Alpine Scenery

Vegetation, trees, and ground textures are the biggest difference. However, some places did update the maps, though I guess you might get the same updates in FS 2020 automatically as well. Would have to compare again. In FS 2020, the US is a bit better than it was before, Europe is only slightly better. Otherwise, it's about as big of a jump as we could have expected, it's not easy texturing the whole world even if it based on overlaying on top of aerial imagery. They have a hard job.

It was semi-accurate near where I live, but it showed 1 mountain with no snow that was covered in real life, so the transition zones are off by a few miles usually. It's difficult to get accurate where I am though because I'm on the border of where the desert meets snowier areas to the west.

As far as I'm aware, it's not illegal to hook a trailing camera with negative zoom outside of a real airplane and then have that being displayed on a screen in the cockpit. So I got you there 🙂

It's not the same, they replaced it in several areas, it just depends where you fly. Grand Canyon, some parts of Colorado, some parts of Texas, definitely replaced. In Europe, I'm not as sure since a lot of Europe was already good. Also, the blending is now working from higher up and the trees add to it as well, so it's altered a bit regardless. That said, I agree that MOST of the terrain is the same, but it's not all the same.

Worse ground textures, are you kidding? The ground resolution is higher (even from higher up), not lower, though I have seen a few places with poor texture quality in Alaska, but I think it was bad before. They fixed most of the colors in Alaska anyhow. Also, due to the trees, when I load FS 2020, it now feels like I'm playing a Sim that is 8 years old. The trees in 2020 are horrid looking compared to 2024.

Right, it's closer to due north of Wales, same difference 😛

It depends where you are flying, the terrain is definitely higher resolution in several places. I just flew over a lesser known place, Palo Duro Canyon in Texas expecting it to look like 2020, and just like the Grand Canyon the textures are entirely enhanced. The trees also are the correct biome, though there are too many. Several places in Colorado, Idaho, Washington State, and Oregon look way better. For instance, Bend - OR looks entirely different in 2024. Now if you want to see some of the best 2024 has to offer, I suggest flying around Wales, specifically Lake District National Park. Other than that, we have Career mode now, and almost every take-off and landing looks WAY better with the new trees.

That was a really interesting video, but do we know if the guy was legit and a real pilot or just claiming to be one? One thing that stuck out was when they said he had never flown a plane into there in his live stream, and he responded --- yes I have, I flown 2 different planes there. However, that is not a common place to fly '2 different planes' there, so it sounded it suspicious to me. I don't know either way, he might be legit. I never thought the big boy airliners were all that hard to model, since they work more like a missle than a paper airplane, it's the smaller planes that are weird imo. However, I am in no way qualified to say how far off X-Y-Z is, just that sometimes things are so funny looking I know it needs more work.

An exceptional video for comparison. My take is (if you have a mid-range system, say 3070 to 4080)... Buildings = High Trees = High Plants = Medium or High Grass = High or Ultra Rocks = High or Ultra (ultra looks a little better) Volumetric Clouds = High or Ultra (but not that much perf savings to go high) Texture Resolution = Ultra Antistropic Filtering = 16x Texture Supersampling = 8x Waves = High Raytraced Shadows = Off Shadow Maps = 2048 Terrain Shadows = 512 or 1024 Contact Shadows = Ultra Ambient Occlusion = Ultra Cubemap Reflections = High Raymarched Reflections = Ultra Light Shafts = Ultra Cockpit Refresh Rate = Med or High Airport Traffic = Med or Ultra Road Traffic = Ultra Upscaling = Quality DLSS or TAA TLOD = 100 to 150 OLOD = 100 to 200 Off-Screen Terrain Pre-Caching = Medium, High, or Ultra (cannot tell enough from his video on this one) Displacement Mapping = Off (kills frame rates)

One part of the issue is control mechanism feedback and resistance. So we are all using different controls, so even if a seasoned pilot thinks it feels right, he is really saying it feels as right as it maybe could with the controls he is using with his sim. Now maybe if he gets the absolute best YOKE money can buy and perfectly configures its attributes, then maybe you could match all points. Also, without "feeling the flight" it's hard for a pilot to really say how real it feels, unless he analyzed all the numbers directly, as many third-party devs do. The thing is though, there are some planes where Microsobo just seemed to use a default flight model without modifying much that had nothing to do with the real plane at all. Some are much better than others, but there are still some weird bugs. For instance, land a non-watercraft in the water and crank the engines (some of them go 100+ directly sideways). The physics on a bounce are also way way off, as almost every bounce looks the same. Beyond that, I have no idea.

