Most liveries don't work in 2024

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The Kodiak will be a 2020 legacy aircraft in 2024, which means the aircraft’s folder structure remains unchanged from 2020. And liveries for these aircraft are most likely to work, if the livery creator has the right values in the right fields. Itl all depends on what values were used in the livery when it was created. Fields that didn’t matter in 2020, have a greater significance in 2024.

However liveries for default aircraft like the 172, DA40, 787 etc will not work, due to significant changes for 2024 native aircraft. ie those designed specifically for 2024. That’s not to say they can’t be converted, but not without a lot of effort. Of the 4 aircraft I tried, 2 just wouldn’t work , 1 worked but the textures no longer matched the source aircraft because Asobo relined something, and 1 converted after a fair bit of effort and is now published on Flightsim.to.

43

Like you guys, I’ve been banging my head against the wall that’s called MSFS 2024 the past week and a half. I’ve been reading your comments as I wasn’t been able to get my liveries into the new sim. I’ve been creating a series of livery packs for the default C172 I was hoping to release when the new sim was launched, but that seems not possible at the moment.

It looks to me that this aircraft in particular has been reworked by Asobo to fit into their new LOD system. Looking in the VFS at the common files, I can see the aircraft been ‘chopped into peaces’, all with their own set of textures. Hence why the C172 doesn’t work with legacy liveries at the moment, and to be honest, I’m not foreseeing it to work in the near future as well.

I can understand why Asobo choose the new LOD system for objects like big terminals, buildings or even big airliners. For dev’s there’s a lot to be gained in performance if you use this new system. But for the smaller GA aircraft I don’t really see the point of doing this as the objects are quite large when up close and personal without the difference between one side or the other being to big. It seems for some of the aircraft, and I’ve only seen it with the C172 myself, that we have to do a lot of liveries all over again once the encryption of the LOD’s have been lifted for the new sim as much, if not all, of the UV’s of these aircraft have been remapped.

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44

The L39’s UVs have not been remapped, and I was able to successfully convert a 2020 livery to work with the new 2024 format for the L39. I was also able to get a 2020 livery for DA62 working, but unfortunately the UV’s have been remapped for the DA62, so they all have to go in the bin.

I have also managed to set up liveries for the DA40 tDi, DA40 NG, TBM930, 787, Baron, 152 (std & aerobat). I used the same method as the L39 and DA62, and they appeared in 2024 in the right place. But I ended up with a plain white livery. This seems to indicate they weren’t using my converted textures. And I haven’t been able to work out why one method worked for the L39 & DA62, but not for the others.

I don’t think the unencrypted files is going to be the great solution everyone is expecting. What we really need is some examples of a stand alone livery for these aircraft. By that, I mean one that doesn’t use a dedicated 3d model for the livery. They can actually be found in the VFS. But while they use the new KTX2 textures, they use the old 2020 folder format and I think that this is reason none of them appear anywhere in 2024’s aircraft selection screens. So even Asobo can’t get some of their liveries working. What chance do we have?

45

Any 787 liveries planned to be released?

46

A little discovery:
I was wondering how is the AI knows to which livery to use, so I’ve looked into a few in the VFS and this is what I’ve found:

livery.cfg 
[Version]
major = 1
minor = 0

[Selection]
required_tags = "airframe"

[FLTSIM.0]
icao_airline="QTR"
livery.cfg 
[Version]
major = 1
minor = 0

[Selection]
required_tags = "B737_700"

[FLTSIM.0]
icao_airline="ASA"

Based on this, you can use the legacy [FLTSIM.N] stuff in your livery.cfg. I can’t test it right now, since the custom registration, etc. is clearly bugged in the sim, but I think this will be the way to use atc_id, atc_airline, etc. in the new modular format.

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That is interesting. But on 2020 legacy aircraft that still use an aircraft.cfg, nothing in the aircraft.cfg influences the dynamic tail number.

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Yes, because it’s bugged:
You can’t even set it in the menu, it will still use a random one when you load in.
But I think this is the intended way for it.

49

It’s KTX2, and I believe it’s only the AO/Roughness/Metal textures that use the format. As I think you know, the format used here is Asobo specific, so you need to generate them with the SDK tools. At least currently.

Yes. It very much seems as though Asobo is actively working against the freeware community. I think they don’t like having to support it.

When I told them they’ll have issues with organizing the library based on the methodology they’ve chosen (grouping by ui_createdby), Eric didn’t believe me. Essentially, livery creators are going to have to choose between putting their name in ui_createdby, and thereby creating a new model tile, or putting in the original authors name, and relying on the manifest.json to record their credit for the package.

