MSFS2024 is pretty realistic so far; it fully simulates the pre-flight interminable airport waiting experience

That thing where your gate information changes but still doesn't have any actual information on a delay or a boarding time, but hopefully progress is being made?

At least I've beaten the login queue!

I'm in!

This is a very elaborate character creator for a Flight Sim

Quick test flight over Dublin. Performance and loading times are leagues ahead of FS2020, even at 4K(DLSS)
It certainly uses every last little bit of my internet connection (which admittedly is not great in the first place) to stream in the game world. I started a download in the background and it immediately complained at me 😂
This is the killer FS2024 feature: how quickly you can load in/out of the map (for regions you have cached) and jump around the world at will. Gone are the bonkers loading times of the previous version

I made the mistake of updating my graphics drivers and now I'm back at the login queue for the next few hours 🥲

Early impressions from my very brief playtime: loading is fast and painless, performance is near-60 most of the time, and it looks every bit as good as the last game and more — but it feels so much more playable because all those pain points have gone away

'We built our infrastructure to scale beautifully to 200,000 users, but we got a lot more than that so the servers melted’

Maybe you shouldn't have launched on PC, Xbox, and *Gamepass* at the same time? 😅 That's a lot of users who could kick the tires for 'free’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuMd7udCyFM

Developer Launch Day Update | Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024

YouTube
Bing's photogrammetry remains… poor. Infinite Loop is ‘here’, if you could call it that, but Apple Park is still missing. And still, a far cry from the procedurally-generated wildernesses in the rest of the game
Flight Simulator 2024 is *really* bandwidth-heavy. They weren't kidding about the minimum internet speed requirements — my home internet is barely enough to keep the terrain LODs fed
Starting Career Mode. Excited to see how much of a difference a structured mission/leveling system makes. There's a (mediocre) text to speech model here that does voiceover for all the procedural missions from the perspective of randomly-generated NPCs, and you get to choose your 'home' regional airport to begin your career at (so thousands of potential locations for your first flight — each unique)
There's something special about seeing your training/certification missions take place in your real-life home town. Because the entire game world powers the main menu on down, you can do some really neat interactive UI screens without lengthy black loading screens

Mission Failed Successfully?

…I think the servers still need a bit more work before I can play 😅

We're back. I discovered that from the main menu you can zoom all the way down to earth close enough to see simulated cars and water effects, which is a very neat bit of engineering
Much like Flight Sim 2020, FS2024 excels the further you go from civilization, as anywhere Bing has photogrammetry data kinda brings it down and takes away the procedural beautification (albeit for more-realistic landmarks)

FS2024's new photo mode has me scratching my head. It has very basic options, but doesn't provide a ‘hide UI’ toggle for you to use your own screenshot program to save a capture. You have to capture it in-game instead.

Beyond that, nowhere in the game does it tell you where those captures go. There's a viewer to view them in-game, but no ‘show in Explorer' or ‘share’ options.

'All photographs are saved in: Local path’

Checked all the usual places and I have no idea where that's supposed to be

I had to use windirstat but I found the FS2024 screenshot path location.

Could you have guessed this one?

Fucking hell.

With that out of the way, I actually upped my graphics settings to 'ultra’ and turned off the dynamic framerate target and I'm still getting a smooth 50fps at 4K, which is so much more performance than I could ever get out of FS2020. I kinda wish I had a 40-series card with frame gen just to multiply that, but I would say this finally solves Flight Simulator's performance for me
‘On foot' mode doesn't quite work with photogrammetry or hand-modeled landmarks. The on-foot stuff is pretty janky overall, but I like that it exists. Realistically, you have an entire earth filled with content (and collision meshes) designed to be viewed from the air, not hiked, and that doesn't really change with this game
Is the sim more detailed in general for on-foot gameplay? For sure. Like I said, it's when you go out to explore the wilderness that this game comes alive
It's far too easy to become jaded to incredible things just because you've seen them before
Picking random spots to just land and see what the terrain looks like from human level. The detail is not bad at all; textures are sharp up close and the ground uses tessellation instead of flat surfaces. Grass inherits the color of the base satellite imagery, which provides nice variation
If your internet can't keep up, photogrammetry areas look a mess until they load in
Even in Flight Simulator, Rome's historical buildings are under construction 😛
Rome, though, is still one of my favorite cities in the world, in-game and IRL
I should emphasize, Flight Simulator 2024 is available on Game Pass, so if you have a gaming PC or an Xbox and $10 to spare, you can play it too
Bing's photogrammetry brings you the N64 version of Galaxy's Edge
I guess that's what the focus blur is for

