superspud

I've often been surprised at the speed with which some freeware creators have wound up in the professional Asobo fold. Plenty of them will have pretty ragged habits and setups. If I got the summons to the big table while rotting in my basement, I'd make very certain that any potential pain point was dealt with long before going anywhere near them. And I'd presume Asobo would want a thorough rundown of rights before integrating anything. Still, sounds like it's sorted which is good for everyone.

I regularly spot miles of 4k normal textures with one microscopic pimple of normal goodness. Great yawning stretches of the rest of the texture is blank. Maybe it's machismo, maybe it's laziness, but most sceneries could be half to one quarter of the size and no one would notice. I don't get why it isn't given more consideration. It absolutely turns me off buying something.

Graphics cards have been totally outgunned in Bitcoin mining for 10 years or so. All you'd be doing is burning electricity for nothing by running one. Plenty of other crud can still be mined with them but the next most mined system has transitioned away from it too in recent years. It's AI that's eating the production now. It'll be interesting to see how much longer the physical graphics cards remains a major thing. More and more people will outsource all of the processing to the cloud and have it streamed to a screen. I still do a 1080ti and seem to chug along just fine. With the 5070 still at 8GB Vram they really need to start throwing lower tiers a bit more meat.

I just waited 13 minutes to load into St Barts in 2024. After loading and another 9 minutes it's still a blur and LOD fest. So my vote is... rather obvious.

If I was a gamer and budding aviation fan and decided to take the plunge in flight simulation with the previous mainstays, it's safe to say I'd be pretty shocked at how 'niche' the experience was. It in no way resembles the standards I'd be used to in terms of graphics and user friendliness. That's totally understandable as it's far outside what regular games can do. I could imagine sticking with it for a bit but never quite being able to compromise my expectations and walking away. Don't think it would ever have died, but it wouldn't have progressed much further than it is now and it's possible investment in development might have dwindled. MSFS definitely has its cartoony moments, but that can be addressed if the will is there.

They've basically had an automated upgrade as far as I can tell. 2024 takes existing 2020 elements such as painted lines and improves them, and also gives the ground textures of the entire airport a better look too. I assume they did tweak any 2024-specific problems. Models look the same. So they are the 2020 airports with the general brush up that 2024 can do.

For scenery there are a fair few new 2024-specific elements, most of which seem to be minor detail enhancements such as extra embellishments to painted lines and extra ground details that you can add. I assume 2020 simply won't read them in a 2024 compiled addon as the programming isn't present and will render what it can. Nothing seems to require being removed and nothing's fundamentally different. There's just extra code that 2020 will be blind to. But that code might be enough to crash the sim. A comma in the wrong place is enough to do that. Planes might be a very different matter.

Zero performance issues. As for streaming, I went to CDG last night for the first time. That was 6-7 minutes before it started to populate in the birdseye view of the loading screen. Another 4-5 minutes on site before most of the items manifested themselves once loaded. And after another 5 or so minutes floating around there was still no sign of the final 5-10%. Once more stuff is downloadable I'll have a clearer view of whether 2024 is usable for us internet snails. At the moment - hell no overall.

Just done this here - https://flightsim.to/file/16991/edxh-duene-airport-helgoland-upgrade Copied the 2020 project. Stripped out everything except the scenery file, opened in 2024 and made the required edits. Copied it again. Ripped out the scenery file and used everything else from 2020 in 2024. One thing you will need to do is adjust whatever LOD settings you have in the 2020 model xmls by checking them in 24. 24 brings them in a lot sooner. Get the right number. Compile in 2020, upload as two separate files and you should be good to go. That makes a full 2024 conversion maybe 30 minutes to a couple of hours rather than the rest of your life. Maybe the model rules will change but it buys plenty of time until then.

As for LODs, if you share a lot of items between sites you could make a library in 2020 to place in 2024 sceneries. And if you share a lot of the same textures it might be worth doing the same for your buildings even if they're all different. Or a 2020 model library for each individual site and split the 2024 download into that and its scenery file. It's a kludge that should last for a few years to come. That's what I'll try first as I may not have plenty of source files any more. Or the time and inclination. Considering the amount of grind going native sounds, I'd only do it if it was absolutely necessary. So far I have one set of animated hangar doors that don't work properly in 2024 and that appears to be the only problem. All of my libraries seem to work fine in 2024, apart from landing on moving boats which needs a small tweak, so I've zero intention of changing any of those to 2024. It's so much work it would never happen anyway. The new LODs are for Xbox users mainly who will never sample my unsettling touch.

I think they're a bit excessive really but do look good. The Gaya ships simobjects are awesome but must be several hundred megabytes a piece. I'm not seeing one for over a minute after placing it. I'm waiting to hear about what the ground image situation is before thinking about scenery. It was supposed to be new in 2020 and 2024 at launch which isn't the case. No point doing anything if everything moves again in a few weeks.

