Today was my 1st day flying MSFS2024 as I would somewhat normally. I spent yesterday getting Axis and Ohs setup for the Black Square Duke Piston and prior flights in 2024 has been checking out Career Mode.

My plan this morning was to visit so addon airports in So-Cal. Its interesting that some airports will port over and others wont. You can always tell if the airport is going to work in 2024 by seeing the star next to the field from the top down view when setting up a free flight.  So the airports today were going to be KSBP San Luis, KSBA Santa Barbra, KVNY Van Nuys, L70 Alga Dulce and KSZP Santa Paula. The weather had me flying IFR for some of it and then the weather broke and turned into a beautiful VFR finish.

With no GTN750, I was flying via pilotage and using my Garmin Pilot App connected to the sim via XMapsy.  I was happy to have the Saitek Radio Panel allowing me to go old school using VORs and DMEs. Its honestly the first time I've every really used it that much as usually my go to is the GTN750 which takes care of Com1, Nav1 and the Xpnder. It honestly felt great to fly to intersections using Nav1 and Nav 2 but the icing on the cake was how well Black Square models the needles on the Century NSD-360 (HSI), Collins RMI-30 (RMI) and Bendix/King KI 206 Localizer. My normal setup uses the G5 (which depends on Air Manager & Pop Out Manager) so I really have never seen these needles in use prior.

OMG, what a series of wonderful flights. Just how far simming has evolved.  The ah-ha moment for me was landing at L70. It was a short hop from Van Nuys in the Duke and I finally really got a true understanding of why someone would model this airport. This is what it looked like to me when it was 1st introduced by Orbx going way back to P3D days.

This looks nothing like what it does in MSFS2024 (sorry no screenshots) using the freeware addon found here: https://flightsim.to/file/47354/agua-dulce-l70

The surrounding foothills have so much more detail in MSFS2024 and the fence line blends so well. As I was flaring on my landing seeing the waves in the runway as if followed the terrain I noticed something about mid field between the runway and the taxiway. As I got closer and passed it, it was a herd of deer relaxing and grazing. As I taxi back towards them on the taxiway, they got up on all fours and started running away towards the hill crossing the runway! These were not part of a freeware addon, this was what we can now expect to see at times. 

I get out of the plane after shutting it down and walked around to explore a bit. I can hear my engines cooling down and as I walked away that sound faded as birds were chirping and the sound of my foot steps changed as I walked from the asphalt to the grass. The grass was blowing in the wind. 

I get back in the plane and go to start it back up. I get vapor lock and have to google how best to deal with that. I didnt want to flood the engine either and the battery was heating up. That is just so dang realistic. No more are addons being developed were the engines just are always going to turn over on a dime. I remember my 1st solo cross country where I did a full stop and taxied back to immediately take back off bc I was so worried about what would happen if I shut it down and couldnt get it started again. 

For my flights Im using Say Intentions and talking like normal, I'm seeing the world in the most realistic manner, theres no more repeating textures and the detail in the ground and terrain blended with the lighting and feel of atmosphere is crazy realistic feeling. When I landed at Santa Paula I noticed the asphalt had a small bubble in it that was casting a shadow from it like a root had pushed it up. Something I've seen so many times on the tarmac from the heat and cold. Then later at Santa Barbra as the sun was low in the sky and the shadows were long, I could see a thin shadow from the thick yellow paint of the taxiway line just like what you see on roads. The edge of the asphalt did just blend into the grass but there was a height difference there to giving yet another thin shadow. I know I'm detailing a lot of eye candy but the plane and the feel of the plane have just as equal the amount of detail and realism as well.

Sorry, guys, I just had to share. 

Edited November 25, 20241 yr by Ident

I feel the same way, have no serious issues, and it looks wonderful compared to 2020. But it is odd that some folks are having such a mess. It makes no sense. It's getting negative ratio'd in the Steam store. I would rate it 11 out of 10. The difference is so huge between some users and others. It's like a twilight zone episode, and strange.

I also have similar positive experiences - I use the carier mode to bridge the time until I get to the real simming (until all tools are compatible and that seems to be relatively fast - another plus point). Of course it has some glitches but basically no long loading times (at least normal), the weather looks incredibly good again and is pretty accurate, no performance problems ... I also use ‘lossless scaling’...definitely helps.
Of course it also depends on the hardware, no question, but my system is always ‘up to date’ (drivers and bios), I think it's often due to that - because how else do such different problems come about! 

It was always going to take the MSFS team 2 to 3 months to work out the bugs and issues, and for 3rd party developers to port their add-ons to MSFS 2024. I said as much when I posted the MSFS 2024 release thread last week.  Yes, I think the MSFS 2024 release was worse than the MSFS 2020 release in that people could download & install MSFS 2020 on release day (albeit, the downloading was very slow for some people), spawn in, and fly, even if there were CTDs waiting when people could fly on the first few days of MSFS 2020.  Conversely, people could not download & install MSFS 2024 on the first day, and on the second day when they could install it, many people still couldn't spawn in and fly.

But the server issues for MSFS 2024 have largely improved since Tuesday, and I think they are still working on improving them.  And they will work out the bugs.  Now I think it's probably closer to 3 months, rather than 2 months, for things to smoothen out, and for a majority of the 3rd party devs to port their add-ons over. Having said that, you can see the potential is there in MSFS 2024. The base is there, and when they get things working better, we are going to have one nice flight simulator.

Edited November 25, 20241 yr by abrams_tank

I refunded PDE during the first couple of calamitous days and retained access to Standard edition via Gamepass.