You can get a sense of Asobo's photogrammetry priorities

Disney World: 👎
Paris: 👍

The locations that sucked in FS2020 aren’t any better in this game

Nothing quite like flying over Europe
If I were trying to predict where the reviews are going to land, on this one, I think we'll see 8s and 9s. It's not that it does anything worse than its predecessor — on the contrary —, but we've 'seen it before’ now, and all the new stuff, while sorely needed, is also a bit janky and sloppy. FS2024 does feel like a much better foundation for the future of the series than FS2020, but there's still a long way to go to make everything as incredible as the world that powers the sim

Where are all the tourists?

…and camels?

I am quite content to never install Flight Simulator 2020 again. Other than offline play (if you can stomach the 200GB update sizes), it really has nothing for me over the new game. FS2020 was a chore to play, FS2024 fixes all that
I had to go back into my screenshots archive to find FS2020 to compare it with FS2024, because the distinction is so subtle that I can't tell the difference from my memory. I don't have anything I can show like for like yet, but you can get a feel for it from these two pictures — maybe not so subtle after all? The helicopter is 2024, the Spitfire is 2020. The 2024 location has photogrammetry, the 2020 does not
And for a bit of fun, let's compare FS2024 to my own drone footage. Definitely room for improvement!
On my internet connection, it takes a good three or so minutes(!) in a geometry-heavy city for all the photogrammetry data to stream in to the horizon for a decent screenshot. (This has no bearing on performance or fps.) Once it's cached, it's cached

I found the location of my Spitfire image! Holy moly does FS2024 look better. I know the satellite imagery has been updated, but the difference is striking.

(I don't have access to the Spitfire in FS2024 yet, so I took the closest substitute)

The different seasonal effects are very pretty, too

What does it take to put these pixels on screen?

24GB RAM and 10GB VRAM, apparently, according to the Xbox overlay

You know the music.
Oh hey, my purchased planes from FS2020 have shown up. Having DLC carry over from the previous game is 👌

The kraken lives!

<…hit a physics bug and was flung into orbit 😂>

At least it's pretty up here.

Space, incidentally, exists. So if you want to buy some Space Shuttle DLC, go right ahead… 😅
The magnitude of being able to run this *in realtime* is not lost on me
(It's real!)

As janky as the procedurally-generated AI-voiced mission system is, there are moments as you're flying over the country you live in (assuming you picked it as your starter location) when the orchestral music kicks in and the visuals hit you hard and it's like… man my home is beautiful.

I'm starting to really like this career mode, as it gives a reason to come in and keep playing the game to progress rather than sightseeing and getting bored

The photographer challenges are really smart, because they place you in locations around the world that look fantastic in FS2024, and force you to take beautiful screenshots. The perfect bait for social media posters
Progressing through the Flight Simulator 2024 career system. The map is beginning to populate with icon types as the fun begins
Having a blast with this game 👌

Star Citizen eat your heart out, because bloody hell.

(Remember kids: this is what Google/Apple Maps will be like on your phone someday)

New mission type unlocked!

Alternatively: this is how we deal with problematic passengers

I can already tell I'm going to play an awful lot of this game; the drop in/drop out aspect of it, along with structured missions, means you know you can just boot it up and play for a 30-min session whenever you want.

If I was ever in the mood to play Flight Simulator 2020, I would launch the game, then have it spend 48 hours downloading a 200GB update, killing off my interest entirely.

With FS2024, I'm in the game world in just a couple mins from launching it, and I have a task ready to do

👌
Wrapping my head around this mission system. The way it works is you gradually unlock parts of the Earth by revealing the 'fog of war’ as you fly missions to/from there. When you unlock a new mission type, you have to prove yourself via a gold-colored mission, which can be anywhere on the globe, to unlock a new remote area of operation. Normal mission POIs only show up where there's no fog of war. And there are a *lot* of missions. It is surprisingly granular for a first pass at the feature
It's not quite the Elite Dangerous mission structure — your character doesn’t have a physical location and doesn't need to travel around the world to pick up a mission, for starters — but there are definitely a lot of similarities. It's a lot more than I expected. Mission types are physicalized — passengers board your aircraft and chat for the duration, cargo is stored in the baggage area, jumpers prep for jump and jump away. But it does make the game a whole lot more accessible to non-simmers

