If 2024 is Working for You, What Are You Doing That I am Not?

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Hi, I’m Nixon Redgrave and you may have read some of my posts on this forum.

I’ve tried really, really, really hard to get 2024 to behave so that I can do some pretty basic flying with it. The never give up side of me is trying to win this thing for me.

Unfortunately, I’m not having success.

Now, I know there are some of you that have made 2024 work for you, I’ve seen your posts countering those who are saying the sim is unusable, so I’m directing this thread at you.

And by “work”, I mean having regularly successful flying so much so that you’re not even taking a second glance at 2020. My issues aren’t with the controls or getting the sim to run or any of those sorts of things. My issues are with the airplanes, flight plans, autopilot and IFR in Free Flight.

Right now, I’m not keen on bothering with Career Mode. As the author of the 2024 Career Mode thread, I’m more familiar with Career Mode’s short comings than I’d like to be.

I’ve tried the bone stock Premium Deluxe vanilla sim and the included aircraft. I’ve had some luck with the Seastar and Albatross, but the last two times I tried to use them I had issues with my flight plans not importing and/or the autopilot being completely oblivious to the flight path as though there was no flight plan programmed. That was pretty frustrating, especially since I had success with both aircraft previously.

I’ve tried other aircraft, but with the little bugs so many of them have and/or the erratic lighting issues (I’d like to fly at night) I’ve come away frustrated with those, too.

I’m not totally crazy about the G1000, but at this point I’m willing to give it a go if means I can find some success, but can it please be in something other than the C172?

First, I know some are swearing by the Fenix. Great! I’m absolutely over the moon for you, truly! Unfortunately, the Fenix is of no interest to me, so if that is the solution to getting 2024 to work then I’m SOL.

For those that are doing some small airplane flying, what are you doing right? What airplane(s) are you able to use them without issue? How are you managing to get IFR working for you?

I have had issues with ATC, so now I have BeyondATC as an option.

Today, I even tried the FSR500, because I know Raul is an amazing Super Star and I trust his aircraft. To use BATC and SimBrief I figured I needed to have Navigraph installed, so I loaded all their 2024 add-ons. I tried a really basic flight plan and when I imported it into the FSR500 only one of my waypoints was present in the flight plan. I’d had issues with Navigraph’s navdata the last time I tried it with 2024 (via Navigraph Hub not by copying it from 2020’s Community folder to 2024’s) where it wasn’t seeing VOR and my flight plan used VOR as waypoints, so maybe that was it. Nonetheless, I quit, again, in frustration.

So, yeah, what are you doing that I am not or what am I doing that you aren’t?

Please note, this isn’t a let’s complain about 2024 thread. There’s eleventy billion of those. This is a thread where I’m seriously looking for some concrete ways to set up and fly some small planes IFR. Is that currently possible in 2024? If so, how?

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I’m on Xbox so can’t really help with any special techniques as I’m in the plug and play world.

I don’t think any of the default aircraft are perfect but I’ve flown a lot of the helicopters and smaller fixed wing.

The one aircraft I could suggest that isn’t G1000 is the Vision Jet.

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I have not even looked at that yet. I will.

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I wasn’t that keen to fly it but ended up enjoying learning the G3000 and subsequently had a few flights in the Longitude with the same avionics.

Hope it works for you.

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Hi @NixonRedgrave,

I have ~ 100 hrs flight time in the sim, and have been enjoying it a lot. My secret? Simple:
—> Avoid any functionality that has a lot of reported bugs. :slightly_smiling_face:

In practice, this means:

  • I only fly in Free Flight.
    I do have my PPL in Career mode, but CM has too many issues right now for me to want to use it.
    I’m not really interested in the Challenge League, so don’t fly those.
    I’ve completed a few World Photography items, but don’t like spawning in mid-air, nor having my settings overridden, so have stopped flying those.

  • I only fly GA aircraft. No jetliners for now, due to the performance of 2024 being approx. the same as 2020 pre-SU15 on my hardware.

  • I avoid complex scenery areas & airports for the same reason.