Agreed this has now stabilised nicely and is a, if somewhat bug ridden, decent simming experience now. Like others, I'm flying career mode and having fun despite thinking I wouldn't go anywhere near it prior to release.

Will be jumping back in with PDE as soon as we see some initial updates and some of the main addons coming over - I see Fenix is already flyable.

I got as far as the refund button on Steam when I couldn't start a flight day two. Everything has worked fine for me ever since so I'm glad I didn't.

Most of the the UK experienced a storm this weekend so I 'landed' a C172 at Shoreham on Saturday (30-50 knot winds), the flight was interesting (medium turblulence setting) and after I touched down the plane got blown over onto its back. The sim reported damage to the control surfaces 😆

 

It just amazes me how people find it ok that 2024 is in such a state and it needs a couple of months etc. etc. etc. For this amount of money its should have been a lot better! releasing it was wrong. Other than maybe an early acces thing or something but it is not ok!

Thanks for sharing.  Landed in an obscure airfield in Aus on the weekend, and something moving caught my eye  - a group of kangaroos were bounding away into the underbrush.  Surprising, realistic and bit of fun  🙂

(err, I mean, Bloody Bonza Mate!!)

Edited November 25, 20241 yr by RobF2

2 hours ago, Fielder said:

But it is odd that some folks are having such a mess. It makes no sense. It's getting negative ratio'd in the Steam store.

Not really. It probably depends on how you want to use the simulator. If you fly VFR or in some sort of "sightseeing" mode or using that new career mode, the simulator feels ready and is usable and also looks really really good. If you want to perform an actual IFR flight with "heavy metal" and all the bells and whistles, it fails miserably. Also, at night, the simulator just looks horrible with excessive bloom all over the place, completely unrealistic lighting in airports, a weird "haze" in the cockpit lights, etc.

Just my 0.02c

Edited November 25, 20241 yr by Nuno Pinto

10 minutes ago, remcosol said:

It just amazes me how people find it ok that 2024 is in such a state and it needs a couple of months etc. etc. etc. For this amount of money its should have been a lot better! releasing it was wrong. Other than maybe an early acces thing or something but it is not ok!

In 2006 I bought FSX that gave me 5 fps, CTDs, and ended up being abandoned by MS.

Despite an obviously premature release I don't think 2024 is anywhere near that level of disappointment.

One thing I noticed was blurry ground textures. In the settings I had dynamic settings turned onto 60fps. Once I turned that off I had lovely crisp textures.

39 minutes ago, Nuno Pinto said:

Also, at night, the simulator just looks horrible with excessive bloom all over the place

I was playing around yesterday with the default settings as my performance suddenly had tanked and I was trying to regain a better experience. Among all those settings I fiddled around with, one of them seemed to affect bloom. Haven't figured out which one. But especially the horrid bloom on the taxi edge lights was reduced to an acceptable level when I landed.

1 hour ago, remcosol said:

It just amazes me how people find it ok that 2024 is in such a state and it needs a couple of months etc. etc. etc. For this amount of money its should have been a lot better! releasing it was wrong. Other than maybe an early acces thing or something but it is not ok!

It amazes me how quickly some throw their toys out the pram.  Launch day was truly a disaster, but MS/Asobo have owned up to that.  Day two wasn't much better, but from day three onwards the sim is much improved.  Today, it is running smooth and looking superb.  2024 is quickly showing itself a worthy advancement over 2020 (which itself remains a great sim).

40 minutes ago, Farlis said:

I was playing around yesterday with the default settings as my performance suddenly had tanked and I was trying to regain a better experience. Among all those settings I fiddled around with, one of them seemed to affect bloom. Haven't figured out which one. But especially the horrid bloom on the taxi edge lights was reduced to an acceptable level when I landed.

If you ever find out please let us know. I guess Asobo will maybe look into it as some sim objects have very strange reflections but anything that helps meanwhile is useful. Thanks!

5 hours ago, AUA425 said:

Of course it also depends on the hardware, no question, but my system is always ‘up to date’ (drivers and bios), I think it's often due to that - because how else do such different problems come about! 

There are legit bugs and some infrastructure issues Asobo will need to work out but from my understanding a majority of the issues seem to lye with the user and not the sim. I spent almost 7k USD on my computer and pay to have high speed internet. I also decided against treating MSFS2024 as an update to MSFS2020 and treat it like a completely new sim thus not selecting to use the key bindings of a different sim because I didnt want to learn the new keystrokes and use the keystrokes of a sim I will no longer use in probably 3 months from now. I also used the career mode which seems was their introductory into learning a bunch of the new keystrokes for moving around, looking around and getting in and out of the plane.

The UI and some aspects of flying at night are the weak areas of the sim. I kinda get why the UI is the way it is, in which I feel is to make it easier for Xbox users to handle. Xbox users to me are causal simmers but I'm willing to bet they bring in a whole new user base which equals to revenue but also could turn them into hardcore simmers down the road. Thus I highly support that move if thats the case as its only a win win for us.

The overall take away is that giving the sim a chance by treating it like a completely new sim, using a computer designed for todays gaming needs on a good internet link MSFS2024 shines bright with some shortcomings that can be tuned. I'd much rather of them released the sim now then let it bake longer to have fixed any bugs bc now all the 3rd party developers can start to code for it and help build it better. Alpha, Beta, Final release...who cares what you call it, it works great, it shines bright and now we all have our hands on it to start customizing it to our needs with the support of addon developers being able to finally contribute to it.