This is the current state of MSFS 2024 (SU2) from the perspective of someone trying to fly gliders in multiplayer:
The LS8 & DG1001 have broken instruments (vario indicates lift when pulling the stick) and lack crucial functionality, making them basically unusable to anyone knowing just a little bit about gliding.
There hasn’t been any improvements to the weather/atmospheric/updraft simulation, despite many bug reports going back to 2020. Unlike real life, thermals only exist under very dense and tall clouds. Ridge lift reaches 20.000 ft above the terrain and is automatically reduced by 50% below 1000 ft AGL. All of which is very unrealistic. We have to create very specific weather presets that work around those issues.
In 2024 the clouds are positioned differently everytime you load up the sim with one of those presets, and different to every player loading into a multiplayer group flight using the same preset, making it pointless to even attempt a thermal flight with other pilots. This is a regression from 2020 where it was possible to sync the clouds by pressing fly at the same time.
The EFB is still unable to load a flight plan from disk without dropping half the waypoints.
The stock tow planes are unable to provide a tow on many glider airfields.
(New in SU2) The sim consistently crashes when players spawn on the runway simultaneously during a group flight.
(New in SU2) The sim constantly freezes for multiple seconds when flying close to a bigger group of pilots.
It’s honestly quite disheartening seeing the direction the sim is heading in, and the lack of attention gliders have been receiving doesn’t fill me with hope.
I want to like MSFS (2024), but the sim is doing everything it can to achieve the opposite every step of the way.
All this while Jorg is on record saying they have been listening to the feedback of glider pilots very carefully and that they aim to become the industry-leading platform for gliding simulation.
Years later we are still waiting for even the slightest improvements.
The only thing making me come back is the tight-knit gliding community, putting in a lot of effort to create a worthwhile experience with custom mods and apps.
I welcome their decision to involve experts from the community (GotFriends and B21) to work on the new gliders for 2024, which turned out great.
But unfortunately their excellent work was let down by the many bugs and issues of the core simulation.
Although we’ve managed to work around most issues, 2024 has thrown new problems at us, that can’t be solved with mods. Namely the random cloud positions with weather presets and the multiplayer crashes and freezes.
Do you mean random between players? Random placement may be a “seed” issue, which is most likely different between players as the different sims can’t communicate with each other. Maybe if everyone had that same seed the procedural generation of clouds between clients would be the same?
The most fun in sim soaring is multiplayer and we have a very active 2000+ member group Sim Soaring Club
Yesterday’s ‘Wednesday night’ flight was a 385km blitz around Taiwan and we had over 20 pilots rock up for the meet. We all load the same weather, yesterday’s had good thermals and a 15knot wind blowing from the SE which provided lift on most of the mountain slopes on track, load the same ‘task’ (i.e. PLN flightplan) and load into the sim at the same time and fly a coordinated start. From then on it’s a heady race in fairly close proximity all the way around the assigned course.
Here’s the killer. although we’ve ensured we have great gliders, soaring weather & tow planes in MSFS 2024:
We flew that task yesterday in MSFS 2020.
Note we ALL bought MSFS2024 pretty much as soon as it came out - MS got our revenue but we had no idea they had made naive but catastrophic errors moving from 2020 to 2024. We thought we were going to get MSFS 2020 with better graphics (great!) and career mode (meh).
Overwhelmingly the worst new feature introduced in MSFS 2024 is every player gets randomised clouds - the rising air is under the clouds so as a soaring simulation MSFS 2024 has a colossal fundamental flaw. Please UPVOTE the bug report as given in the Sim Soaring Club post a couple up from this one.
The inability to load a PLN file in MSFS 2024 absolutely kills our ability to share a common task among multiple players (sure, there are plenty of buttons in the EFB, but they don’t work). It is not possible to have a 300km+ multiplayer soaring task with players just looking at the task sketched on a piece of paper. We have some workarounds to shoehorn our ‘PLN’ flightplan tasks into the glider nav instruments from outside the sim, but this is a serious pain, and pilots have to be warned NOT to enter the EFB which will mess up a task even if it’s already loaded.
So in summary, 1. & 2. above are just unexpected regressions from Asobo/Working Title moving from MSFS2020 to MSFS2024 which have had a catastrophic effect on multiplayer gliding.
The other points from the OP particularly affect the stability of MSFS 2024, which in the main affects everybody. Worryingly the major stability issue we now have if multiple players spawn into the same airport seems to be NEW as of SU2. We sometimes develop workarounds, like for this we’ve started spawning at random distances a long way away from the start airfield and SLEWING over to where the task is going to start, but that is yet another painful workaround.
It has been 5 days since this topic has been posted, and as of today there has not been one response from anyone at Asobo/Working Title. Not one!
I am a member of the SSC group and it’s key members have put in huge amounts of work into making 2024 work for glider pilots. We are just one group that are trying so hard to fly gliders in MSFS 2024.
It really is now up to you, Asobo/Working Title, to make things right for our committee’s and fix all of the serious issues mentioned above.
Still nothing 2 months? Sad to see.. i really loved gliding in 2020 .. but in 2024 its not that much fun.. as the problems desribed above.. also the LOD problems with far away stuff in polygon looking (see other thread) .. 24 killed the fun for me in gliding..great work by SCC btw!
So I went up in a glider for the first time on Saturday, loved every moment of it. Had controls for about 40 minutes and was allowed to try turning and climbing on thermals.
One of the first things I was told about (and experienced) was adverse yaw (which I was not at all prepared for by slim flying!), and this was very fun to deal with.
Anyway, I got home and the first thing I did was boot up MSFS2024 to see how the gliders handle, and whether I could practice what I’d just learned… only for there to be no adverse yaw whatsoever.
Like literally I could just bank the stick and pull all sorts of turns easy-peasy without even touching my rudder.
I had no idea that the gliding in the sim was just so flat-out unrealistic? Is this a poor flight model in play or am I just not understanding something?
At ninety dollars for Condor 3, just add a few more bucks and get an hour of actual duel instruction in a real life sail plane. You’ll get way more out of it in the long run.
Is there any plan to fix the lack of thermals of 2024. I play around with the cloud settings a lot and get no rise in any glider. 2020 was much more predictable for actually expecting thermals.
2024 Sim Update 4 (Beta) has fixed a bunch of things, crucially including giving multiplayer clouds in the same places to everyone on spawn in (as it was with 2020). That’s enough for us to pivot our very popular multiplayer cross-country soaring from MSFS2020 to MSFS2024, and take advantage of that gorgeous scenery.
It all came together in our most recent multiplayer flight from Gap Tallard in France, with ~40 players online flying the same task. FYI the map view of some of the start looked like this:
I just ran across that video the other day while browsing YouTube. Definitely makes me want to give gliders a shot! Mostly fly GA and haven’t done much at all with gliders. I think it would be a hoot in VR (I am a simmer 20+ years now and about a month into my VR journey)!
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