All of our models (FSLTL) have an aircraft.cfg with Category set to “Airplane”. And we believe as of one of the SU4 beta releases, we started to get reports and noticing the sound cutoffs and cut-ins.
But as mentioned, it may have also been around the time we changed our WWISE soundpacks to have a lower priority (85 vs 100… FSLTL Base Models Oct 16, 2025 release) and I haven’t yet tested to see if going back to a 100 priority has any impact on the issue, but I plan to.
If you like, I can package up one of our models with soundpacks, etc, and send it over.
I need to do more testing. Last night I tested at one airport for a couple hours with just one of our models used for each injected aircraft. And at first, there was no sound cut-out or cut-in. Only after some time, potentially after quite a few more aircraft had been injected, did I start hearing the cut-out/cut-in of sound from our AI aircraft.
So our specific issue could be distance related… but maybe combined with a limit on the number of concurrent sound sources (is that a thing?).
I’ll continue testing and with other models. But a quick repro it is not (so far)… at least for us.
Thanks again for the responses
Can confirm that using our (FSLTL) older soundpacks that had the sound priority set to 100 still exhibits the cut-in and cut-out issues.
Good to know it wasn’t our priority change that’s causing the issue, but still curious why this is happening only in MSFS2024 (and I believe started during SU4 beta).
Will package something up and send it over.
@FlyingRaccoon, @BirdmanRS , am I to understand that this sound restriction is NOT imposed on “aircraft” type SimObjects? (which would make sense, because, this being a FLIGHT simulator , aircraft SHOULD be heard from far away)
If that is the case, I can make my rocket SimObjects an “Aircraft” category, and provide only mandatory files to make the Aircraft work. According to documentation, the basic, essential structure for aircraft is:
MODEL folder
PANEL folder
SOUND folder
TEXTURE folder
aircraft.cfg
Since my objects will be aircraft in category only, I can discard all other optional cfg and flt files. Also, the absence of these files (lack of flight model) will not affect my object behaviour since I am placing them under my own position/attitude control.
If the above is correct, this solves the problem in my particular case!
It appears to be ‘imposed’ on the simobjects of type ‘aircraft’ that we inject via SimConnect. It appears to us there is some limit to how many sound-generating objects you can have in the sim (MSFS2024 only… MSFS 2020 isn’t an issue) before it starts to cut-out/cut-in the sound when an object is a certain distance from the camera. If we only inject one aircraft, its much more difficult to reproduce the issue. But once we’ve injected several aircraft, it occurs for every aircraft we’ve injected.
I have sent a test package of one of our simobject aircraft and associated soundpack to the devs.
I could replicate what you described.
Possibly some sort of optimization as playing sounds for dozens/hundreds of aircraft could quickly bring performance issues.
I’ll have that clarified as well.
Ok, glad you were able to reproduce.
I believe it started during the SU4 beta, so if there is some ‘optimization’, I’m assuming thats when it was added. Does not occur in MSFS2020.
Hopefully that optimization can be returned to the prior method for ‘Aircraft’ category objects at least.
@FlyingRaccoon I was wondering if there is a sound fix coming for SimObjects other than “Aircraft” category? If not, I would go ahead and convert my static SimObjects into “Aircraft” to overcome the sound limitation, as per my previous post.
@FlyingRaccoon - Just following up, any movement on a solution to this? We need to fix this either way. We suspect that this issue cost us a drop in product rating from 4.8 to 4.4, at which point we are excluded from some “Highest rated product” targeted sales on Marketplace, which impacts our (and Microsoft’s) revenue.
We are thinking about lifting that restriction for SimObjects from 2020 packages to preserve backward compatibility.
But I can’t tell yet when the fix will be available so changing your SimObject type to aircraft is probably the better option for you and it will also work if you ever decide to port the project to MSFS 2024.
The problem is not in MSFS2020. Our KSC Scenery package works beautifully in MSFS2020, everything is fine.
The problem is in MSFS2024. In December you wrote “The restriction to 250m didn’t exist in MSFS 2020.” You informed us that you did “optimizations” for MSFS2024, and this is why we are seeing these problems.
We already have our product out for both MSFS2020 and MSFS2024, the later one being a port from MSFS2020 to MSFS2024, done by MS/ASOBO during the ingestion process (we had nothng to do with the porting).
That is what I am referring to, this is a MSFS 2020 package mounted in 2024.
The change we are considering (lifting sound range restriction on non aircraft SimObjects) would only apply for 2020 packages mounted in 2024, with the goal of preserving the behavior of existing packages.
However, if you build a native 2024 package, the restriction will kick in and you will have to convert your SimObject to aircraft type.
So what you’re mentioning here is different than the sound issue you reproduced when multiple aircraft objects are added to MSFS2024 (like FSLTL), yes? The multiple aircraft sound issue is the “optimzation” you said was added?
Or are these two issues (aircraft and non-aircraft objects) related?
If I need to open a different post about aircraft object sound cut-offs/cut-ins to help keep them straight, let me know.
I’ve turned to trying to get the simplest possible structure that is still accepted as an aircraft, and I have found (through many trial and error cycles and sim re-starts) that, contrary to SDK documentation, flight_model.cfg is in fact MANDATORY element. SDK states that this file is optional:
Can you confirm that? Or is there a setting somewhere in the aircraft.cfg (the only file that is stated to be mandatory) that I missed, so it is perhaps looking for flight_model.cfg?
The phrasing is a bit ambiguous. It’s an optional file for a SimObject in general but becomes mandatory for an aircraft.
We will clarify the documentation.
For the minimal structure, I suggest to save the aircraft from the SimObjectEditor, it will create all the files with every required fields written to its default value.
, aircraft SHOULD be heard from far away)