  • I only fly VFR, even when I should be flying IFR in inclement weather. I just pretend to be flying in 1922. No DMEs, VORS or GPS back then!

  • I don’t use ATC.

  • I generally don’t use the flight planning tools.

  • I’ve turned off Live Traffic, as the AI aircraft behave erratically and the sim can freeze or CTD when enabled.

  • I’ve turned off Multiplayer.

You may be saying about now that I’m flying a very pared-down version of MSFS - and you would be right.
So why not just stay with 2020, you might ask? (a very good question!).

Here’s a few reasons why I’ve not flown in 2020 since 11/19:

  • Much faster loading times to menu and flight.
  • Improved representation of the ground: canyon / cliff faces, 3D textures (aircraft wheels visually interacting with the ground), biomes (grass, trees, rocks, seasons), fauna. Much improved water physics for amphibious aircraft.
  • Improved lighting and color pallet.
  • Excellent choice of the new aircraft for 20204.
  • Walk-around mode / Avatar enhances my experience of both pre- and post-flight.

In my imaginary 1922 world where most of the items I list above that I’m not using had yet to be invented, I can fly pretty much anywhere without any issues. No freezes, CTDs or blurries, and virtually no stutters (since v1.2.8.0). My custom graphics settings mean that FPS are just fine, except for times when the CPU will inexplicably hit 100% for as long as I’m in that area, and thus tank the FPS (a bug that I’m trying to consistently repro before filing a bug report).

By focusing on what does work, and ignoring what does not (which, admittedly, is a heck-of-a-lot), I’ve had many enjoyable hours flying in 2024 (see my topics in World Photographer & Screenshots for an idea of what I’ve been up to).

In a nutshell, I focus on what works right now & ignore what doesn’t. :man_mage:

If, on the other hand, you just, must, gotta-have any of the items I don’t bother with, then you will likely be spending more time trying to “fix” things or tearing your hair out in frustration than flying. :frowning_face:

I hope this post helps you. I know you want to fly IFR, but since it is not working well right now, why keep on trying to play a broken record? Instead, try flying without it - the early aviators managed do do so in the early years of flight - why not try to emulate what they did? You may find that it is incredibly rewarding to find that airport down there in the gloom without relying on today’s instruments. :slightly_smiling_face:

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I don’t fly default planes, don’t use default ATC, don’t fly from/to default airports, don’t use default ground services. And the most important, I don’t play career mode :).

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What Smothery is saying is find a group of planes that fly consistently without issue in free flight in places that work, but it’s the consistency that’s eluding me.

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Turn down the settings a little bit to give the sim some room to breathe (overhead). Maxing everything out on your system doesn’t give much wriggle room and the inevitable stutters, bad textures etc will appear because there’s no room for processing them.

Fluidity of the simulator is key.

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I fly vr and it’s not working for me, it just irritates me as soon as I open the game and have to re select my controls profiles again, only to be greeted by so so visuals and buggy / poor performance. I’ve come to two conclusions, 1st there are a number of YouTube influencers that have clearly sold out, 2nd people’s expectations and acceptance levels are vastly different. I really wish I could enjoy the game but it just makes me sad, please nobody even mention DLSS please :face_vomiting:

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I don’t mean to complain, but the other day I went in determined to sort out my control mappings. I get my General and Airplane profiles created, keys all mapped. Try another plane, okay I need to add a step to make sure the profiles are selected, they don’t seem to be coming up default, but they are still there. Try another plane. This time my Toggle Cockpit External View Mode command is missing. I try to map it, and I get a dialog saying “This will permanently delete the profle.” Strange, I didn’t click Delete. Then I notice my Toggle Cockpit Mode command is “analog” and not “digital”. So not do I need AnalogGeneral and DigitalGeneral, and AnalogAirplane and DigitalAirplane profiles?

I’m not going back in 2024 until I hear from the community that it’s fixed because I don’t want to face that mess. That’s my weather gauge.

