Flight Simulator 2024, the Airline, and ACARS - What does the future hold?

As any of the early adopters to Flight Simulator 2024 will have discovered, the new simulator doesn’t work directly with ACARS, or LittleNavMap. I’ll get to what I mean by “directly” in a moment.

The problem

LittleNavMap and ACARS cannot read the scenery files from Flight Simulator 2024 to compile their database of airports, because the scenery files aren’t there any more - the scenery data is streamed from the cloud while you are flying.

A potential workaround

A potential workaround that various developers have been looking at, is to use the SimConnect interface (the API that is commonly used to return your aircraft position). Within SimConnect, there is a call to return nearby facilities - the nearest airports list you would see in a Garmin GPS, for example. The problem with this? It references the aircraft position, and doesn’t return all of the data about each given airport, it’s navaids, or procedures.

You could speculate that programming could spider from airport to airport, moving the aircraft position, and building a map algorithmically - and you would also speculate that if you’re Asobo, you would throttle such behaviours - because they will degrade performance for everybody else.

The obvious workaround at the moment - at least for LittleNavMap - is to continue using the scenery database from Flight Simulator 2020 - you just won’t be able to update it any time soon.

The future

Many developers have asked Asobo for a method of accessing the scenery data once again. Some of them had found the BGL files within the 2024 install (the legacy scenery file format) - but over the Christmas period those files were removed from the stock installation (I believe in the mid-December update).

Watch this space

All we can do at the moment is wait and see what happens. Whatever Asobo do, the developers of platforms such as phpVMS (that the airline is based on), ACARS (that the airline uses), and LittleNavMap are doing their best to find a solution.

I wouldn’t be surprised if an entirely new API arrives, allowing the scenery and weather data to be interrogated. When that might arrive though, is anybody’s guess.

Even if a solution arrives, it may be months before the airline can support 2024 - if at all. Like I said - we’ll have to wait and see what happens.