I made the mistake of updating my graphics drivers and now I'm back at the login queue for the next few hours š„²
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 ā 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 meltedā
Maybe you shouldn't have launched on PC, Xbox, and *Gamepass* at the same time? š
That's a lot of users who could kick the tires for 'freeā
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuMd7udCyFM
Developer Launch Day Update | Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024
Bing's photogrammetry remainsā¦ poor. Infinite Loop is āhereā, 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 ā 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 ā 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?
ā¦I think the servers still need a bit more work before I can play š
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 āhide UIā 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 āshow in Explorer' or āshareā options.
'All photographs are saved in: Local pathā
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 'ultraā 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
āOn 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 š
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: š
Paris: š
The locations that sucked in FS2020 arenāt 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 ā on the contrary ā, but we've 'seen it beforeā 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?
ā¦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 ā 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
Oh hey, my purchased planes from FS2020 have shown up. Having DLC carry over from the previous game is š
@stroughtonsmith Is there any reason, or indeed any way, to āupgrade installā? 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 everyoneās #1 wish
Havenāt felt exactly this since ā¦ Office 98 š¤š¤
@whophd I feel like the game hit 9 of my 10 top wishes. I would really love better map/photogrammetry data, but I know that's not gonna happen
@stroughtonsmith Wow š¤©
What do you (or can you possibly!) mean by *better* map/photogrammetry data?
Itās better than 2020 already, right? But youāre asking for ādriving simulatorā levels of zoom I think, and we get spoiled by what is available on Street View, Flyover and so on. (Google Earth? Not sure).
@whophd well a lot of Bing data is old. Appleās headquarters, which opened in 2017, doesn't even exist on the map. Newer data, like the kind Apple Maps has, is higher resolution and has the benefit of street-level lidar, which really helps things with overhangs like bridges, etc
Steve Troughton-Smith
Christian Kent šš :ļ¼¼ļ¹„