Your input is very appreciated. As I said, the SDK team didn’t believe me when I predicted that all this would happen.
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I am a complete amateur painter on occasion but I thought I would share these screenshots of the Shrike Simulations F-86 Sabre. Shrike Simulations gave me permission to overwrite textures of their liveries so I could paint an RCAF 413(F) Squadron personal livery that my father flew to Zweibrucken Germany on Operation Leapfrog. Thanks to Shrike Simulations. Thank you to guennizw for the excellent Zweibrucken Airport that is working in MSFS 2024 and thanks to DeltaSierra for his great rivet mod for the Sabre. I am very happy this is working and wish the best to all the artists working on MSFS 2024 livery creation.
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Just adding that no matter what I tried I could not get the main fuselage part of the paint kit to download.
It seems to me that the days of the true community is coming to an end. I believe that they want to sell liveries rather than the community beavering away making them for free. It might be an end to good times!
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At least liveries for the Beaver and Cessna 414 in your pictures can be converted to work in 2024.
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Here is the three F-86 Sabres I did to have 3 Wing from Zweibrucken Germany represented.
427(F) Squadron Lion and 434(F) Squadron Bluenose and The previous Sabre was the 413(F) Squadron Tuskers.
I am just really glad I have them in MSFS 2024.
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So none of my ATR liveries work in 2024. Is this a common issue then?
Yes it is a common issue. The solution could be as simple as updating the aircraft.cfg, or more complicated by converting textures and folder structure to 2024’s format. Or it could be the livery needs to go in the bin. Although this is usually confined to Asobo developed aircraft. ie those in the initial release of 2020, like the 152, 172, 787 etc.
so… I’m really not sure why anyone here is trying to get 2020 liveries to work with the default aircraft… EVERY SINGLE MODEL is NEW. they aren’t going to work. period. You have to wait for asobo to unencrypt the livery files so painters can make new liveries.
The reason is that people are trying to get their liveries working is because Asobo have provide no information that anything has changed. We are mostly guessing, based on the little we can find in the VFS, and what has happened with attempts to get liveries working. And “every single model is new” is an exaggeration. The models I have been able to look at indicate they are much the same, it’s only the UV maps that have changed.
Asobo had promised that stuff would just need to be copied across to 2024 (and Yes I have that in writing). But they forgot to mention that this doesn’t apply to liveries for default aircraft. So you can’t blame people for trying to get liveries working, based on the information available.
And spoiler alert, I have no intention of recreating all my liveries again.
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Asobo literally said that all the models are brand new from the ground up to take advantage of the new LOD system… Jorg also just said in the last developer stream that the liveries and some of the config files will be unencrypted soon, and they are hoping to decrypt all of the aircraft at some point in the future.
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The latest patch just arrived and the logs indicate content is now unencrypted in the VFS.
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One thing I have noticed is that after the patch, you can enable 2020 content like the 2020 DA40 tDi. When you enable the 2020 DA40 tDi, it just disables the 2024 DA40 tDi to avoid a conflict.
However this action appears to be limited to deluxe and premium deluxe aircraft, and is not available aircraft that were part of the base package. So you can enable the 2020 172 with classic instruments, but not the 2020 172 with the G1000. This is good new for liveries at least. Of course you will lose any flight improvements they might have made with the new model. But as flight model mods should work now, that may not matter as much. And you also fly with an empty cockpit since the pilots disappear as well.
This could be also good news for some aircraft like the Blacksquare analog Baron, since it relies on the 2020 Baron in order to work, which can now be enabled. Once you enable the 2020 Baron, then the Blacksquare Baron might work without a total redesign.
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That’s only true for the Standard, Deluxe, and Premium planes. Not all, if any, of the Local Legend or Famous Flyers have been updated, in fact I don’t think any have been, and I don’t know of any 3rd party aircraft to be updated to 2024 format yet.
Sorry for yet another long post, but these issues are complex and difficult for me to explain in brevity.
From what I am seeing going through every default aircraft in the VFS while working on retaking their thumbnails, I’m noticing that some of the aircraft which are being converted to 2024 are mid-way through that process with a few of their old texture.* folders scattered about the VFS.
These texture folders are NOT currently being called by the sim, indicating they are place holders for the representative texture files nested within them until the conversion to 2024 format is 100% completed for the aircraft by the devs. That’s to say, there is a 2024 folder for the aircraft with some of the original texture nested within it, but the legacy texture folders are still present and not currently part of the 2024 folder yet and are not represented in the livery selection within the game UI itself. It’s a bit messy right now.
I would expect they are going to clean that up when they get to them and their conversions are completed. At least I hope they do. Jorg said that all the 2020 aircraft would eventually be converted, if I recall correctly.
Beyond that and in relation to default aircraft…I’m running into yet more issues related to taking those thumbnails with the “Aircraft Capture” tool and its associated “Spawner Window” tool within Developer Mode.
