MSFS 2024 | What we know so far

Big changes for MSFS 2020 were introduced in the middle of the cycle. They can do it again. Things like DX12, Frame Generator, implementation of the CFD etc were introduced more than a year after the release.

The ATC already exists, so they have to improve it. Working Title is working on it, I trust them, I believe they will deliver it.

A flight simulator will never release fully featured, never happened before and probably will never happen in the future.

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Do we know yet whether MSFS 2024 will have improved taxiways?

I am all for improved textures and all that but I would appreciate some dev time also being spent on making the sim’s airport TWs a bit more accurate than we see in MSFS 2020.

I have a strong suspicion this will be in the purview of World Hub editors when it comes back online.

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Were you around for 2020? Maybe I’ve misunderstood what you’re saying, but We’ve been getting pretty major rewrites of nearly every section of the code since launch. Look at the work WT did in multiple areas. They expanded greatly on the framework originally designed into their flight model (even though the community at large doesn’t seem to recognize it). In fact, early on, WT made it known that they had to create their instrument framework before ATC could be rewritten.

Yes, 2024 is a fundamental change in the delivery of MSFS to our computers, but, I fully expect subsystems, like ATC, to be replaced along the way until the next major version.

Jorg has stated multiple times they have been working figuring out how to do ATC better. I think part of their problem is they don’t know how yet. They’re still in the concepting stage. I think they’ve tossed around a bunch of ideas, but it doesn’t sound like they’ve solidified anything yet. They may be waiting for some breakthroughs in technology.

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Could you be a little more clear on what you mean by taxiways being “a bit more accurate”? That could mean a lot of things.

If they’re going to make things better, we’re going to have to be very specific about what we’re asking for so it’s actionable.

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So how come ATC worked better in FSX and even FS2004 than it does now?

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For a lot of reasons, and I’m not privy to all of them.

And I’m not sure what that has to do with anything? They’re aware that the community would like to see ATC improved. They, however, have no idea what you’re talking about in many respects I imagine, as they didn’t use FSX on a day to day basis back when it was relevant.

Have you reported all the ways that ATC worked better in FSX than it does now?
I’m sure that would help them make the current system better.

But then again, is that good enough for you? I don’t remember ATC working very well back in FSX and before. I’ve detailed a few small changes that should be easy to implement here on the boards. There’s lots more changes I’d like to see, but I’d like to see what they’re thinking of improvements first.

As an example of how disconnected they are from our needs, they first chose NavBlue to provide charts for 2020. That was a disaster. Now, once again, rather than go with the king in the industry Jeppesen, they’ve chosen LOWI as their source for charts. They really have no clue how important ATC and Navdata is to us across the board from bush flying to PPL to Commercial GA to Airlines.

Then again, maybe they don’t want to step on Navigraph’s toes, and that’s why they chose LOWI. I understand if that’s the case, as much as it makes me sad. I’m not interested in a Navigraph subscription, or a tool that wholesale changes the default airports (that’s a great source of creating issues).

Point being, they can’t help us if we don’t tell them exactly how to make it better, in detail!

(You’re not the first person to ask for changes without providing details of what you mean today, it’s a problem Microsoft / Asobo has to deal with across the board. Customers complaining, without explaining in detail why they’re complaining.)

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I am not a RL pilot (only a long time simmer) so my understanding may not be correct but what I personally mean by taxiways is an accurate, real life, representation of ‘paths’ from the airport terminal or current aircraft position to the runway with accurate signage so that ATC (Asobo or a 3rd party product) can direct you in a true to life way.

That is my understanding. As a RL pilot yourself though I would be interested to learn what your own understanding is :slightly_smiling_face:

Looks like we’re both in the Headmaster’s office today for not being precise :cry:

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I hope you’ve learned your lesson :straight_ruler: :wink:
I won’t call your parents this time


@CharlieFox00 is going to help me out here, I’ve got a meeting in a few minutes I have to attend, and I’ll add anything extra when he’s done :smiley:

(I work on laying out and designing huge 3D models at work and see lots of blue circle, so it gives me time to read here, lol. But sometimes I actually have to do work
)

(check out my KASH, KCON, KFIT, and KBED airports where I’ve fixed a lot of the issues for those airports in the meantime)

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The issues with taxiways are several fold:

  1. There isn’t a publicly-available dataset for the geometry and geography of taxiways (like there is for navdata and runways). The only public info available is from the airport charts in the terps. I’m fairly sure Jepp and Garmin have some geocoded data, and perhaps other vendors have access or have built their own database, but I don’t think it’s easy to get, or free. Without the data, they have to be bespoke, handcrafted, which takes a lot of time (see points 3 and 5).