I don't live there, but was going by the real flight video I've watched in that area. Pretty close, the trees aren't perfect, but otherwise the resolution is almost as good as the real videos.

The aerial resolution around Wales in England is just nuts now combined with the new buildings and trees. It looks real for the most part.

Its running great here on the West Coast, but I only fly late at night mainly. This is pretty close to the sim I always dreamed of, just had a great flight on the Beaver and pulled off a last minute ILS lock due to weather.

Sorry if already answered earlier in the thread, but is this better than the Aerosoft one Orbx has on sale right now?

If you think a broken mouse is bad, try a working moose.

What fixed my issues was duplicating the top 2 profiles, renaming them, restarting the sim. I haven't had an issue since, but I'm not trying to do exactly what you are doing. I am using the same profile globally for all aircraft for now.

You guys version must be stuck on FS 2023, I'm playing FS 2024 and I'm having a lot of fun. Sure some planes don't work right, don't fly those. As far as the other bugs go, yes night lighting is screwy, some places worse than others. Otherwise, it's a SUPER word not allowed load of fun, you're missing out. I am not a Koolaid drinker, the first 3 days I was like man this is terrible and I had to spit it out like vinegar. After the textures started loading correctly, I was like WOW --- EWWWW ----- AHHH, this is a lot better. I think they are heading in the right direction, and I'm glad I didn't have to wait another 6 months to play it just so they can fix bugs I can avoid. The only downside is I'm using Standard Edition through Gamepass, so going to have cough up the money to buy the Super Deluxe Extra Gimme-Those-Planes Version.

Even clouds that look like volcanic ash are a major improvement.

I am pretty happy with the graphics now in many areas I fly. The clouds are vastly improved. Also, W and NW of Denver is way higher resolution than it used to be. Denver always looked ok around the immediate area, but now even in mountains far west of there it looks much better. New Clouds in FS 2024

That looks exceptional if you ask me. Are those default FALL trees in FS 2024, or from one of the addons?

The night lighting is broken in some cities, around Venice it was completely borked. Every light was at an equidistance forming a perfectly symmetrical geometrical pattern. It looked like a poka-dot city. So yes, there are issues, but it just depends.

Yah, sometimes when you get at ground level it can ALMOST get competetive to a game like RDR 2 (not quite, but sort of in its own way). I would say it often reaches Witcher 3 level graphics from the ground though. It's just inconsistent, not all areas or biomes trigger that level of detail, totally depends.

I have seen massive differences from one flight to the next, I think its a bug in their caching algorithm and I don't believe it's just server speed related. I think what happens is sometimes when it loads a farther away LOD, it never replaces it in the cache, so you lose texture resolution. It's something like that. It doesn't happen all the time, it just depends I guess.

You can say about it what you want, but again, the truth is it depends where you fly. It's still inconsistent too, the water looks better when there is wind or waves, but sometimes lately I'm seeing no waves at all and the water looks like glass (no idea why). The visuals are still inconsistent at times, maybe they'll patch it. Bend, OR looks a lot better, so does Cascade, Idaho. Taking off is an entirely next level experience with the more detailed ground and better looking trees. The Grand Canyon was re-done with higher resolution textures, and that seems to extend about 100 miles in every direction. Some areas in Colorado appear to have been improved slightly. The low-ground textures and new trees make the Bend, OR area look better even when you are flying around 4000 feet, so it's not always having to fly 100 feet above the ground. There are a lot of variables, when the trees are too dense it looks similar to dense forests in FS 2020, but like in Bend, OR where the trees are spread out, it looks next level compared to FS 2020. The night lighting is messed up because of the bloom effect inside the planes, though as a couple real pilots pointed out, that problem does exist in real life with some displays and you have to turn the brightness down, it's just exaggerated in the sim.

A lot of it just depends where you fly and exactly how low. i noticed when there are buildings it also loads more ground detail at a higher elevation, which means the best looking areas tend to be small cities and large cities, rather than 100% rural areas. Here is the Venice Area (can reach this area by flying southwest from LIPV)