OCTOBER 22ND, 2020 DEVELOPMENT UPDATE

POSTED BY: MICROSOFT FLIGHT SIMULATOR TEAM

Screenshot by c0mmanderkiller

 

“I’m more than happy they’re making an effort to keep the development process open, and to give us updates about the progress. I’d say keep publishing updates on a weekly basis.”     – Avsim user

You got it! You’ve heard us say it a thousand times, “This is just the beginning,” and we mean it. Weekly Development posts will continue as we focus on providing updates to the sim on a regular basis and ingest your feedback daily. We are prepped to release Update #5 next week and will provide more details then. We aren’t going anywhere!

Speaking of, our next live Developer Q&A is scheduled for next Wednesday, October 28th at 10:30am PDT. Scroll down to the Twitch section of this update for more information.

– MSFS TEAM

 

PARTNERSHIP SERIES UPDATE

The first seven episodes of our Partnership Series introduced key partners that helped us in the creation of Microsoft Flight Simulator like meteoblue (real-time weather system), Blackshark.ai (procedural building generation, etc.), VATSIM (online air traffic control and flying community), Bing Maps (satellite and aerial imagery as well as DEM), Textron (close partnership in the development of 10 of our 30 launch planes), Gaya Simulations (development of airports and POIs for World Updates), and Aerosoft (retail edition and feedback on our SDK).

We could not have created the simulator without these teams and are very grateful for the fruitful partnerships we have formed with these experts during the past years of development. In the coming weeks and months, we will continue this series and will present our collaborations with Azure Cognitive Services, NAVBLUE, key third party partners, several plane manufacturers, peripheral makers, and a few surprises.

 

AROUND THE WORLD SERIES EPISODE 5 – NORTH AMERICA

 

VR CLOSED BETA

Good news! We are on track with our upcoming VR build and will be sending out emails next week to our first wave of VR testers. As a reminder, Wave 1 is for WMR (Windows Mixed Reality) VR users only and Wave 2 will be for non-WMR users. Stay tuned and we look forward to working with you.

 

DEVELOPMENT ROADMAP 

 

FEEDBACK SNAPSHOT

 

SDK UPDATE

The SDK team continues to improve many areas of the SDK based on input from the developer community. Recent work focused on:

• DevMode:
  • The new Export Window is ready and will be made available in a future update.
  • The node-based Visual Effects System is about ready to be used in production by the internal team. We will make it available broadly after the internal tests are complete.
  • Improvements, new options, and small features continue to be added here and there in tools. To list just one of them: an optional auto-hide behavior is currently being implemented for the DevMode bar.
  • As a background task the DevMode team is always working on improving the overall stability of the DevMode, giving a special focus to the Project Editor, the Scenery Editor, and the Aircraft Editor. The community’s feedback continues to be helpful to identify & fix bugs and thus make the tools better.
• WebAssembly:
  • The WASI layer filesystem functions have now all been implemented.
  • Mouse events are now forwarded to gauges through a new callback.
  • Preparing the new GDI+ implementation for release.
• New samples (windsock and bears) have been added to the SDK.

 

3RD PARTY UPDATE

65 partners have been approved to our Marketplace Partnership Program and the amount of content keeps growing! We added another 5 airports to the marketplace last week and we are excited to publish new aircraft from IndiaFoxtEcho Visual Simulations and IRIS Simulations soon. We are also very pleased with the progress Aerosoft is making with the upcoming Bombardier CRJ. It’s exciting to see the progress aircraft developers are making!

 

MARKETPLACE UPDATE

This week we have 6 new products and 4 updated products in the Marketplace:

 

6 NEW PRODUCTS

 

4 UPDATED PRODUCTS

 

TWITCH SCHEDULE

We have a ton of fun content coming next week! But don’t forget, tomorrow at 1900Z we are welcoming back community member SeedyL as he gives us a guided tour of Banff National Park in Canada! If you are interested in joining us for this flight, check out more details here.

Next week, we will kick off the streams by bringing Chewwy94 back to the channel! He is a fantastic flight simmer and content creator in the Twitch community and we can’t wait to fly with him.

On Wednesday, our monthly Developer Q&A will be live and you can post or upvote questions for that stream here. In this stream, we will go over the Feedback Snapshot, announcements, and your community questions.

Last but not least, we will host a special “spooky” community fly-in on Friday. We currently have a livery contest going on in Discord, so if you love creating liveries come enter! Have a great weekend and we look forward to spending time with you on Twitch.