  2. Most small airports don’t have full airport charts, so without those and the lack of a dataset, they’re always going to be a shot in the dark unless you have familiarity with the airport. I’ve had to look at photos and YouTube videos to figure out taxiway names, signage, etc at the majority of small airports.

  3. When crating bespoke taxiways, the conventions for taxiway naming are fairly vague. There are a lot of connectors from one taxiway to another, for instance, and there isn’t a ton of guidance as to which names they get and how it will affect the sim (especially with regard to AI behavior) - the only thing I’ve heard is “be consistent.”

  4. The original AI made a lot of mistakes in detecting taxiways, especially where they connect to ramps and parking spots (which are dreadful). Half the time spent in the world hub is unscrewing that. Signage is fairly awful - way overdone at small airports. But again, how can you blame it? There’s no database of signage and while you can usually see a sign in an aerial photo, it’s hard to know exactly what it says (back to photos and YouTube, which of course can be out of date).

  5. Taxiways are always changing, under construction, etc. Without someone manually checking and updating, you’re going to run into discrepancies.

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I was more concerned about detention after school to be honest :rofl:

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You don’t remember how it worked better? OK, let me list the ones I can remember, bearing in mind I haven’t played it for a decade.
It RARELY (not never, but still less than FS2020) flew you into mountains.
It never, in my experience, told you to ascend to 10,000 feet 4 miles away from the destination airport, which happens on a regular basis with FS2020.
When it switched between different controllers, it selected a different voice from its pool of voices most of the time.
The pool of voices was about 10, not 4.
The voice of the controller didn’t constantly default to being the same as the pilot so it sounds like you’re talking to yourself.
The approaches mostly (not always, but more often than FS2020) made more sense.
It was much better at giving out vectors.

You’re not sure what this has to do with anything? It has to do with ATC already being more capable in the past than it is now, implying that the solutions are already there, at least in part.

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Ah 
 thanks for the information.

Very interesting and it goes a long way to explaining why there are obvious shortcomings in FS20 :slightly_smiling_face:

My observation is that there was a lot of GIGO in the navdata set (including airports) when 2020 launched. The in-game ATC hallucinates based on that and the base programming can’t get rid of it (hence bringing on WT and moving to 2024). I do agree that it was better in FSX, but I also think the FSX database was much simpler and much more sanitized. 2020 just tried to do too much out of the gate, be the end-all, be-all, and it is more of a fundamental problem.

But I don’t work on the ATC side of things and I don’t use it in the sim because of how dreadful it is, so take it with a grain of salt. I’ve just seen how bad of a disconnect there was with the underlying navdata, especially with regard to the original in-sim GPS navigators. If that is what ATC used (and I expect it did), then, yeah, there’s going to be issues with the follow-on logic.

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You’re welcome! I’m glad there are good people working on the front end of it, but I suspect that without a major manual lift a la the World Hub, taxiways will continue to be problematic, especially at smaller airports where there is less info.

Maybe a third-party vendor is working on it?

But without a simming “general public” who knows the details to look for, why it’s wrong, etc, putting the right energies into solving the underlying problem is difficult. My goal is to educate on that so we can lift all our boats (planes?). As I said earlier, my expertise is the type of airports into which I fly IRL, and where all my education and certification has been, which is small to medium airports in the US. I absolutely want people elsewhere to continue advocating for their regions, using their expertise. And we all need to keep constructively hammering Asobo (with broad support from the community) with evidence, details, standards, etc, so that maybe someday it’ll be fixed.

