So? This has been and always will be one of the main differences between the console and PC experience.
If you want to be able to tweak, mod or otherwise dig into the technical side of games, you will need a PC. If you don’t want the bother of having to constantly mess with stuff, get a console. Better yet, use both 
So your solution of closing the platform by encrypting the content (unfortunately the first time this has happened in the 40-year history of Flight Simulator) to force Asobo and MS to comply with what they had announced, preventing the community from solving it, it’s a very ‘strange’ reason to justify the encryption.
Are you trying to defend the rigths and interests of the community by taking away its most powerful tool, which is the ability to modify the simulator at will? Sorry, but I think It’s a rather odd way to solve things.
As others have eloquently point out, this logic is contrary to what has made the flight sim community a community. Take the WBSim 172, the JPL 152- it is highly doubtful if MS or Asobo would ever develop such a basic aircraft to the fidelity these modders have. As for mods not being available for XBox users, well as pointed out, that has been an MS choice on what they allow to be on the market place as well as a limitation of choosing the platform.
I can understand why many might choose to use a console, but that choice comes with limitations especially when it comes to customization of not only the content, but the environment itself. Xbox is a great gaming console, but will never be as customizable or moddable as a PC.
By the way, even with all downloaded you will still need to be “always online”
And that is a really bad thing if you can’t always have access to internet. On 2020 you still can fly without real weather and photogrametry.
On 2024 NOTHING. The game becomes useless.
Wow, this is amazing. We need some sort of tutorial for this, with a better name. Something like “How to decrypt MSFS 2024” files.
All in all one doesn’t need to do much:
It is the responsibility of Microsoft to fix all issues. Yet there are tons of reason why modding should be allowed.
All in all the only reason that modding is not allowed and everything is encrypted is greed. By locking everything Microsoft attempts to earn more money by selling all the stuff people could get for free when modding exists.
What do you expect from them? That they tell you that?
It’s so easy to proof me wrong here. Just enable modding 
As a modder myself and a livery creator, the ability to repaint aircraft at a bare minimum should be allowed by all users to create their own liveries, as it has been for all the other Microsoft based sims. Or at least give us the paintkits for those aircraft so we can create skins of our own for them. Without the ability to look at and/or modify stock aircraft files undercuts a HUGE part of what makes up the community on this sim. Whether it’s the freeware or payware developers. Some have already touched on the importance of having those files open for modification and/or viewing. If you aren’t going to let us modify aircraft, that’s a huge problem. Not allowing us to modify or create our own textures also presents another huge problem.
My thinking on this topic is that if at least Aircraft were downloadable then it would have the benefit to users of the game loading quicker.
The upside to MS would be that the servers would have less overload at busy times. So I can’t see a downside to anybody here.
After the initial download all that would be required is the checking for and downloading of of any updates to the aircraft.
I know this doesn’t address the concerns directly that people who wish to apply mods have but once the decision is made to make them downloadable is made you are more likely to get your wish of unencrypted data.
I can’t see Asobo altering the situation UNLESS there is a direct benefit to them.
Possibly, but the two don’t necessarily go hand in hand. MP content in 2020 is downloadable, and still encrypted. But it would perhaps be a necessary first step, unless they stream them unencrypted, and really I don’t think that should even be an issue. Who is going to try to steal a default tier plane?!
Or right, I was forgetting. They don’t want people “cheating” in the career mode. Who knew that thing was going to cause this much damage to a flight simulator. As always, if you can’t think of a good reason why a company did something dumb, look to the money. Until I see evidence to the contrary they are going to try to monetise this thing to the hilt via the marketplace, once it comes online. If it were to remain cosmetics for your avatar I would be fine with that, but I suspect they will go further, but only time will tell.
That would be all well and good except the VFS doesn’t work anything close to how it should. It’s only the base portion of aircraft that are unencrypted, accessing more than a few files regularly crashes either VFS, the sim, or even the whole computer, and I’ve had a few that refused to download at all. That’s on top of the lack of a Quick Reload button anymore. They took something that was working great previously and solidly broke it.
Totally the opposite for me. If it was bare minimum only it would be the ability to mod the aircraft every time. A mod can fix or improve many aspects. It is fundamental to a properly working aircraft where as a livery is just some outside view only eye candy. The ability to mod therefore has to be the number one requirement.
I think both are #1 requirements. As a non-pilot, I have no clue how the aircraft should feel when I fly it, so I leave the flightmodel-tweaking to others. However, I more or less grew up on an airfield and I know what I would want my planes to look like, so I’m more in the field of livery creation.
Sure we’d certainly like both but the point was about if you had to choose just one. The modding is not just flight model it’s anything. Non functional switches. Systems enhancement, re-texturing, etc, etc
To be fair, at my flight school we all refer to MSFS as “Microsoft Flight Game.” lol
Since Update 3 (10 december patch) is already possible make mod on default aircraft via VFS Projector …
Still no option for us to download the default aircraft to our hard drive.
You can copie all aircraft files for modding via VFSProjector … i can access all files available via streaming
Yeah i’ve been able to use VFSProjector to copy out files that are unencrypted and modify them with a mod in the community folder successfully. However, I haven’t figured out how to get quick reload to work so that I can make a change to the mod and apply that change to the sim without restarting the sim.
I posted in the dev forums for help but haven’t gotten anything useful. I played around with creating an aircraft project and naming it in such a way as to override the aircraft I was modding, but couldn’t get it to work, and couldn’t find documentation for it. So I had to spend a ton of time waiting for sim restarts when developing the mod, and probably won’t do much modding until a solution becomes available or documented. Please let me know if you’ve found anything useful for quick reload in 2024 when modding another aircraft.
It’s actually much easier to mod the 2024 modular aircraft than before. The first thing to do is create a new aircraft project. This gives you access to the editors and packagebuilder which is the proper way to create the package instead of overwriting existing simobjects.
Let’s say you want to tweak some engine settings or flight model. You would create a modular simobject airplane with the same name as the original. But inside the packageSources, you only need to add a preset. That preset will have an engines.cfg or flight_model.cfg file which only contains only the lines you want to change. These changes will get merged with the common config files.
To make it a viable variation, it also needs an aircraft.cfg but again with only the lines you need to customize. Then copy the attached_objects.cfg from the original aircraft which will attach all the models and behaviors to your variation.
This method also allows adding models to the aircraft through the attachment system. There is more detail to it but all of that is explained in the documentation.
Another advantage of this method is that there is much less chance different mods will cause problems with each other because your mod is registered as it’s own unique variation.
This also allows you to reload using the simobject editor which is not quite as quick as before but much quicker than restarting the sim. Feel free to contact me for questions.
Yeah. I also want to play the game offline.