50

Yup, Asobo bang on about the ‘Community’ while all the while removing the ability for the ‘Community’ to mod the sim. I’ve found livery painting for MSFS to be a great hobby but I think I’m getting near to retirement!

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51

Use the “VFS projector” under Tools->Virtual File System in developer mode to inspect the files and new directory structure while the sim is running.

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Great news that some of you folks are persevering with this. If this sim works out…it would be good to be able to transfer the MSFS liveries.

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Yes have been using the VFS projector for a while now. But it was clearly developed as an afterthought as a lot of stuff is missing. What there is available is incompatible with existing livery creation processes. But I have seen enough to speculate than no existing liveries will work for the majority of 2020 base aircraft in 2024. This would consign a huge proportion of liveries on Flightsim.to to the bin.

Any default non-Asobo aircraft like the Beaver and DC3 are ok though.

Based on the few I could see, it appears Asobo have altered the UV maps that link textures to liveries. When this happens, existing liveries can’t be converted, and can only be recreated from scratch.

We need only look at what they did to the SR22 while still in 2020. They replaced a single larger texture with about 15 smaller textures. This change killed all existing liveries. I saw that this had happened to the DR400 in 2024, so assume it has also happened to the rest. I had tried using the same successful method as I used for the Beaver and L39 in 2024 on many default aircraft, but they all failed to recognise the textures. The reason can only be that the 3d models in 2024 are now looking for different textures.

If this is the case then this is very bad news for the FS community.

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54

They want people to buy liveries through the marketplace, that is the only reason for it.

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55

XBox users already have that as their only choice. The bad news for them is that any liveries they have already bought will need to bought 2nd time. The reason being that any livery creators on the marketplace will have to invest the same amount of time and effort to recreate those liveries for 2024 as they did to produce them for 2020.

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56

I’m working my way through retaking all the thumbnails for all default and some payware aircraft I have. I can’t believe they still use the horrible useless mostly front view of the aircraft for a thumbnail. In 2020, this resulted in not really being able to see what the livery looks like. They thought enough to carry that bad design choice for thumbnails over to 2024, unfortunately.

It’s clear to me, whoever made these decisions hasn’t a clue about managing aircraft and add-on skins in the sim. When we were told by Jorg that all 2020 aircraft would work in 2024, I had no reason to even think that they would break skins and even worse, the ability to sort aircraft/skins properly in the menu. It’s terrible and WILL cause chaos for developers, FSTo, and the end-user themselves.

If anyone knows how to manage third-party aircraft and skins in 2020, it’s me. I currently have 21,623 skins setup in 2020, all with newly taken thumbnail images. I did this using PowerShell to dig into the aircraft.cfg, texture.cfg, panel.cfg, and model.cfg files and make adjustments in order to sort them in the hangar menu by Manufacturer, Model, Airline/Company/Private, and registration number. All I had to do was to set the folder name for the aircraft to “Delta Airlines (N460DL)” or “Private (D-EDML)” and my scripts would rip into the files and set everything up. I could rip 300 skins into the sim in seconds doing this. The real work was loading each aircraft and taking the new screenshots using the dev tools. You can’t effectively do this in 2024. You have to load the aircraft into a flight within the sim. It’s arduous and a disaster of a design choice. Throw in the fact that there are three different ways to setup aircraft in the sim and what you’ve got is a community disaster in the making. Heck, most people had no clue how to properly setup the cfg files in 2020 to get skins working. Some fields were left empty or didn’t even exist. This was part of the reason I used PowerShell to straighten them out and get consistency in the 2020 hangar. Does MS really think the community at large is going to be able to handle/understand the new methodology unless they are a dev? I think most people just won’t put forth the effort, or if they do, they’ll do it wrong. They’ll be a handful of us that get it done, but by and large, the community is not going to want to deal with this mess. Maybe I’m wrong but I doubt it. I’ve been simming for over 35 years and this file structure wreaks of inexperience from an add-on inventory management perspective, IMO.