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It sounds like this is going to involve an incredible amount of work then and community efforts via the World Hub over an extensive period of time will maybe be the best way forward as you imply.

Regarding 3rd party vendors Black Square some time ago came up with an improvement addon but unfortunately this was still a bit limited and covered only around 1000 airports in the USA. I was expecting more areas to be offered but this never happened. I suspect (don’t know) the reason for this is that it wasn’t particularly cheap and didn’t sell that well. Pilot2ATC also enables taxiways to be corrected in its own addon by the community but to correct taxiways for 1000s of airports in this way is far from feasible.

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I do, but I certainly don’t know all of the issues you may be thinking of.

And, more importantly, Asobo doesn’t necessarily. I’m always shocked when Seb and Martial are surprised by various questions, such as this. I’m also, as you can see from many of my posts, surprised by some of the decisions they make, which clearly were made in a vacuum of information.

BTW, what I meant was, what does the fact it worked “better” in FSX than it does today? 1. the fact that the current code worked better in the past doesn’t matter, in general it doesn’t work now, and it had lots of issues back then. 2. The code that’s in the system today doesn’t work, it’s old, and can only be taken so far. So figuring out what has been broken along the way is only a very partial fix, and may in turn break other things.

So, my main point is, we need to explain what we mean rather than just say “Hey, this is broken!”. “Hey, this is broken!” without an explanation of how is a useless post.

ATC needs to be rewritten altogether in my view, but, as I said, I’m not privy to all the reasons about everything
 Nor am I aware of what’s going on behind the scenes to make it better, and what’s good and bad about those ideas.

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You refer to “LOWI” charts. I think you mean “LIDO” which are produced by Lufthansa. LIDO is a competitor to Jeppesen for both charts and nav data. Many providers of nav data for real aircraft give you the option to source the databases from either Jepp or Lufthansa. The latter tends to be slightly cheaper for a one-year subscription, but the two providers are pretty much equivalent in terms of accuracy and coverage.

I actually prefer the layout (graphical appearance) of LIDO charts over Jepp, but their coverage is not quite as good worldwide.

I’m glad MS never implemented NavBlue charts. They may have improved in recent years, but at one time their charts product was grossly inferior to either Jepp or Lido.

I was very surprised when MSFS was first announced, that they had selected NavBlue as the official supplier of sim nav data over either Jeppesen or Lufthansa. Jeppesen was the official source of nav data for FSX and FS2004, so at one time MS had an established partnership with Jeppesen. The existing relationship between Jeppesen and Navigraph may have precluded from them from partnering with MS/Asobo for MSFS, but Lufthansa would have been a good alternative. NavBlue was a very poor third choice IMO.

As far as taxiway data, BlackSquare released their “Real Taxiways” product back in 2021 which corrected taxiway numbering and signage at a substantial number of US class B, C and D airports in MSFS, so that data is definitely available from somewhere. Later, they came out with a similar product for European airports.

Major custom “handcrafted” airports in MSFS were generally created from official data sources, and tend to be far more accurate to the real-world airports in terms of taxiway layouts and numbering.

Most default airport layouts in MSFS were derived from satellite photos rather than from official airport diagrams, which is why the assigned taxiways names were often completely fictitious. My own home airport in MSFS (KELM) was based on a 2014 BING satellite image. The taxiways underwent a major re-routing in 2018, but they are still wrong in MSFS. I did create a corrected version of the airport which I posted to flightsim.to quite some time ago, but hopefully it will be corrected in default MSFS 2024. We’ll see


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That wasn’t me, I think it was @FlyingsCool5650

But are LIDO charts available for smaller airports? I think that was his point, and I agreed that if they’re not, it’s no bueno.

I have that product and they’re one of the vendors I had in mind. But I’m not sure where they got that info - whether it was a database or if it was as handcrafted as anything else. I tend to think the latter, but I’d love to be proven wrong.

As far as the inaccuracy based on aerials, I’m right there with ya. I did an overhaul of KSMF in the world hub (the only “large” airport I’ve worked on) and the aerial (and subsequent taxiways, lights, etc) predated at least 2017. Either way, none of the existing taxiways were correctly designated.