Nightly Flight Simulator photos ✈️

The career difficulty does ramp up dramatically, and I’m having to give myself a crash course in the G1000 just to work the autopilot and give myself some breathing room on longer flights. Useless hyper-specific domain expertise? Perhaps…

@stroughtonsmith love that everyone has tik tok voice. 😂
@stroughtonsmith And I love how creative passengers get with their seating choices
@stroughtonsmith Thanks to all of your posts I now have an Ultimate Pass and am in Cessna flight school on my MacBookPro…. 🤣
@stroughtonsmith The way the sun plays off those dark clouds is downright astounding.
@stroughtonsmith how are you playing it? Do you use any special controller?
@stroughtonsmith Now I'm just curious to find my house.

@jamesthomson @stroughtonsmith back when the HTC Vive was new, I ran Google Earth on it, zoomed all the way out until the globe was a large ball underneath my feet, then started zooming back in, in, in, and on and on until I was looking at the street of my childhood house.

Tech can be cool.

@stroughtonsmith I’ve never played it, but always been curious, and have enjoyed watching your reactions over the last couple of days. I was wondering - would it be just as fun as a new Google Earth? Are the “game” or “sim” bits that fun? You seem to enjoy the Google Earth bits the most!
@pmj I enjoy taking screenshots the most*. This game is a screenshot factory first and foremost. But it is a flight sim too, and isn't geared for the kind of usage you imagine. I'm very much enjoying the flying
@stroughtonsmith Nice. My grandfather is from Newtownbutler in Fermanagh. Fly over his farm?
@stroughtonsmith pah, I remember the Computer Programme doing just that on a BBC Micro back in the day ;)
@stroughtonsmith holy crap that’s incredible
@stroughtonsmith wow, that's crazy realistic!
@stroughtonsmith How easy is it to get into and enjoy it for people who have not played it before?
Thanks.
@stroughtonsmith Forgive me if you've mentioned this already, but what do you use for control? Controller? Yoke? I'm struggling to land well with just a controller.
@krg Xbox gamepad, yeah. I'm sure everything is better with a flight stick, but the convenience is top
@stroughtonsmith Does the whole aircraft/scenery add-on ecosystem from the 2000s still exist? I spent an obscene amount of money and time on IVAO 15-20yrs ago and wonder if that is all still there.
@joshua I’m sure some of it was remade for 2020, but 2020 was an engine overhaul and I don’t think anything could just be ported over
@stroughtonsmith I’ve been using Xbox Cloud and really am starting to regret selling my PC 😂
@stroughtonsmith I wish they added War Thunder style arcade mouse controlling so I could just go fly to see the views. Now it’s too cumbersome to set up joystick every time you want to go fly for a bit. That was the biggest obstacle for 2020.
@stroughtonsmith i’m playing 1080p with a 4070super, i think this is the only game that maxout my card to 100%, and this game is said to be CPU-bounded! i may only imagine what it can do with a 4090…
@stroughtonsmith How far have we come! Compare this to cover of one of my favorite C64 games vs a screenshot
@stroughtonsmith OMG is the maximum altitude now higher than 270,000 feet?
@whophd it's way beyond, but there are rendering bugs and other issues
@stroughtonsmith *rubs hands together in glee*
@stroughtonsmith Antarctica needed a bit of work … or the poles, I should say
Doctor Who - Victory of the Daleks - Spitfires in Space

YouTube
@stroughtonsmith Is there any reason, or indeed any way, to “upgrade install”? Should I just not bother moving any files to a new system and go for a fresh start?
@whophd as in FS2020 -> FS2024? No, I don't believe anything transfers. The new game is only a 10GB download, though, and everything else streams in as needed

@stroughtonsmith Wow they really listened to everyone’s #1 wish

Haven’t felt exactly this since … Office 98 🤔🤗

@stroughtonsmith you got me really interested until I read the specs of the PC I would need. Just a slight upgrade over my current setup. I’ll have to live vicariously through your images for now lol
@stroughtonsmith super buggy on PC, this is with a 14700k, 64gb of ram and a 4090, most of the time its just internet issues — but boy what a shit show of a launch.
@curthard89 I haven't found it buggy today (yesterday was another story, but servers), other than a repeatable crash using the showcase camera. Game runs great now though!