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Contrary to popular opinion I have until now only used career mode, and am enjoying it (mostly at least :joy:). It involves a lot of pre-flight planning (checking runway lengths, weather, instrument procedures, fuel calculation, …), working around the known bugs (e.g. change flight plan to below FL200 in PC-12, knowing when to ignore ATC or when to request what they should normally give themselves), switching off visual assistance and (probably most important) don’t skip anything, then my flights (mostly medium cargo and charter with my own company) work in 99%.

For control mappings, I just don’t use it :wink: Already in 2020 I used SPAD.neXt, it takes a lot of time to finally configure it right, but I have no trouble afterwards that I have to redo everything on every flight.

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I mostly enjoy what is working. I’ve been enjoying the career mode (it is far from perfect but it had me explore new locations and planes that I wouldn’t have thought to explore on my own). That has kept me more than busy enough, while I wait for them to fix stuff.

When I heard from Jorg a year or so ago that there won’t be any beta testing for MSFS 2024, I thought what a recipe for disaster.

So MSFS 2024 is a mess right now, and effectively we are doing the beta testing. I perfectly understand why people are upset about that, but for me that is not a big problem. I am a former pilot and flight stimming is the only thing I use my computer for, I don’t do any other gaming. So if Microsoft had gone the other way, and had called this an open beta, I would gladly be beta testing for them. So for me personally, it doesn’t make a difference if we call it an open beta or a finished product. But I can very well understand that other people would be very upset about that.

So TLDR, I’ve been having an interesting and mostly enjoyable time beta testing. And we shouldn’t forget what Jorg and company have done for flight stimming in general. So I cut them some slack. But I can perfectly understand that gamers expected a more polished product.

Now don’t get me started on the way that they have been treating VR users, so you non-VR users are truly blessed in comparison.

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The Visionjet is awesome and works really well. There’s a strange bug with the nav lights appearing on the pitot tubes, but I usually fly this little jet round Florida in daylight, so I’m happy to overlook that for now. I’ve also had good flights with the A330s, though the reflections on the external model can be glitchy. Raytraced shadows ON solves this, if your GPU is capable.

Oh, and I believe your a fellow JustFlight RJ owner, so there’s also that. :+1:

I went back to 2020 last night, but there was just something pulling me back to 2024, but I can’t quite work out what. It might be the smoothness of 2024, for me at least. I also think the overall lighting (retina burning aside in the cockpit) in 24 is fantastic.

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I’ve followed some of your good work in 24 here - except Career which does not interest me but kudos to you for taking it on - but certainly not all of your many detailed threads. Treading lightly here; perhaps too much expectation too soon after launch with a long holiday break in-between? This was their first week back and the expectations they set beforehand was they need 1Q to sort things out (or I am misunderstanding what I heard)? Anyway, on to recommendations or solutions, the stated ask/intent of this thread…

Bearing in mind that I fly on Series X with a lot of controller peripherals:

  1. Fly GA IFR in 2020 at this time. Period. Full stop. No exceptions. 24 not ready for you yet.

  2. The Dreamliner is the only native 24 aircraft that I have found IFR capable as is today. That said, I have not tried many/most default aircraft after reading so many bug reports and complaint posts. With quite a few IFR flights in the 24 Dreamliner using the web based flight planner and EFB functionality, I am comfortable that it is not a waste of my time. That said and like others here, no ATC or traffic (similar to how I fly in 2020 so no surprises there).

  3. A few things I have learned about the process flow from the web based planner to the FMC:
    Before launching the flight, after loading the flight plan and sending to ATC, if I then go back to the top to change departure runway to a gate or apron position, I have to go back into the EFB and reimport the flight plan as the sim has now made unwanted changes to my flight plan. Also, there is no point sending to avionics before starting the flight, it has to be done again anyway from the EFB on the flight deck during the FMC process flow. And so to avoid frustration, I now do things in a certain order that makes sense to me to avoid doing them more than once where the flight plan, EFB and FMC are concerned (and to see the plan I made online through to FMC without unwanted changes).

  4. Where the G2 VisionJet is concerned, I flew the default 24 version a few times VFR after launch but abandoned it finding the FFX version I already owned to be superior for my use. That said, the suggestion above to try the G2 in 24 is a very good one. The FFX is the only other model I will fly IFR in IMC in 24, so the native version is certainly a strong candidate for your use case. YMMV and you will let us know if it is a good bet for your IFR GA flights?