Now, let’s talk about MS’ decision for getting rid of the Hangar. I would assume this was done to lean the install size down a bit. If that is the reason they eliminated this most useful tool for skinners and hobbyists that collect skins, then they’ve totally destroyed that argument by moving to PNG files for the thumbnails. What used to be approximately 850 MB of folders and thumbnai.jpg replacements for ALL default aircraft thumbnails (And I probably have over 5k in payware aircraft) is now 2GB just for approximately 15 aircraft I’ve setup so far in my 2024 thumbnail replacements folder. And I’m just getting started. I fully expect this set of folders and PNG files to be somewhere around 70-100 GB+ when completed. And, all add-on skins are going to add to that total even further. The sim is going to have to crawl through them at launch to replace the horridly useless default ones in my case, thus putting my install right back into excessive loading time for the sim. All for transparent thumbnails in the 2024 menu systems. Nice! Any SSD space saving and/or sim loading time savings has been eliminated by moving to PNG files to get the cute, animated, transparent aircraft thumbnails in the 2024 menu systems. Who’s making these decisions at MS? Really? Honestly, what a disaster. Frying pan/fire comes to mind here.

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57

Don’t forget the huge number of livery packs people purchased on the Marketplace in 2020. They’re going to be automatically downloaded, and, unless all those livery authors update the packs for 2024, for the 2024 planes, they won’t work. So users will have a huge number of funky aircraft in their library and will be forced to go through and delete those packs from the system. Which means the package delete command has to work on Xbox.

So, the Marketplace is going to have to enforce the author approval feature for livery packs, and only release them to users when they’re updated for 2024. Or… as you noted, consign them to the bin as lost purchases.

2020 liveries do work for 2020 planes. Most of my Carenado plane liveries still work.

I can’t imagine removing the hangar was about slimming it down in size. All the data required for it is already there, and the geometry for it is basically a small airport package. A teeny one. So the size isn’t an issue. I would say they thought it’s about slimming down the use of the interface, they thought they were getting rid of some clicks, and making it faster to choose a plane. And possibly “more compliant” with the Xbox interface rules… (which gets to be pretty subjective).

But they forgot that liveries look different from each other, and the current configuration makes it impossible to see the livery you chose. And they also broke the zoom feature, as many planes look tiny and you can barely see them.

And not only can you not tell the difference between liveries, you often can’t tell the difference between variants. For instance some variants the difference is the avionics available. How can we tell without being able to hop in the cockpit.

And they forgot that sometimes we like to look at our aircraft and walk around them without having to load into the world. One of my favorite things to do is explore my library, like I was at an airshow. Only in 2020, I could not only walk around the planes, but also jump in and take a look at the cockpit.

And all of your complaints.

While I prefer the hangar layout for this task, the least they could have done was given us the ability to spin the plane (it is a 3D model killing my graphics card after all, might as well let us use it), and a button to hop in the cockpit and move around.

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58

While they do work in the sim, the issues arise when taking new thumbnail screenshots for some of them in the sim. It is abundantly clear that they have not gone through these aircraft and made sure they are 100% 2024 compatible. Even worse, the FLT files are no longer respected in the aircraft capture tool for aircraft state. Instead, the tool relies on the state of the aircraft when loaded into the sim. Meaning, you have to go into the EFB and set the state before taking the screenshot using the dev tool. Nothing, however, resolves the issues related to how the devs setup the aircraft nodes or interesting points on the model itself. This results in some aircraft that MS claims are 2024 compatible not sitting correctly in the aircraft capture tool to take a decent screenshot. Here’s an example:

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59

There’s also that the team hates supporting the FSX style liveries, especially the 8K ones. They, correctly, surmise that those 8K liveries on AI aircraft killed performance of 2020, especially if the textures didn’t have all the mipmaps, and there was nothing they could do about it, yet they (Asobo) gets all the blame. At least in 2024, they could only upload the necessary mipmaps, if they exist.

They’re trying to force livery creators to use their livery method to maintain performance as well. But, of course, they’re not giving us the tools to do it; the models are encrypted, and the painting tools and modeling tools are expensive and/or hard to use.

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60

Correct. Part of the reason I scripted the install of skins in my case was to set the following in the aircraft.cfg file. This eliminated loading third-party skins as AI aircraft for my entire library. This is one of the things I was speaking to when I stated most skinners had no clue how to properly setup the cfg files. Combine that with their thumbnails being all over the place and the naming conventions used to name the skin and the menu was a disaster in 2020. My scripts fix all of these things.

IsAirTraffic = "0"
IsUserSelectable = "1"
CanBeUsedByAITraffic = "0"
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61

Or aircraft authors for that matter!

I had to edit 80% to 90% of aircraft.cfgs and .flt files of all aircraft I purchased. At least in 2020 I could game the system using it’s VFS priority system for those aircraft I purchased from the Marketplace and their aircraft.cfg files were encrypted. That “feature” has now gone away in 2024.

1 Like