I feel this is a step behind. No one can mod any of the aircraft in 2024. I know they want to protect the Career Mode but this is really nerfing what made MSFS 2020 great. How much the modding community improved on it. I hope this is an temporary thing and that people can go back to mod their aircraft like we were able too before.
I assume if this was for career mode protection theyād simply stream server-side configs?
Asobo / MS ā whatās the forecast for this? Can we get access to configs via the VFS or via Marketplace Installs sometime soon?
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Absolutely agreed. With over 150 mods to most aircraft worth flying in FS2020, a plane that needs no tweaking at all is a very rare thing. From the few FS24 planes Iāve flown, they are far from that.
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I really doubt that its about protecting the career mode. Making piracy more difficult seems like their goal with this.
Priracy for sure is a piece of the puzzle, but a huge problem was/is issues with modded default ac and how these modded ac interact with the core sim. A myriad of problems. Wasted hours trying to find the causes, customer frustration, faulty bug reports, etc.
That said, some default ac need a little closer and quicker attention when issues are found. But that is a different topic.
The encryption utterly failed to prevent that in the last version.
Why would they want to protect the career mode? Itās a non-competitive single player game. Makes no sense.
The essence of flight simming is modding.
BTW the ācareerā is meh. Having close to nothing in common with how real aviation works. Zero flight planning and decision making, just following the magical blue rectangles drawn in the sky.
The missions are totally scripted, takes mosty of the fun away for me. Iām not a robot, I want to plan the flight and make decisions, not be a neuron powered autopilot.
Cringy dialogs written for a 5 year oldā¦ Way to easy certifications, a traffic pattern for PPL, really? What about dead reconning navigation, simulated engine failures, stall recovery, deep turns, flying through controlled airspace, etcā¦
Plus funny issues like forcing me to fly through restricted airspace (blue rectangles) and then punishing me for it 
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Thats the funny part! Crackers are seemingly always a step ahead.
Game companies nowadays will ruin the experience of people buying their games with things like denuvo (makes games unstable) or requiring constant connection to the internet even for single player games and their games will still be cracked a few weeks after release at the latest. LOL!
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You will own nothing and you wonāt be happy.
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Agreed, and additionally Iām afraid this will also stifle payware development down the line. Browsing through core files for examples of working code or parameter configuration is how people learned, to eventually make their own products. Well, now they wonāt
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Asobo wish to support MSFS customers effectively and the way they can do that is to provide basic aircraft and experiences that they control the narrative of. I get it - money, customer service etc. Thatāll be why they bought a lot of the independent studios and brought them onboard.
I donāt believe MSFS or Asobo actually care that much about third party developers any more and theyāre very much second fiddle to the core offering.
But what a big F you to the development community that has made this franchise what it is.
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There is a difference between encrypted aircraft, and aircraft files not being easily accessable due to the streaming:
- Encrypted aircraft can not be modified by users at all.
- But it is possible to get access to non-encrypted aircraft by using a new developer function called āVFS Projectorā. With this function you can map a folder on your computer to the simās virtual file system and then access its contents. This is ONLY possible while the sim is running. But if I understand it correctly, you can then make a copy of the aircraft, put it in your community folder and start to modify it.
This has been confirmed about a month ago by Asobo here:
The relevant quote from that link:
"Please have a look at the Tools / Virtual File System window - the last section labelled āVFS Projectorā has information on how to map the VFS content to a virtual folder on your hard drive. Please note that this mapping is only available when the sim is running.
The online documentation will be updated shortly with further information on this feature - apologies for the delay.
Best regards,
Eric / Asobo"
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It doesnāt work. Aircraft.cfg has 0 bytes using the VFS projector.
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lol. okay.
While the sim is still running? (When the sim gets closed, it does not work anymore)
Im afraid thats another āfeatureā and not a bug.
Yeah, what they didnāt mention maybe is that all core aircraft are apparently now, as they put it, protected? Which means VFS lets you look up file tree structure, I suppose. Which is the absolute least problematic thing to look up if you want to create something.
Just not the actual part that matters, flie contents which will show you how to do things that work in this notoriously poorly documented environment
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Yeah, it doesnāt show either of the key files for my sort of modding, the flight model or engines cfg files. I mean, files show up for all aircraft but theyāre 0 bytes and never download or fill. Plus exploring the file structure is an apparent myth as all the files are stuck into token folders which have no relation to the actual file structure as far as I can tell
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I donāt fully understand these thingsā¦will I not be able to paint liveries for Flightsim.to ?
Apparently they are working on it. From a new post from the aforementioned thread:
Hi everyone,
Just to let you know: the topic is being discussed internally - I hope Iāll get back with answers for you in the coming days.
- We know that not being able to look into Standard aircraft is a problem so I am confident there will soon be a satisfactory solution for everyone - actually, it should already be possible but it looks like we (my team) forgot something in the VFSProjectorā¦
- Then there will be the topic of modifying those Standard aircraft - we are discussing potential solutions so that should become possible soon too. However please note that the changes you make locally will most probably only affect the aircraft in free flight - not in career or competitive modes.
- For payware aircraft things may be different - if a developer doesnāt want his product to be browsed by everyone, then thereās no reason why we should allow it. Which will also prevent changes to the aircraft.
Lets hope Asobo gets this fixed asap.
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I dont think its for making it harder for piracy as primary goal, even denuvo with its latest releases having very hard time doing that, thats why many developers if they decide to use denuvo, they remove it after a while.
but maybe the main reason to protect copyrighted rights in those projects. as for piracy, msfs 2024 is already hacked by russians, and its microsoft responsibility to take down unauthorized access to their servers by banning pirateās Microsoft accounts.