These couples of weeks, I have been getting myself accustomed to helicopters. I still keep 2020 for IFR and recently grabbed XPlane 12 from Steam’s winter sale.
However, most of my flights have been MSFS 2024. Flying along the Gibraltar coast and hovering a remote island in Indonesia, pulling out rotor brake knob and stepping outside and looking at the slowly stopping blades, strolling to nearby cottages, I mean MSFS 2024 scenery and ground texture are just wow… Stunning.
I am like most of the members here, frustrated with the controller setups, server disasters, and sudden drup fps + stutters, I even asked for a refund which got rejected by Steam.
But now the sim seems more stable, and flying slow and low with Taog’s Hangar 315B Lama, is just mind-blowing.
Perhaps I am lowering my standard with this sim due to its issues. But when you expect less, you’ll get more.
I’m sorry you guys feel like we/some of us don’t like you. I totally appreciate what you all do, and I know it takes a ton of time, effort, and heart to do it.
On the contrary, I feel like every one of you regularly active in these forums are unfailingly professional and even-handed. You all do a thankless job very well and MS is very lucky to have your services.
Anyone who reads my post history knows I call the sim like I see it - and if it’s broke, I raise it like anyone else - Zendesks, now Bug Reports. Heck I even go so far as to buttonhole key personalities (outside the Forum of course ) if I know they might have undue influence on resolving or escalating the concern. I’m shameless in that regard.
I do try to keep a positive outlook - mostly because I have a bad tendency to head off to the pessimistic side too quickly at times. It’s periods in a product’s lifecycle history like this that teaches folks Resiliency. If the flaws become too much, I’ve started to walk away from it and do something else for a while. Then come back and see if anything’s changed.
There are some 2024 moments that are astounding. I wish there were more, but that will come with time.
I take comfort in the fact that FS2020 today, nearly four and half years later, is also at a peak. And that is a glimpse of 2024’s potential as well. In order to get there, we’ll all have to take the journey - together.
This is why I have 190+ hours of 2024 in-sim time to 5 hours of actual flight time.
I’m working hard to find, replicate and report bugs to help bring this thing forward. I want nothing more than for the sim to be what it can be for all of us.
And that’s what I did. In November after the launch of the sim, I took the liberty of ignoring it. Some days later, there was another attempt which resulted in being frustrated about the controller setup. Now I have holidays, fired up my laptop and 2020 to check some (for me important) bindings and replicate them in 2024. With a few occasional surprises (I can’t remember having changed the instrument views from Ctrl + [number] to Shift + [number]), it runs rather well (without many addons - just two regional airfields in Community). Though I still use 2020 for my Airbus trips with FBW’s 320, I do enjoy the career in 2024 and am looking forward to more things to come once the teething troubles have been resolved.
I think this is pretty much my ratio too so far. I’ve spent the vast majority of my time doing what I can on my end to make the process better, figuring out which planes to fly, testing scenery, and whatever else I can do to improve the experience. Of course I did the same in 2020 until I started working with 2024.
Huh, you made me go check. The XBox App shows 58.1 hours in FS2024, while my in-sim logbook shows 13 hours of flight time. I’ve loaded in quite a few times merely to test performance and VRAM usage in various circumstances, trying to replicate the runaway VRAM use and single-digit FPS results people are experiencing, and to see if additional items from my FS2020 library had transferred over (and on that note, I just got a notification that my 2020 content transfer is “complete.” I wonder what new item(s) transferred that I had not noticed being missing?)
I agree. At low level it’s stunning. I took a drone and flew around an area at ground level up to about 40 feet and was simply blown away by the richness of the texture delails.
Unfortunately, this is also the case, even more so after a recent update. In FS2020 I used to be able to fly at 5,000 ft., look down, zoom in, and be amazed at the details. Now it’s blurry, even with fairly high TLOD and OLOD settings. I really hope they can fix this.
I’ve been very impressed with MSFS 2024 since I started exploring it. I missed the initial launch problems and its all been pretty smooth so far - once I got my head around the control configurator.
Things I like:
The lighting model is far better
The ground textures are really a massive improvement
Performance is very smooth and stable (but then I’ve not contaminated it with a ton of mods yet - there is a moral in that somewhere)
The live weather (on a superficial level at least) is must improved with real variety.
My only real complaints would be over the quality of the default aircraft and the lack of user options in some key areas and yes, the very blurry ground textures when at any kind of altitude.
Career mode is especially impressive - when you see reviewers in the mainstream (ie non-aviation/gaming) press complaining that it requires actual real effort to learn how to fly the aircraft ‘properly’ and this is a ‘grind’, then you know you’ve done it right.
So bien joué, Asobo and Microsoft. Looking forward to the next four years of improvements (just no SU5 moments, please!)
Unfortunately, due too many bugs I completely lost interest in 2024. Even when they fix all the bugs (highly doubt), I would not enjoy this sim anymore. I had that with Cyberpunk, installed. Played few hours and never came back. Too much hype, too many bugs to enjoy. Once I get dissapointed with so something, it’s very hard to try again.
Yesterday I did a short hike with my wife in the Alps south of Munich, in the area of Lenggries. We had beautiful blue skies, while Munich was covered in dense fog.
In the evening I fired up MSFS2024 and started a flight in the Cowansim R22 to check the area in the sim with live weather, turning back the clock to 10:00 when we started in the morning. And the experience was just amazing. Snow coverage was accurate, weather was accurate with the fog visible in the north, elevation model and textures were really good, and even the autogen buildings were very close to reality. Steep mountain sides looked extremely good as well, no comparison to MSFS2020.
I remember checking the same area when the latest world update for Germany was released, announced as a preview for the scenery detail in the upcoming new sim. That was quite disappointing, with many north facing slopes covered in shadows. Maybe the 2020 version lacked the AI processing?
I agree that there is still lots to do for MSFS2024, fixing the incredible number of bugs and making the sim stable and usable for everybody. But on my system I have hardly any problems, and this was one of the most immersive flights I ever had in any sim (started with FS2002)!
Hmm I am not replying to this post because I have huge problems with this simulator, to me so far I cannot do anything more advanced with it. I cannot even post anything in forums, just reply to other peoples posts, why?
Here’s my very local to me scenery comparison from western Scotland. It’s just stunning what this sim can render. Bottom one is IRL photo close to same spot-
Actually, not a valid comparison as the view point is just at the top of the hill where as the sim view is likely closer to the hillside drop off. There are connifer trees there. You can see their tops in the real image. You also have to keep in mind that a lot of the terrain is managed forrestry operations so clear cut and regrow, so it will vary from year to year and the dates of satellite imagery.
Here’s a view slightly to the right side of the above one, but just down from the summit that shows the tree density.
) if I know they might have undue influence on resolving or escalating the concern. I’m shameless in that regard.
