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 😛
@stroughtonsmith Then what about Barcelona’s famous church that’s been under construction for 400 years