Nah, this bug was all mine.
I felt that in an aircraft of this vintage, some of the bulbs behind the glareshield annunciators might be near the end of their lifespan or already burned out, resulting in variations in brightness of the annunciators. So I added an override for a file that defines the interior to add a “bulb age” factor, generated individually per variant. Since that file was no longer part of the base model, but now part of the mod, the sim applied different rules to it (I think), and culled the interior whenever the camera was more than a few meters from the model.
I didn’t notice this issue for weeks. The interior was visible when the walkaround started, and I was so focused on my work on gauges and systems that I always immediately entered the cockpit. Only after releasing the first v2024.2.x version, I stopped treating every flight as a test flight, got back to my “normal” flying (mostly sightseeing while doing FSE jobs), and only then I noticed the holes in the model.
Funny story: I was looking for the underlying issue in all the wrong places, then I decided to ask for help on the dev forum, and minutes after explaining the issue there (and claiming I didn’t override anything related to the visual model) I remembered that innocent change to the annunciators. (They call this “Rubberducking”, and it works.)
I removed the critical file from the mod, moved the bulb age to a different place and the interior was back.
I still don’t know how to get the pilot avatars to show, though.
If you notice any other regressions from the base model, please let me know. Working on X, I might break Y and Z, and never notice. If it’s not listed in the README.md as a “known issue” (and, ideally, if it’s reproducible after a sim restart), I want to hear about it. 