First Flight

[TuFun]

I avoided Microslop, but thats me, plus it was on 20% sale.

 

[Daube]

Hi guys. I am still in P3Dv4.5 land and thinking of making the jump to MW2024. Are there any good set up guides or tutorials I should study?

I think the reply DennyA is a nice start

I would simply summarize like this:
- You can buy MSFS2024 from the XBox store or from Steam. I went with Steam because I already have a lot of games in Steam and I'm more familiar with that platform. If you are already a Steam user like me, I would recommend you to get MSFS2024 from Steam.
- The install is easy and fast. You only need to pay attention to selecting the correct drives to install your sim
- The sim is made of two parts: the launcher which is installed from Steam or the XBox app, and then the sim content which is downloaded from the sim itself upon first start of the launcher. As I wrote above, please be very careful about where these two parts should be installed. It's easy to overlook and you'll end up with files in some obscure path deep inside your user folder on C:\....

Forget about any tweaking of sim config files.
The sim will run beautifully as long as you configure its options properly (to avoid the ones that are too demanding for your hardware).
For identifying the "expensive" options, best is to ask here But most of them, you'll be able to figure them out by yourself with just their titles and a few tests.
It's going to be a bit frustrating to understand how to properly configure your controllers, axis etc... But once you get it, it will start to make sense and get much easier. It's just a bad but short transition period, so to say

 

[Daube]

Ah, also there are several versions of MSFS2024, with a varying amount of default planes and enhanced airport sceneries included. It's up to you to decide which one you're interested in. I's recommend you basing you choice on the included planes instead of the airports, but that's just me.
Default planes in MSFS are often (for the most) a bit limited in the realism they offer, from a flight model or avionics points of view. However they provide a very good graphic quality and quite a good initial experience (nice for a change from time to time), and for some of them, some freeware addons exist to improve them and rectify some of their flaws, so it's definitely worth investigating.

 

[expat]

Terrifically helpful - thanks guys.