ?
When you are in the air flying, press pause, then TAB to bring up the EFB. Scroll down to “LOAD/SAVE PLN FILE”. This talks about being able to save *.flt files but then only offers a file filter of *.PLN (the preflight flight plan).
Ignore the file filter and save to disk a filename with extension FLT. e.g mySave1.flt.
using Notedpad edit this saved file to make a very small tweak. For info if this worked so far the *.flt file is of the order of 20k in size, whereas a.PLN file is 1k or so in size.
find the line “FirstFlightState=PREFLIGHT_HOLDSHORT”, add a # character in front of this line to comment it out. save the file back to disk.
At the freeflight start menu, select any airport and start on runway, once you are in the running plane, hit TAB to get the EFB, select “LOAD/SAVE PLN FILE” then select “LOAD FROM THIS PC”
Again the *.PLN file filter means you wont be able to see the mySave1.flt file we just saved, so type * . * into the windows filename box, you now should be able to see and select the mySave1.flt file.
click on the mySave1.flt and pray it loads the file we saved without crashing
It should load you back where you were in the sky at the time of the save, however it shows an external view. You need to press SHIFT X twice to get back into the cockpit
I have itemised the steps in detail so it sounds involved, but in reality its easy and pretty quick to do. Hopefully it works for other people too.
I am very torm as to whether I will buy FS2024 now my trial period has almost ended. On one hand in parts it is amazing and works well. On the other I am shocked at the level of disrespect MIcrosoft are showing their loyal customers in charging more than a AAA game for what is clearly an unfinished and untested software.
They clearly had a date where they were going to shove out of the door whatever they had completed and tested by that date. Pretty sad really.
Hi
Well first question is does it work at all for other folks ?
But your assumption is wrong, it does store wear and tear params
Whether wear and tear actually works or not is of course unknown at this stage, did they throw it out of the door before it was finished ?
For info, here are few things it stores:
Landing_gear, rudder_cable, brakes, tires, tire_pressure, flaps_cable, fuel_tank, oil_tank, hydraulic reservoir and 44 different electrical systems etc etc. Looks pretty comprehensive
However it doesnt store anything specific to career mode, so quite how useful save and load flight is when in career mode I dont know. I havent tried career mode
The wear and damage functionality works in free flight at least in the sense that you can go damage your airplane and then get out and do the parts inspection and see the health value has done down (or open up the debug tool and look at the numbers there), but I haven’t yet tested actual failures occurring in free flight.
Rather than “FirstFlightState=PREFLIGHT_HOLDSHORT”, the mid-air .flt file that I first saved as a test contained “FirstFlightState=FLIGHT_CRUISE”
Since FLIGHT_CRUISE sounded fine for an aircraft in the air, I left that alone instead of commenting it out.
For my first test, rather than loading in to an airport before trying to load the .flt file, I loaded the .flt file directly from the map screen’s EFB
It did successfully load back into my flight!
I also tried it the other way, loading into an airport and then loading the .flt plan, like you said. That works too and does a nice zoom out and camera pan across the world map if it’s far away.
The load/save function of the EFB is disabled in career mode.
But for me the great news is the ability to actually make use of the wear & tear system across flights in free flight mode. It just requires you to save a .flt file when you’re done with your flight (i.e. after you shut down the plane) and then load that same file next time (which will also accomplish saving your plane’s position like a lot of people want).
As a side note, the .flt file also contains a [Covers] section that saves the state of engine covers, pitot covers, etc. While there’s no click-spot interface for putting those back on in the sim (wait, I just discovered the Joby S4 does let you click covers back on!), in dev mode, in the Debug menu, Aircraft submenu, there’s a “Covers & Chocks” window that can be opened to toggle covers on and off, so they can be replaced when you’re done flying in free flight. Also in that same Debug→Aircraft submenu is a “Wear And Tear” window that can be used to “repair” your plane as you like, or cause wear/damage on purpose. Of course you can edit these things in the .flt file as well.
Some things to be ware of:
If you save a .flt file while your avatar is outside of the aircraft rather than inside the aircraft, the wear & tear data is not saved, in fact the .flt file is only 8k instead of 20k, so quite a lot must be missing. So if you go outside the aircraft to look at the chocks/covers as you put them back on with the Debug menu, be sure to go back inside the aircraft to save the .flt file.
When you first load a .flt file that you saved from a shutdown plane, it may place you back at your original starting airport (or in midair, if your .flt file has no [Departure] section), as well as not loading your wear & tear (debug shows all parts at 100% health). When this happens, simply get into the flight and then open the EFB and load the same .flt file again and it should put you back where you were when you saved the file with your saved wear & tear loaded properly.
Something else you can do with .flt files is edit the TailNumber= line to get the tailnumber you want on your plane, to work around the current bug in FS2024 that replaces the tailnumber you enter in the plane identification tab with a random one.
I tried my forum username “MagentaLine” and it seems to have a limit of 9 characters, or at least the Draco X with this livery does.
Well, I’m clearly missing something! Please clarify for an old man such as myself.
I can’t save the file in .flt format as it only allows the file to be saved as .pln as suggested by the game. Saving the flight as Today.flt still gets stored as Today.flt.pln and only about 500 kb in size without any files like FirstFlightState even in there. Any help would sure be appreciated - thanks folks.
Strange that some people get this to work and others not, wonder what the difference is ?
I just tested this again, chose free flight, select depart cardiff airport, sat on runway I just select save/load–>save to PC in the EFB and then type cardif1.flt in the Windows file dialogue and it saves it as expected to “cardiff1.flt” and is 20k or so and contains flight data.
Couple of random ideas what might be the difference?
I am running Windows 10, is that relevant ?
I have the windows folder option to show file name extensions enabled.
Would be interesting if people could say if it worked for them and what those 2 items are for them ?
I did a bit more testing on this on my Win10 machine
Option 2 having the windows folder option to show file name extensions turned off as an experiemnt made no difference. I could still save a *.flt file, it is 19k in size and stores the flight data.
if you save with no filename extension or a filename extension it doesnt recognise such as *.xyz then it saves as *.xyz.pln and is the 1k sized flightplan.
The code is specifically looking for you to type in the .flt extension for it to dump the in flight data.
Another odd bit of MS/Asobo coding is that if you save the file as *.txt that then gets dumped as *.txt.FLT and is 19k in size and contains in flight data.
So I still dont know why some folks cant get this to work, maybe they are on Win11, I cant test that theory though.
