What a fantastic overview of the Seafarer (Float) Variant by Dreams of Wings!
If you have an hour to spare this Sunday, this video is well worth the watch. It highlights a great selection of features, details, and everything that makes the Seafarer such a unique way to experience the Taylorcraft BC-12D.
What an awesome early look at the aircraft! A nice breath of fresh air as well… Much needed this far into development for a tired ole’ Dev like me! 
Hey, I haven’t gone down this entire thread, still in the hate the move to marketplace part, but I bought the Marketplace 2024 only released Rafalel C from Azurploy and it includes a small download on their website to enable full weapons usage. Things aren’t as locked down as you all think, and I honestly prefer the platform for multiple reasons.
I will continue the thread, but this immediately came to mind to your question while scrolling through.
Yeah it’s not that you can’t mod Marketplace planes, it’s simply that to make mods you usually need info from the planes files, which you can’t read from Marketplace planes. But GotFriends addressed this topic a bit after that:
Guys, I really can’t wait for this flying tractor to arrive. What a beautiful beast.
checking every day for release updates
It looks like we will get screenshots and videos all the way until September 
Plane looks GREAT! Thanks for all your hard work, will be purchased as soon as it’s released!
Right now, our primary focus is entirely on polish. The aircraft is essentially ready for release, but our beta team is deep in the trenches of bug-hunting season and doing an incredible job catching those obscure, one-percent edge cases. While it might be tempting to push it out the door, our entire team is completely aligned on taking the extra time to investigate and clear every single report. We don’t want to just release something good; we want to hand you a beautifully refined experience from the very first flight. As soon as the beta team gives us their final sign-off and we know the quality is exactly where it needs to be, it will be yours.
I knew the Wilga was made in Poland, didn’t know the Taylorcraft was too! 
Take your time, I’m a patient man. I’ll just watch Dreams of Wings’ video a couple more times while I wait.
We are thrilled to announce that our flagship glider, the AS 33 Me, has officially landed on PlayStation 5!
As a quick reminder, the Wilga 35T (Towplane) is included as a fully flyable aircraft within the AS 33 Me package across all platforms; PC, Xbox, and now PS5.
This means you can experience our flagship glider and get a taste of our flagship bush plane in a single package.
It’s great to see the Wilga expanding across the entire ecosystem, even if it’s just the single Towplane variant for now. Looking ahead, we still plan on bringing a fully native Wilga 35/80 Series to MSFS 2024 in the future, though we don’t have any new details to announce on that front just yet.
Cheers, and happy Gliding/Towing!
Folks please remember to keep your posts on topic, and be respectful of other members posts.
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This will be a day 1 purchase for sure! I know the wait will be totally worth it. Also, I hear August 27 is a really good day (like it’s someone’s birthday or something…) 
AvAngel brought up a good point in her video (the aircraft looks awesome by the way!): we really need a mooring option that keeps the floats parallel to a jetty, instead of just weather-vaning around an anchor point while clipping through the jetty and other objects.
Any chance to add something like that? Perhaps even as an addon that could be used with other 3rd party aircraft? That would be the cherry on top! 
Don’t go suggesting stuff like that! This close to release!! Hahaha
Could Man’s Best Friend’s positioning system be adapted to move an anchor point around? Put the anchor point on top of a dock or the shore or whatever, that would do it.
I fly float planes a lot, especially using the RTMM/Misty Flying Club addons for Southeast Alaska, and every time I do, I wish someone would develop a mooring/docking addon that would work for all float planes. Would make some of my flights just that much more enjoyable!
It’s actually not that hard of a thing to do. If you have Flow Pro you can easily make a widget to do this. In fact I still have the one I made for 2020 kicking around.
Currently I have a keybind that toggles Freeze Lat/Long and Freeze Attitude, but that has its own issues, and I still have to time it just perfectly pulling up to a dock. It’s also not very realistic for anchoring, where you would be swinging around on the anchor due to wind direction & strength, as well as current (which I’m sure isn’t modeled in the sim although I’d love it if someone told me otherwise).
This evening, I wanted to fly a lovely plane I had not flown since MSFS2020, the Kinner B2 Sportwing by “Golden Age Simulations” a company that’s been dead for years.
I went for a flight on MSFS2024, all seemed ok at first, the plane flew as good (in fact, better) as I remembered it, but as soon as I went to external view for a screenshot, the engine stalled (!). Every try, same result.
It took me roughly 3 minutes of poking around in the *.xml files to fix the MSFS2024 incompatibility, and everything is working perfectly again.
If that plane had come from the marketplace, with its encrypted files, that plane would now be lost to me.
And this is why even though I own several of their products, I won’t buy any new Gotfriends release.
Most of their products are excellent, so I’ll keep hope that they some day come back to a distribution system that’s compatible with my idea of what flight simming is : a hobby for tinkerers.
Until then, best of luck.
Haddock
I understand the concern, but I think this comparison gives people an inaccurate impression of what Marketplace encryption actually prevents.
In the exact scenario you described, Marketplace encryption would not prevent you from fixing the aircraft. Marketplace aircraft can still be modified through SimObject Patches following the VFS layout. With an understanding of the package structure and the SDK tools available, you can still inspect how the aircraft is built and override the relevant functionality to make the same kind of compatibility fix.
This is done through:
And that is only one approach. There are many other methods available depending on what you are trying to change.
Just because an aircraft is encrypted does not mean its behavior is completely hidden or inaccessible. The SDK exposes an enormous amount of information through the VFS, Behaviors Debugger, SimVar/LVar tools, SimObject systems, Aircraft Debugger, and other development utilities.
Those tools exist specifically so developers can investigate, debug, extend, and override aircraft functionality. In fact, this is generally the more robust way to create community patches, rather than directly modifying an aircraft’s source files and potentially breaking future updates, bit-checks, or Community Folder compatibility.
For example, our Man’s Best Friend: Deluxe add-on patches functionality within an encrypted system. This is nothing new. Just because the original source files are inaccessible does not mean you cannot change or override a specific piece of functionality.
You can, and MSFS 2024 makes this easier than ever through its Modular SimObject architecture and the new Merge system, which allows packages to extend and override existing functionality without directly altering the original aircraft package.
More importantly, however, this example involves an abandoned aircraft from a developer that is no longer around to support it. Got Friends is actively supporting our products. If a simulator update causes an issue, contact us. If you have already identified the problem, send us the information and we can investigate it, make the appropriate fix, and distribute that update to everyone who owns the aircraft.
That is our responsibility as the developer, and one we take seriously.
If unrestricted access to every source file is an important part of flight simulation for you, we completely understand why Marketplace products may not be your preference. But the idea that a Marketplace aircraft would simply be “lost” because one of its files is protected is not accurate.
There are several avenues for modification, and more importantly, as long as we are actively supporting our products, you should never be expected to repair compatibility issues yourself in the first place.
If tinkering with aircraft is one of the things you enjoy most about MSFS, I’d genuinely encourage you to explore the SDK’s official methods for patching and extending SimObjects. There is considerably more access and flexibility there than many users realize, particularly with MSFS 2024’s modular package system. For a lot of developers, that kind of tinkering is actually how they got started.
