started career in Australia. Interminable intros leading to familiarisation flight with instructor. Jerky, lots of dialogue boxes, felt like a Switch game. No CTD yet, but have to try the PPL exam. For once and only time actually found myself wishing for a CTD to get out of the storyline.
after restart. CJ4 egjj-EGGP. Live traffic. Preset weather (slight clouds), 32 GB RC, PG off (I gave up on PG in 2020) FL310 - according to the miserable ATC , “EFF Ell” rather than “flight level”. Never heard that before from a controller followed by my FO changing destination to EGGP 12 times….
Flight all OK LOD went a bit blurry around TOD as did the instruments - but recovered quickly, Snags - had the blue fligh path ribbon even though it 2as turned off. Couldnt get rid of the pesky thing. Terrain appearance about equivalent to 2020, perhaps not as good in a couple of areas during descent - say 8000ft. Looked very good turning finals on to ILS - Big refinery chimney acting like a cloud factory … this was one of those “wow” moments. Excellent approach felt very real… slowed up and stuttered a bit on landing and roll out - too many static and moving sircradt ( try traffic off next time?) perhaps. Taxied in and shut down, Another flight with no CTD.
I can’t even play atm. i went for 2 flights so far… (Xbox) Freezing once i got to 15,000… restarted game and icons are missing, everything is blury and flashing… Restarted AGAIN… everything looks fine for the first 5 mins then icons and backgrounds are blank… seems much worst then ever…
Xbox series X
I tried flying again yesterday. My results:
Career - medium cargo with Cessna 208.
The longer the flight the more chance of CTD. Usually in outside view and over territory with photogrammetry for sure.
What has worked relatively reliably:
Turn off photogrammetry, restart sim.
Career - medium cargo, skip all phases. Mission successfully completed. Duration about 15 -20 minutes.
If I attempt another similar flight without restarting sim, CTD or freeze follows during flight. Extreme freezing right after shutting down engines see printscreen.
I tried a firefighting mission once. Almost managed to complete it, but on the last flight the engine failed, crashed and I spawned on coordinates 0.0N 0.0W in the Gulf of Guinea.
Generally, shorter flights without photogrammetry work OK. Any longer flight, or the following flights without a restart end sooner or later with a CTD or freeze up.
Frozen screen at the end of the mission, I had to restart the SIM
I think these are two things we can do in the current beta release. Will be interesting to see if future releases make these two things unnecessary, but we are not on that release yet. Until then, I will leave PG off and restart both 24 and the Series X between each and every flight. BTW this is a strategy developed by many other Xbox pilots of 2020. We only got the ability to do multiple flights without restart last year after SU15 released, and that runs on DX11 whereas 24 runs on DX12, so no end in sight right now. BTW I resisted turning PG off until recently.
Fortunately, the sim’s beta reboot is significantly faster on Xbox than the 2020 version and the current production version of 2024 too.
Let’s hope it stays that way.
The difference in launch speed vs 2020 is really big.
I am playing MSFS24 with an Xbox Series S. I’d like to share with you all my experience so far.
For starters, I’m using a Thrustmaster T-Flight HOTAS One MSFS Edition.
Until the beta testing came out, I reckon there isn’t much to be said, because we all know how unstable the game was.
With the 1.13.10.0 version there was no doubt a huge amount of improvement in the game.
The sudden freezes in mid-flight, the constant freezes when arriving to an airport, the avionics screens not turning on… thankfully it’ll got fixed fairly quick.
The screens now barely fail, being turned on every single time I run my checklists and start my aircraft.
Some of the problems I consider of extreme urgency to be fixed/worked on would be:
The NAV system is not following the routes in some planes such the Cessna 172 and the Pilatus DC-12 NGX.
The scenarios sometimes make the Xbox freeze due to graphics processing.
Let us not forget that the Xbox Series X has 12 teraflops to work graphics and game engines around, but the Xbox Series S (the one I own) has only 3 teraflops which makes it much harder to process such an impressive amount of data and world graphics. This instantly made think Microsoft would work on an optimized version for Xbox Series X|S.
The SIM Rate option works very good in the first three levels of speed. When you press your shortcut to apply the next SIM Rate speed, it jumps every 30/40 frames forward. I also believe there should be a fix/work arounf for when the pilots are using the SIM Rate and an ATC transmission comes in. We could lose it and affect our grade when the flight ends. With such an option that could be quickly and easily prevented from happening. E.g: SIM Rate active > (if) ATC Comm’s received > SIM Rate “auto shutdown”
Some buttons in the cockpit won’t show as being ON even when you turn them on. Although the button became ON, the text still shows as the if the button OFF.
Because I use a flight stick and a mouse to interact with instruments in cockpit, sometimes I feel in the will of not skipping the part where we take off the engine cover, etc. It’s the only part of my missions I skip. Otherwise from those I complete every mission to its very end. I have my xbox controller plugged in only for those situations when I walk outside my aircraft. When I look around with the controller the game delays a bit making it difficult to point the white towards where you wish to.