 

MORE AMAZING SCREENSHOTS FROM THE COMMUNITY

Screenshot by KerionZoldik

 

Screenshot by ScarsdaleTim

 

Screenshot by gordongreig

 

Screenshot by arcolegrove

 

Screenshot by mpvalmiki

 

Screenshot by Pacifica9287

 

Screenshot by simtom2

 

Screenshot by gordongreig

 

NEXT UPDATE – 10.29

Sincerely,

Microsoft Flight Simulator Team

Edited October 22, 20205 yr by ChaoticBeauty

I don’t understand how some items are marked as in ‘update 9’ when update 5 isn’t even out yet, and nothing is marked for update 6 or 7. Is update 9 going to me something major or something? 

All i know is this sim is pretty amazing. Can't wait to see it evolve over the next year. Incredible. 

Edited October 22, 20205 yr by RobJC

2 minutes ago, Ianrivaldosmith said:

I don’t understand how some items are marked as in ‘update 9’ when update 5 isn’t even out yet, and nothing is marked for update 6 or 7. Is update 9 going to me something major or something? 

My guess is that Updates 5 & 9 will be the Simulation Updates, since the Feedback Snapshot suggests that they will be improving the flight dynamics and system issues. It would fit with their planned cadence of a Simulation Update every 2-3 months. We shall see next Tuesday.

3 minutes ago, Ianrivaldosmith said:

I don’t understand how some items are marked as in ‘update 9’ when update 5 isn’t even out yet, and nothing is marked for update 6 or 7. Is update 9 going to me something major or something? 

As best I can tell, the first Garmin updates have been scheduled for that time slot... Lets hope they are worth the wait! 🙂

You can read into that what you like, but I am hoping that they realize that this is going to require some work/time to accomplish.

Seems like they learned their lesson of introducing new bugs when trying to fix the old ones, and now they are going to progress at much slower pace but probably more thorough testing. Updates 4 and 5 seems quite small. We will need to be patient, seems like a long way to fix the bugs introduced so far e.g. the draw distance / LOD issue. 

Edited October 22, 20205 yr by Steku

That 3 minute video went by way too fast. I can't wait to explore the new scenery of North America.

3 minutes ago, airlinejets said:

That 3 minute video went by way too fast. I can't wait to explore the new scenery of North America.

If I am not mistaken, that video features the scenery as it exists today..

3 minutes ago, Bert Pieke said:

If I am not mistaken, that video features the scenery as it exists today..

Quoting @scotchegg

Lovely video but given the water masking and extended LODs I'm guessing that's not the current release build.

 

3 minutes ago, Bert Pieke said:

If I am not mistaken, that video features the scenery as it exists today..

Not according to the augmented scenery release schedule. NA was the next region after Japan to get a marked increase in scenery fidelity. I could be mistaken though.

So the constant thunder and lighting in mostly clear skies without an actual Thunderstorm in sight that was introduced on the last patch (using Live WX) is 'under investigation' and backlogged......????   Not sure how something like this is not at the top of the fix list. We are now relying on "votes" to determine what gets fixed??

 

Edited October 22, 20205 yr by Flic1

I find their regular reassurances that ‘this is just the beginning’ and ‘we aren’t going anywhere’ reassuringly reassuring.

Edited October 22, 20205 yr by scotchegg

If they get the beta testing team setup properly, that will allow Asobo to get more aggressive with fixes and the addition of new features.  The beta testing team will be able to root out the major bugs, giving Asobo more confidence when they release a patch.

I hope Asobo can leverage a beta testing team like they are already doing for the VR beta.  Then we can more fixes and more features, while the patch shouldn’t have game stopper bugs like the VFR map bug or the sensitivity menu bug.

Observations:

1) Weekly development updates to continue, as it seems the majority wish to happen.👍

2) "an optional auto-hide behavior is currently being implemented for the DevMode bar." So it looks like we can have DevMode running without the distraction of a constant toolbar (much as with the main flight toolbar).👍 Still hope we'll get an aircraft switch option without needing DevMode running (handy if you've set up a flight and forgotten to change your aircraft before clicking Fly Now).

3) It will be interesting to see Toronto compared to the already impressive freeware from one of our own forum members.

4) Hope that removing Press Any Key will actually speed things up. Not sure if that's been promised. I'd like to think it will, but it may only just avoid the potential delay if you don't click it immediately.

5) I'd like to see the taxiway arrow reworking and removing vehicles from runways/taxiways addressed sooner, but as they don't actually cause any failures of anything other than realism, I can understand them not being a priority.

Edited October 22, 20205 yr by 109Sqn

7 minutes ago, Flic1 said:

So the constant thunder and lighting in mostly clear skies without an actual Thunderstorm in sight that was introduced on the last patch (using Live WX) is 'under investigation' and backlogged......????   Not sure how something like this is shouldn't be at the top of the fix list....

 

Did you vote? There are many topics at the MSFS forum on the subject.