I despair. I really do.
Having read the hype, digested the showcase demo, paid my cutter and effortlessly installed the 2024 simulation, I already knew I might be taking a gamble in attempting to run FS2024 on a 30mbs cellular Wi-Fi hotspot but, impressively, without fuss or drama, I was soon aloft and experiencing the spectacular vistas and landscapes of my beloved Lyme bay coast and West Dorset scenery as it unfurled before me.
And I was impressed.
My first task was to fly along the UK coast between West Bay, (Bridport harbour), and Seatown before turning around and landing atop Thorncombe Beacon where I expected to jump out, look eastwards and be rewarded with an iconic view of Chesil Beach running in an arc for 17 miles along the coast till it was punctuated by the isle of Portland jutting out into the English channel at its far end.
And yes, FS2024 would have delivered exactly that expectation had I not noticed the … I mean, what are those things I see right at the end of the twin piers of Bridport harbour’s marina entrance?
Are they cranes? Are they diggers or excavators?
(Pause)
I look closer … and my heart sinks because … at the very end of both piers, in utter dismay, I note that MS2024 has placed a couple of large oak like trees growing up through the concrete.
Thus … instead of seeing a welcome, familiar and entirely believable landscape, the spell is broken and the so called digital twin of my real world collapses like a quantum wave function except, as the observer, I am not delivered my own bespoken authentic version of reality but, instead, delivered a fake, unbelievable and unreal vision of my world.
And then I notice the golf course above the cliffs at East beach. Now a golf course festooned with hundreds of alien fir trees or similar.
And this disappointment repeats when I ‘virtually’ visit several of the Iron Age hill forts and Anglo-Romano villa sites that are an intimate components of my fascination with West Dorset’s unique and treasured ancient heritage because, instead of being able to document and share my knowledge of these remarkable sites by using FS2024 as a fabulous tool to record such visits, (via OBS Studio or similar), to my chagrin and vexation, in the Microsoft flight simulator world, phantom simulated trees now grow and inhabit the man made flint and soil of the ramparts, ditches and dykes of these ancient citadels and their branches and limbs entirely block the line of sight that normally, in real life, allows an observer to view other iron age hill forts nearby or on the horizon.
This has been a tremendous blow to my vision of using MSFS2024 to aid me in contributing useful visual content to supplement my 3d photography, 3d drone footage and general drone and camera photography and videography.
So … just like MSFS2020, this latest embodiment of the MS franchise superficially appeals to a “gaming style” mentality where the graphics appear realistic to an untrained eye but, I have to ask, is the flight sim’s environment really an accurate ‘digital twin’ of the real world?
Answer. NO. Certainly not.
Especially if a phantom tree can infect the digital twin and, like a virus or a browser hijacker, just steal the scene or break the magical bubble of immersion by negatively controlling the user experience.
Is there a solution to this massive, unhelpful and unwelcome flaw? Or must we … should we … regard the product as little more than a game rather than an accurate flight simulator, specially as Asobo has removed the “SAVE” function?
And yes. I have ‘turned down’ the tree, (and related), settings to ‘Low’ but, unless you have a tip, a tweak or knowledge of some hack or third party solution to this issue, I’m resigned to the fact that I may have to seek out some graphical A.I based solution to edit out or erase these unwelcome objects.