In some Career missions with Boeing airplanes if you skip to go fly you will FAIL the mission bacause “You left parking without fisnishing procedures”. If you don’t skip it you incur the risk of getting stuck at some point between passenger boarding and pushback request.
Some missions are still producing an error because of Altitude Violations: Soons as you lift of from track, the red box in the top center screen shows up saying “Altitude Violation” or even sometimes “Speed violation”. I thought right away I’d be doing something wrong. But I wasn’t. With the right speeds and climb rates there’s no way I was wrong, and so I was able to confirm it is the game producing the violation because of some background processing conflict.
Last but least, this one has the same weight of both importance and frustration in it:
Have you ever flew a mission of 3 hours (real time) straight to arrive the final passage points and suddenly crash, freeze, crash, xbox main screen… This one is killing every now and then.
To finish, with the last update the game became far more stabble than ever before.
With a few more fixes it’ll become as stabble as the 2020 version. The main aspects to keep an eye on, at least for Xbox users, should really be the graphics stability OR work on an optimized version of the game**.
Thank you for your time reading my review. Cheers.
Visual regression is pretty bad and still there - blurry areas on the ground, large patches of blurry textures amidst sharp, detailed textures. Detail on the POIs and photogrammetry section below the plane loading in late or loading in “tiles” and “blocks”, especially as you pan the camera around. Draw distances are still poor.
Live weather either goes off on its own or doesn’t want to stay on. I have to manually turn it on every time I launch the game, and also between flights, find myself doing the same, annoyingly.
Performance is all over the place - if you fly over a photogrammetry citiy with a fair amount of live weather effects, live AI traffic, and busy bespoke airports nearby, the frames hiccup uncontrollably, often causing a series of half-second screen pauses which lasts several seconds or, sometimes, up to almost a minute. This is mostly with airliners or complex third party planes, such as the fighter jets, especially as you fly faster and lower.
CTDs are rampant! Almost every session, it just locks up in mid flight, and a few seconds later, I’m back on the dashboard.
Graphics do not want to load up on time as they are coming up, particularly when I’m flying low and fast, or even high and fast. I’ve ran experiments using an under 80mbps connection, 100+, 200+ and 500+ mbps - same results, pretty much. Textures do not load up on time and every time I pan the camera around, graphics start popping into view. A good example of this is actually the area surrounding the Grand Canyon and the Grand Canyon valleys themselves; I’d go from sharp detailed textures to suddenly a large blurry blob of wax underneath my plane, and I have to either pause the game for a few seconds or really slow down and keep circling the area until the textures pop in several seconds later.
This is kind of unacceptable I think, the servers really need to be improved in this aspect and we should start to see options to save aircraft and especially individual cities or countries onto our SSD. MSFS '20 looks nearly flawless right now compared to 2024, draw distances are good and everything is detailed, already loaded in when you cover distance on the map (a few exceptions, of course, such as London and Paris).
Just wanted to share my findings after re-enrolling into the beta. The public build is better, honestly, because graphically it’s the same more or less, and it’s super stable, you actually have to try really hard to CTD it, lol.
Since we didn’t get a new beta release for the weekend, and the current unstable release on Xbox has been out for a week now, it may make sense for folks who want to enjoy the weekend to return to the public version which is a little less glorious and far more stable? Reward yourself with some fun flying and wait to see what is offered next, either as beta or release candidate. That’s what I did a week ago after seeing 1.3.10.0 is a no-go on Xbox. Good flying this weekend!
I am still on beta but thinking about to leave it. On Xbox it is and was literally unplayable CTDs all the time. As I just blogged you get even CTDs when you pause/break the game on ground so not moving. I suspect an error on server connection side. What L dont understand is why this can’t be fixed quickly.
I hope as well but not sure this asobo guys seem not to understand our feedbacks. How can we test something on Xbox which is continuously ending in CTDs. I am patient but these guys seem still not to understand how serious the situation is
On the dev blog they stated that the beta was more or less frozen and they were prepping it for general release. I certainly hope it doesn’t come out like this. I can’t even complete a free flight longer than an hour without a CTD.
The release candidate is not necessarily the most recent beta release. They can look across the public release and both beta versions to determine what goes into the release candidate. Wondering if we will get to flight the RC, maybe Tuesday, or if they have what they need for a public release. With SU2 said to be ready to flight, they might end SU1 beta early and move on?
It’s everyone’s choice to join the beta or not. If the first launch of SU2 beta is better than what we have now, and fixes crashes, then what does anyone have to lose by joining? It’s their loss if they don’t join and give it a try.
Yeah I thought that’s what I heard. Hopefully it will happen before then and we can move on to SU3.