Respectfully & cheers!

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Perhaps the G36 or G58 for GA IFR in 24?

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what he said… Free Flight GA , nothing complex, I reckon it will get there.

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I appreciate the level of detail you gave me in terms of how you’re approaching the sim and why.

That said, your post is a pretty sobering look at where 2024 simply is right now.

I love Jimmy Doolittle. I’ve read his book, “I Could Never Be So Lucky Again”, and while his incredible experiences at the forefront of flight are something to behold, that isn’t what I thought 2024 was going to be about. I can work to try and change what I’d like from 2024 in the hopes that I can enjoy what it can do currently, but that is going to be hard for me.

I’m fully willing to accept my initial experience with it has, for lack of a better way to describe it, scarred me. It’s going to take a fair amount of undoing the negative experiences to try to have the positivity to approach it fresh and with less expectations. Maybe that is impossible, I don’t know. I’m not sure how to reset.

You’re the second endorsement of the Vision. I will definitely give it a go.

Unfortunately, yes, this looks to be true. I am continuing to fly 2020 simply because this mode of flying is available to me there.

Having read the posts that reiterate what you’ve said here is primarily why I’ve not flown the Vision, to date. I’d heard such positivity about the 2020 version and read many posts disappointed that the 2024 is, what sounds like, a watered down version of 2020’s. Of course, I never even flew the 2020 version, so I’ve nothing to compare 2024’s to.

I haven’t looked at the G36, but I couldn’t get past the G58’s elevator trim scale having no neutral point on its scale. It’s only showing nose up values. I’d have to review it again figure out where the neutral point currently is based on the bugged scale. Thinking about having to do that just brings me back to my statement:

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Or not? Any way to just accept the aircraft as the FBO rented it to you today, dirty and all? LOL!

While running a checklist is important and nice for immersion, I think a lot of the default models are almost ready to fly without too much fussing. For example, elevator trim is very close to where it needs to be for a safe takeoff. Why make more work than needed and get sandbagged by defects before even starting an engine? Suggest trying to overlook the many little defects for a while and just sort out what works first, see if you can complete an IFR flight in one of the G1000 Beechcraft? (Ok, G1000nxi is not my favorite suite either, as capable as it is I don’t prefer it to other avionics, but WT has done a lot of work on it so it may be fairly mature?)

Just sayin’ / time for the new approach you are looking for? Or did I misunderstand your ask?

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I wouldn’t fly in an aircraft that had no known way to properly reference elevator trim.

I’m not even sure anyone would be allowed to.

I’m not sure completely divorcing myself from some basics of realty is what I am looking for in a product titled “Flight Simulator”.

I’m here because the woman who loves me is terrified of me dying in an aircraft, and because my love for her far outweighs my love for aviation I don’t have a C170 in a hangar at KPRB.

I would like the experience here to be somewhat based on reality, so yeah I want my airplane(s) without stupid bugs like completely broken trim indicators.

If that is way too much to ask of 2024, then I don’t know why it wasn’t too much to ask with 2020. Again, I don’t want this to devolve into a bash 2024 thread, but if 2024 is just not the product for me, then okay, it’s not the product for me. I’m in a fortunate enough position where the $200 loss is not going to affect me.

As it stands, reading the responses here would indicate that, perhaps, I’ve bought Flight Simulator 2024 for the wrong reasons.

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Or it’s just not ready yet, and that has been tossed around enough above and in other threads.

To your OP title question, what am I doing, please consider:

  1. Not sweating the small stuff if it is not directly blocking the flight objective for today.
  2. Finding out what works that one can have fun with today, as it may change in the future.
  3. Passing on the stuff that gets in the way of having some fun in 24. There is always 2020…

We are fortunate to have 2020 to fall back on, and the PC pilots are fortunate to have far more options than us Xbox drivers to find a way to having some fun with these two games. No need to go there. Why not just have some fun trying out some of the suggestions folks have made?

In good cheer!

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