No way to make external liveries work in FS24-monolithic aircraft

Apart from VFS locking that limits users from accessing any texture files at all, we are presented with a new limitation: monolithic aircraft compiled in FS24 are incompatible with liveries compiled externally from the aircraft SimObject package.

  • FS20 aircraft converted to FS24 (eg. Recompiled for FS24): liveries created for FS20 are completely incompatible due to different texture formats (DDS vs the new KTX2). Alrcraft loads fully pink (texture missing). All liveries need to be recompiled for FS24, which is fine and understandable, except….

  • Liveries compiled in FS24 (eg. KTX2 instead of DDS) for monolithic FS24 aircraft do not work!:

  1. Using FS20 Livery sample, modify fallbacks for specific FS24 aircraft, add textures in PNG and compile with FS24: error on compilation (Simobject is missing aircraft.cfg despite having one)

  2. Add liveries to aircraft package, compile, and extract the compiled liveries to create a new package, reconstructing the layout.json for the liveries only: package compiles correctly, but loading into MSFS Fails - all liveries included in aircraft base package are gone from fs24. New liveries (external pack) are now selectable, but completely unusable due to missing textures (pink materials)

  3. Create packs fully manually by manually generating KTX2 files and generating layout.json (technique used by most freeware devs): same issues as #2

This issue essentially breaks ALL fs20 aircraft going through conversion to FS24, and having a major effect in the freeware community. Most of these aircraft will not be converted to modular due to the amount of work required.

We need proper “native FS24 monolithic” support in FS24 or otherwise the vast majority of 3rd party content won’t be fully supported!

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Note - FS24 Modular + modular liveries work fine.

FS20 Aircraft + FS20 DDS liveries work fine (though we are moving forward with FS24 conversion due to other issues with these aircraft)

The issue is FS24 monolithic with liveries.

+1
this is truly the worst thing to happen to the Simulator as we developers can not add extra liveries to our products via any sort of livery packages.

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friendly bump

your friendly neighbourhood bump is here!

@vantech,

Would you be able to send me a sample FS24 package that doesn’t work as you expect?

Best regards,

Eric / Asobo

@EPellissier
Sent.

  • First package is a source FS20 project that includes a livery for the C17. You must try compiling with FS24, and will notice it won’t due to the aircraft.cfg issue
  • Second is a hand-made livery (eg. compiled along the aircraft, extracted the compiled livery, reconstructed layout.json manually). This one loads fine, but all other aircraft stock liveries are excluded.
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We have decided that any liveries we release would be at the expense of nuking the liveries included in the base pack, and this will likely be the case for any of our legacy FS20 catalog being converted to FS24.

That being said, this is not a sustainable solution, and there does seem to be a bug here in how FS24 handles monolithic aircraft, which will continue to exist as does not make sense to convert many older aircraft to modular.

Could you please provide an update on this matter?

@vantech

I haven’t had time to look into your repro package yet but I’ll do asap.

Best regards,

Eric / Asobo