I trust Microsoft/Asobo will address this issue somehow, and allow aircraft and scenery to be downloaded rather than streamed. Hopefully sooner rather than later.
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From my perspective, during the era of FSX, and to P3D and X-Plane, flight simulators might not have had the stunning graphics we see today, but it was reliable and stable. Since the release of MSFS 2020, however, it seems stability has never quite reached the levels of the past, with various strange issues cropping up. Nevertheless, thanks to the incredible work of the community, the efforts of developers, and continuous platform improvements, it has eventually become a quite decent platform. However, if MSFS 2024 doesn’t even allow custom liveries for default aircraft, or set barriers for community creators just to make more money by selling liveries, that would be a huge huge step backward.
The only reason I consider buying MSFS 2024 is the upcoming iniBuilds A350. Other features (and bugs) so far haven’t offered any appeal to me.
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To be fair, when MSFS came out, very few developers had the details about how to successfully construct an aircraft. It’s true that the unencrypted default aircraft provided a lot of knowledge along with FSX and P3D developers congregating on the FSDeveloper forums to share findings. Freeware helps accelerate that process because you can build on something that already works.
But with MSFS 2024, it’s a very different situation. The SDK is much more standardized and less custom code should be required. Because of that, it is not super necessary to be able to see how someone else solved a problem. Asobo has already solved many of the standard systems and the customization is done more through parameters than custom code.
Even if Asobo unlocks the standard set of aircraft and other assets, all the existing addons still need to do some amount of work to bring them up to the new requirements. Give it some time and the future will be bright.
Edit: To be even more clear about the state of the SDK, (and I should make a larger post about it), is that nothing is really locked away from developers. If you buy the sim, you can make anything and share it same as always. For liveries, the LOD1 models are available through the dev tools.
you could use the monty python gimick regarding… “is it a African swallow or a European swallow…”
“Is that aeroflot a330 a leased one or a owned one??”
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Thanks for the update last night but the question we really want to hear an answer to still hasn’t been answered yet. Are we going to be able to download aircraft and when is that happening. As of now we still can’t download which means we rely on only streaming and third parties can’t create mods like liveries properly without making makeshift paint kits, it’s making stuff less enjoyable in the new sim. Please update us on this asap. 2100+ people have voted on these topics, many people really need this
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Oh, that’s new to me. Gotta check during the weekend… does that also apply to 3rd party planes like Carenado’s 182RG?
Owned. Just not necessarily by Aeroflot…
This needs to be done as soon as practically possible tbh. Liveries, and mods are the lifeblood of a sim like this. Until this is done, I won’t be buying any marketplace content whatsoever, when it comes up, until the same ability to mod/create liveries/download aircraft and scenery is done, it should be exactly the same as in 2020.
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I had looked at the VFS Projector only briefly earlier so here’s an update. It appears that not all simobjects are available but the standard set of planes we could access in 2020 seem to be there. I can also see some of my Marketplace purchases.
A big change that comes with the new modular simobjects is that the models are split into more pieces than before. So more work for livery designers but overall a better design.
This is the Beluga fuselage LOD1 model. I think that this is useable to build a livery. I don’t really develop liveries for other aircraft so I can’t speak to the entire process.
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No, cause i’ve seen the premium planes pop up on piracy site to download and put in community folder for people with packages that didn’t inc those planes
For me it‘s a deal braker not being able to modify planes. CFG files and liveries need to be accassible.
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Not on Xbox! 
I’ve been poking around in the SDK. I can’t figure out how to get the LOD1 models. Can you share with me how you did it?
Thanks.
To copy out the streamed files, you go into developer mode and select tools → Virtual File System. Then select VFS Projector. Start up the projector service and it will link a directory in Windows. Then you can copy files to another location and it streams the full content.
Some files are encrypted but I am seeing that many model files are not.
I find that loading the aircraft you are after into a flight, gives more details than is available without loading the aircraft.
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Hi everyone,
Some of you might recognize me from the MSFS Discord, where I’ve been working on documentation and releasing some scuffed/ limited paint kits for livery creation in MSFS 2024.
Those who wish to view this document can find it in the #liveries-discussion channel on the server.
I wanted to take a moment to address a few important points related to this forum post and address some misunderstandings I see here, specifically from the perspective of livery creators.
I want to emphasize that drawing attention to this forum thread remains important, despite the temporary but limited solutions we’ve found for livery creation. While these workarounds allow us to get started, they are far from ideal. I will elaborate on this here below.
Main Issues Currently with Livery Creation:
1. Limited Paint Kit Quality:
Currently, we can only use LOD01 models to create Blender-ready paint kits and export UV maps. This introduces minor but noticeable deviations between the livery’s appearance during creation and how it ultimately looks on LOD00 models in the simulator, especially when viewed up close.
2. Mesh Compression Errors:
Another significant issue is that certain models—seemingly at random—trigger a “mesh compression” error during import. These models fail to import entirely, making them unusable. More details about this issue can be found in my documentation.
3. Challenges with iniBuilds Aircraft:
A specific problem has emerged with iniBuilds airliners (and potentially others as I continue testing). Elements like placards (small decals such as warnings and operational info) and door trims (the gray outlines around doors) are stored separately from the base aircraft.