I expect more than a few will switch to downloadable options when they're available and disable some streamed world update stuff if that's possible. Depends on how seamless their streaming is. It never will be for me so I'll do it ASAP. That'll probably be a fairly small minority but I'm not going to expect every single thing will show for everyone. The fancy cars are new and separate. There don't seem to be that many of them and I find the LOD pop in egregious so may not avail myself of them.

Very strange. Do you have a link to them so others can download and look?

I had a look through the entirety of the SDK object catalogue. I think almost everything that was once there in 2020 is in 2024 too. I'm not noticing huge gaps in 2024, but I'm sure there are plenty here and there, so a stock object you placed in 2020 should show up again in 2024. Even if your internet is painfully slow, there should be a grey presence where a stock object is waiting to load further. Maybe you have some sort of connection problem.

Not really. I haven't yet experienced that. Do they share a similar characteristic? Size? Location? There were plenty of times when they wouldn't load at all for me, but I think that was down to general sluggishness. There are a couple of priority problems. Helgoland is showing a bunch of weird buildings, but the Asobo WU version also has the same problem.

I've been to a few of mine and it's better than expected overall. Painted lines and aprons from the SDK have ported over in an improved manner. Custom ones haven't fared very well and show up as the too low res they are, or have lost their opacity. Haven't seen too many elevation problems, but there are some here and there. A couple have buildings that shouldn't be there. Some animations are broken, but odd ones like hangar doors rather than the obvious ones. Everything is taking so long to load that I can't tell in some cases whether something is sub par, or simply hasn't fully materialised yet. Problem is a minor 2024 tweak involves an epic journey of remaking all the models so it works properly. The more I read about that, the more of a grind it sounds. Some folk are saying they'll only develop in 2020 and let users drop it into 2024, but there are likely to be 2024-specific problems that can't be addressed that way. I'm busy lounging around at the moment so I've yet to settle on what to do. There's also the question of the new aerial images in both iterations, plans for which seem a bit woolly. Zero point doing anything if everything moves again in a few weeks. I'm pretty sure Earth doesn't do that.

I thought it was a given that planes and custom airports will be downloadable eventually? I assume it'll require the marketplace to be up and running first. All streaming is lovely idea but premature. Many people, including me, don't have internet that's good enough which is what I thought would happen. Presumably things still aren't A1 but are far better. It's still taking agonising amounts of time for everything to fully manifest itself so I won't be buying it unless something changes. 2020 was good enough for me in terms of bandwidth, but its photogrammetry was usually an ask too much. Times that by every single other thing and I knew my goose would be cooked.

Definitely working far better for me now, but I still don't know if this is the 'settled' state or whether there's some strain remaining. If this is the final experience it's still not usable for me. Looking in the SDK it's taking around 2 minutes to download a complex simobject like the new ships. I'm hoping they up the amount of downloadable content to the model assets as well as planes and airports.

I'll wait to see how it runs when things have settled down. It took nearly ten minutes for a Twin Otter to fully materialise around me last night. Allowing local storage for more game assets beyond aircraft and airports will solve a lot of problems. I'd rather have a similar ish install size to 2020 than be a total slave to bandwidth. If they don't do that, and it can't be that hard, then 2024 probably won't be usable for me.

I haven't been able to start at an airport today, but free flight is startable most of the time.

Pure guess. It makes sense to factor in a reduction in 2020 demand and allocate the same space to 2024.

I had not considered the likelihood of 2024 hoovering up 2020's server space and bandwidth. That's a no brainer. In which case that's two sims that won't work properly for me. Fingers crossed that isn't the case going forward. But it will probably will be.

I went to many, many watery places. Almost all the watercraft were the same models as in 2020. Plenty of variety beyond cruise ships dotted around, but no new stuff. Maybe 2020 models are a lower tier and the fancy new ones were turned off.

My Internet is at the absolute bottom of the recommended spec so I ain't in for a good time whatever happens. It seems OK ish, but might get tiresome quickly.

I am in. Everything is very sluggish of course. Impossible to tell what it is really like without the server load reducing, and I don't know how my rubbish Internet will stand up in normal times. So far - autogen buildings aren't really any better in terms of placement and interpretation. Autogen airports look pretty much exactly the same standard as a whole so far. Ground markings and apron details are vastly improved. Model assets look way better, but the LODs are hyper aggressive The ground, once it's loaded, looks spectacular in some places and worse in others. Some grassy areas in particular don't look any better close up. Definitely a big old improvement so far, but I'll be fine with 2020 if I can't run this properly. It has enough of the same. Even without the strain, I can't see myself being able to zip around without having to wait for everything to load in as I have to do photogrammetry in 2020. That might get old.