Steve Troughton-SmithI 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
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
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
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)
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 👌
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
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…
FS2024 career mode continues to progressively disclose new UI and mechanics as it opens up, and it goes deep. You level into starting an aviation company, those companies need to purchase new/used aircraft, pay for maintenance (there’s a damage model) and insurance (you lose planes if you crash them), and actually fly aircraft to the airports that missions take place at before you can do them — unlike the regular mode, which lets you teleport around the world at will. It's remarkably granular
Jack@stroughtonsmith when does that unlock?
@jackamick level 20-something? Not entirely sure
Brian Bothwell@stroughtonsmith you’re playing with a controller, right? Have you tried the helicopter certification yet? So touchy and crazy hard to control the tail rotor while moving!
@sysrage yes, yes, and omg it's a nightmare. And just so slow, you can't autopilot it at all for long journeys. I don't want to progress the helicopter tree at all now cause it will fill my map with helicopter missions