When setting the “Debug” options on the “Spawner Window” tool to explicitly use the “Show Scene Light” option, as soon as a camera is loaded for the automated screenshot, the tool immediately disables that option and re-enables the “World Light” option before taking the automated screenshot. It forces this setting which is not at all what I want. I suppose this is done to get the aircraft shadow to show up in the UI thumbnails. I don’t want that. Because so many of the aircraft are clipping through the rendered ground, I decided that the thumbnails would look better with the camera options configured as follows:
And the “Spawn Window” debug options set to:
These settings actually look great for the thumbnails as the transparent background better matches the background of the in-game UI. The “Show Scene Light” option changes the thumbnail lighting on the 3D model render to an exact match to the lighting and contrast of the 3D aircraft model as represented in the in-game UI. Call me OCD I guess, but I really want that to be the case as the menu would look super tidy with no discernable differences between the lighting, contrast, and saturation of the thumbnails vs. the model itself in the UI. Awesome right? Not so fast…
You’ll note in the screenshots below that the 3D model looks super realistic using the “Show Scene Light” option/parameter whereas the “Show World Lighting” option washes out the thumbnail and makes it difficult to determine true colors for the thumbnail in the UI. In fact, some of the coloring on some of the thumbnails doesn’t match the color of the 3D model at all due to the lighting differences between the two methods. I’m after the same thing with the thumbnails. It’s not happening, for whatever reason. Bug? Design choice? Whatever the case may be, it’s F_U_B_A_R_'ed.
The problem…When I manually set the “Show Scene Light” debug option in the “Spawner Window” to explicitly use that lighting mode to illuminate the aircraft model for the thumbnail, the tool immediately reverts back to “Use World Light” when the automated capture is run. Great!
So, I opened up the associated camera.xml file and forced the settings in code because I’ve noted that the “ShowShootingSceneLights” parameter I’ve saved as “1” in the “Spawner Window” GUI (meaning the feature is set to on) never saves that option in the XML itself. In fact, when manually set it by explicitly defining the parameter in the camera XML, the automated “Aircraft Capture” tool does not respect it. Every corner that I turn in this sim I get a fight.
Here’s the hard-set code in the camera’s XML file that is not being respected by the “Aircraft Capture” tool:
Here’s a few example thumbnails showing the difference between the two lighting methods:
Scene Lighting - Perfect! Awesome! I’ll take this option please:
World Lighting - No we’re going to give you this instead!..Washed out looking and does not match the 3D model lighting in the livery selection UI. Ugggggh!
Ahhhhh! The joys of being a pseudo beta tester for Asobo.
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My ATR liveries are working without any problem.
On the other hand, most of the liveries for FBW A32nx not loading at all, I can see their thumbnails but the livery itself won’t load (in the livery selection screen). If I try to start a flight with one of the non-working liveries, the airport loading screen just loads forever.
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Same issue for me, I had successfully imported the V1 320 to the onestore2020 and all my liveries did load and work, but since the latest patch, they all broke and do not load and airport screen loads forever. It also happened to my third party liveries for some third party aircraft. only the liveries that came with the third party plane do seem to still load up, but not any custom liveries. The odd behavior I get now is a plane wont display or load if I simply just overwrote the fuselage texture keeping same texture file name within a third party default livery folder leaving everything else intact. so my observation is some custom liveries work and some do not, and now some that do load appear like black texture when they worked fine on patch 2. (all in community folder only) I even had Caribou liveries for my Aviator edition working fine initally and those broke after latest patch too.
Have you tried running the layout.json tool to make sure it’s up to date?
2024 is very strict on the file size in Layout.json being correct now, and there may be other issues. I’ve seen reports from a bunch of people this helps make things work again.
I love painting liveries…but I hate and get easily confused by the paper work! Is there a way to get my C414 and Beaver liveries to work in MSFS2024?
You’re in luck because the C414 and Beaver are 2 aircraft that can have their liveries converted for 2024.
I created a guide for converting liveries for 2020 legacy aircraft in in the link below. I have successfully converted all my 414 liveries using this method.
It’s quite detailed but basically you just make sure your ui_createdby value matches your source aircraft, then dump it in your community folder and it should work. If you want to disable the dynamic tail number, or create some 2024 style thumbnails, then that is more complicated, but covered by the guide. Once finished your C414 liveries should work in both 2020 and 2024.
The Beaver is more difficult as it has been converted to the 2024 format, unlike the C414 there converted livery will only work in 2024. Luckily the Beaver wasn’t done by Asobo so all the textures still work. You just need to use the new folder structure and convert the textures to KTX2 format. I haven’t documented this process, but have successfully converted a few of my Beaver liveries for 2024. Have a look at one I have converted for the folder structure needed.
https://flightsim.to/file/85489/2024-dhc2-beaver-c-gzbe
Just convert all your textures to PNG format and then use this utility to convert the PNG textures to KTX2 format.
If you get stuck, then send me a direct message and I’ll help out.
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