Additionally, these decals are bundled with 3D assets used for liveries, and I have yet to find a way to reference or fall back on the decals included with the default blank white livery for iniBuilds aircraft, and simply including them in a livery is not a solution as the LOD00 file for these decal models is also encrypted and LOD01 being low-poly collides with the mesh surface of the LOD00 fuselage under it if forced on to resulting in the decals phasing into the airframe surface on awesome areas
I’d also like to highlight some concerns regarding the MSFS 2024 SDK and how it approaches livery creation. Similar to MSFS 2020, the “official” method for creating liveries is still focused on using vector /3D decals rather than traditional stencil painting (directly painting textures), which remains the preferred method for most of us independent livery creators. https://docs.flightsimulator.com/msfs2024/html/3_Models_And_Textures/Modeling/Aircraft/Airframe/Liveries/Static_Liveries.htm
What makes this particularly interesting and problematic is that with all LOD00 models currently encrypted, using the vector decal method is not even a viable option. This technique requires access to the exact LOD00 mesh to function correctly (or you have to use extremely high tolerances)
Lastly, I’d like to address a common speculation I’ve seen mentioned here: that the encryption of aircraft models is a deliberate attempt to push users toward purchasing liveries from the marketplace. This theory seems unlikely. If that were the case, marketplace partners would have received dedicated resources for livery creation. However, they face the same limitations as independent creators. Currently, the only people with full access to the necessary data are the aircraft developers themselves and Microsoft/Asobo. This affects the entire livery-making community equally.
I apologize for this wall of text, there are a lot of things to cover, and I tried to focus on the largest issues for now. For anyone with questions do not hesitate to ask me, I’m not much of a Forums user so Discord would be preferred, either via DMs or via the MSFS server.
My username is:drunkpupper25
Don’t send me a friend request tho, I have open DMs so you can msg me as long as you are in the MSFS server and your account isn’t set to friends only.
Cheers
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Today I saw some liveries, like KLM and some others for A330. I did install livery for Aeroflot, Delta, Air France and Lufthansa, but others as far as I can remember were not available as default?
Can anyone remember did we have any other livery beside Airbus and white?
In spite of the overwhelming amount of add on liveries available for 2020 aircraft, Asobo have provided absolutely no help getting any of them working in 2024. The SDK is designed for people building aircraft, not stand-alone liveries. They won’t even respond to livery questions about 2024 aircraft on the MSFS development forum.
The good news is that liveries for 2020 legacy aircraft are relatively easy to convert. But for liveries for default aircraft converted to the 2024 format, the news is mostly bad.
The problem is that a consistent approach to converting liveries across for 2024 native aircraft doesn’t work. I have tried to move liveries across for the following default aircraft:-
- Aero L39 - Total success. Livery textures used and fully operational in 2024.
- DA40 tDi - Fail - livery textures weren’t used and ended up with a plain white fuselage
- Longitude - Fail - livery textures weren’t used and ended up with a plain white fuselage
- 787 - Fail - livery textures weren’t used and ended up with a plain white fuselage
- TBM930 - Fail - livery textures weren’t used and ended up with a plain white fuselage
- DA62 - Partial success - Livery successfully used textures, but as UV maps have changed (for no obvious benefit) all existing DA62 liveries will be unusable in 2024.
So I used the same process on the L39 and DA62 (the 2 that did recognise my textures) as I did on the 3 that failed and didn’t recognise my textures. But since there is no guide of any sort, and no default stand-alone liveries that actually work to look at, I am just stumbling around in the dark.
How can Asobo/Microsoft stand there and say they are listening to the community when such a large chunk of it has been ignored, and continues to be ignored.
It is also clear that many of the additional liveries designed for their own aircraft haven’t been set up correctly and don’t work. So even their own people don’t understand the process. While these liveries use the new KTX2 textures, they exist in the old 2020 layout. As result they simply don’t appear in 2024 in spite of being streamed into 2024. You can see them using the VFS tool in development mode. Here are just a few examples.
And here is a comment from the SDK on textures generally for 2024 native aircraft. In my experience this just isn’t true.
Texture folders are an integral part of the creation of many add-on packages for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024. They’re required for aircraft, ground vehicles, animals, and other things. At the most basic, textures for SimObjects and Scenery don’t really need much setting up other than to have a “textures” folder in the same directory as the
sim.cfgfile, and the engine will detect this folder automatically.
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Look on the Bright side, (The glass 1/2 full).
At least MS/Asobo did not encrypt the SDK Documentation !!
But I would consider that a lot of the pre-release Promotional information about MSFS 2024 was effectively “Encrypted” to hide some basic truths about the product.
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Voted and commenting to help with visibility! This is unacceptable! If we have to wait for microsoft to put out liveries instead of making them ourselves, then that means there are 1000’s of liveries that will NEVER see the light of day! I have several I have made for FS2020 and would love to convert over for FS2024 aircraft.
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I’m a 3rd party livery maker. It is pretty much impossible now for me to make liveries for this sims “Official” aircraft.
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