Images in loading screens: Personalize

[thinksFlyer]

One of the great features of the MSFS personal experience has always been, in the past, the ability to change splash screen and loading screen images with our own. To Personalize the loading experience!

In MSFS 2020 the loading happens in two stages:

1. a) Startup, b) splash Screen, c) Checking for updates, d) ruminating and thinking about the contents of the Community folder. During this stage of “checking” the community folder, MSFS is frozen like a woolly mammoth in Siberia. If your community folder is, say, 50 GB, like mine is, the freeze in the “Community-checking” phase can last for over four or five minutes.

Then comes…

2. Loading proper. Same splash screen, but served from a different location and in front of it boxes of images announcing stuff you can do.

The whole loading process including large-community-folder-checking can easily last 12-16 minutes. (X-Plane 11 loads in …uhm …18 seconds)

The loading images are found in these directories, when MSFS was downloaded from the MS Store in a PC:

1. Startup Splash Screen:
   C:/Program Files/WindowsApps(hidden folder)/Microsoft.FlightSimulator_1.21.13.0_x64__8wekyb3d8bbwe/Packages/fs-base-onboarding/images/onboarding.jpg

2. Second phase launch images:
   Go to your Community folder, wherever you may have installed it. Go one level up in the windows explorer. You will now see the Community folder itself, and another folder called “Official”. Enter folder Official.
   Enter folder OneStore
   Enter folder fs-base
   Images are at:
   fs-base/missions/Common/LOADING/BOOT/
   fs-base/missions/Common/LOADING/FreeFlight/
   fs-base/widgets/Activities
   fs-base/widgets/images

All the several images, including the splash screen in the “Second phase” of the launch are easy as pie to change. You just have to change them back to yours after each sim or world update.

But it is IMPOSSIBLE to change the original onboarding.jpg image that is located in the protected “WindowsApps” folder. That folder is owned by Microsoft and not the computer administrator (you).

And I just hate Asobo’s choices of silly onboarding.jpg images they saddle us with in that protected folder after each sim update or world update.

If anyone knows a way to change the onboarding.jpg inside WindowsApps, I would greatly appreciate it if you share the knowledge (WARNING: trying to change permissions/ownership in that folder almost always leads to disaster, with Microsoft putting you in front of the business end of a two-by-four).