Even if they unencrypt standard aircraft (as they should), it won’t affect Marketplace-purchased planes. Those will always be encrypted because thieves.
The downloadability of default aircraft and making streaming optional are what I care about. To me those two are integrally related and therefore not buying from Marketplace until I know I can have my purchases available offline.
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I totally agree, in fact I was just watching a streamer and he polled “What Simulator Are You Currently Using” - Many people will not come over to MSFS2024 because it’s basically ’locked’ as in EVERYTHING apart from 3rd party Aircraft and Scenery. It’s been over 6 months since release…
What are you looking to do that you can’t currently?
Standard version aircraft are already unencrypted. You can use VFS in the Developer tools to view all the files of Standard aircraft: https://www.avsim.com/forums/topic/665354-how-to-view-the-config-files-of-default-planes-in-msfs-2024/
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While you can access nearly all aircraft in the virtual viewer once everything is enabled in developer mode. It’s not entirely accurate that it’s fully unencrypted. Since not all the files are available for viewing and/or editing/downloading to your PC to mess around with. Even the files you can access, like liveries for example, are in Asobo’s proprietary texture format and you need 3rd party software to even view them. So sure you can view and edit some parts of these aircraft, but not all of them are either complete or available to modify. And again, some files that are, are in proprietary formats you can’t open them unless you go and download external 3rd party software.
The SDK software is also pretty behind as well. It has a subpar model tools for an old version of Blender requires 3.9 I believe it is, while the newest version of Blender is well into 4+ at this time and isn’t compatible at all in the new versions. And no tools for easy texture viewing/editing either. If you’ve got 3DS Max you’re probably fine. But if you’re trying to do anything freeware friendly it’s still a long ways off from being as user friendly as any of the past simulators were.
I suspect many would just like access to the CFG files so they fix flight model issues, and the like.
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I agree. A lot of the unrealistic parameters some of the aircraft in the sim have can likely easily be fixed by members in the community instead of having to wait 6+ months after issues for flight modeling have been expressed, proven, and continually reported. I look at aircraft like the CL-415 for example that’s been struggling to perform it’s real life scooping missions because it only has about 40% of it’s actual climb power and causes engine failures repeatedly as a result. Stuff like that.
The other part I’m sure is people that want to do liveries for the aircraft. The way it’s set up currently, it’s a nightmare compared to how easy it used to be. Hoping it’s streamlined and cleaned up considerably.
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No clue if it’s mentioned in the patchnotes, but you can now download planes, scenery, traffic on the su3 beta. That being said premium deluxe planes are still not unencrypted at all (I opened the files for the pc24 and the .cfg files where straight up mission lol)
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Even atleast some base planes are not unencrypted. But ok.. one battle at a time..
for the pc24 you can do liveries already however on the longitude still no options to do liveries
So we can download any addons we want at beta now? No need to download planes, airports etc? Omfgg awesome news!! I was stucking at 10fps sometimes while scene, airport, aircraft downloading (i checked not a vram issue, it was not even near full) I hope this solves it all!
well , unless Asobo communicates or someone finds a way to do the liveries for longitude and other planes , most of us will still use 2020
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Does this now mean its possible for developers to remove the satcomm on the 737 max?
It’s good that the packages can be downloaded now, but the jets I fly are still pretty much encrypted. We still need the unencrypted version of those aircraft so our fight is not over yet.
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The new feature is not actually downloading the entire content, some config files are not downloaded, for example I still had to use the VFSProjection to fetch some livery cfg files, you can check that by using VFSProjection tool.
I reckon this will take at least some time if at all due to career mode shenanigans. Even if I don’t consider the theft prevention angle, they may be using it as a tamper prevention mechanism as well for the career mode.
So if they unlock everything for the user to see (which is currenly somewhat possible with the VFSProjection) and more importantly change those willy nilly, they will need a mechanism in place which can detect these and may be revert to streamed content for career mode. But there may be many technical challenges in doing this depending on how the internals are architected.
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This is what I’ve been pointing out for several months now. People say, “Oh all the aircraft are unencrypted.” Which is NOT the case at all. All aircraft in the sim you can view and have files you can view/download. HOWEVER not all files are complete and not all aircraft have the completed number of files for viewing/downloading/editing.
Not sure if someone in beta for SU 3 can say it’s changed in the last few months, but from how it sounds. They still haven’t changed much if anything in that department.
Once that’s dealt with so we have full access to aircraft files, liveries, etc. The community will be a lot happier. The MS/Asobo proprietary texture files they use now for 2024 is the other headache to get past for livery makers. For people trying to mod/fix aircraft performance, models and such, it looks like we’re still out of luck there.
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I am personally looking for the camera.cfg, but there are more files that we need access to.
I tested the download of two planes over the weekend, in the new SU3 beta.
First I tested a Marketplace plane, knowing its encrypted, and chose the Carenado Cessna 182Q. As expected, the package downloaded had two ‘.fsarchive’ files, and a single ‘systems.cfg’ file.
I then tried a plane from the Standard version of the game, this time the first party Cessna 208. When this was downloaded, and installed it looked exactly the same. I couldn’t see any of the other .cfg files, only ‘systems.cfg’, and three of the ‘.fsarchive’ files.
I thought standard planes were supposed to be unencrypted now?
Again, this is what I’ve been trying to explain to people in here since I found this out as well. They aren’t. We have access to all the aircraft and only a small portion of unencrypted files, but not all of them. All the aircraft you can view and some you can edit. But again, it’s not full unencryption at all. LIke you even point out, that’s how a lot of the aircraft are. They don’t have all the files available to view/edit or the files that are there, aren’t completed. Some aircraft.cfg files as an example only have 10 lines of coding in them, etc.
So at best, one can say sure, files we have are fully unencrypted. BUT, not all the files are there to even download or edit. And the ones that are, aren’t fully complete. So really, this statement is only partially true. We might have maybe 40-50% of files? Roughly? Plus or minus.