28th October Developer Q&A: Begins at 10:30 AM PDT

[abrams_tank 7,393]

29 minutes ago, espent said:

I liked it. The only thing that didn't give me a warm and fuzzy feeling was when they talked about lightening. "We know about some reports about excessive lightening over Bahamas..."??? I see this pretty much everywhere. Surprised they did not know more about this.

Because they can't reproduce it.  I haven't really noticed the lightning problem either when I play.  I do see the lightning problem when other people live stream MSFS.  

This is an example of where I can't reproduce the problem, but it happens to other people.  The best way to help Asobo fix the problem is to help them reproduce it.  With respect to lightning, this is more complicated because if people are using live weather, the weather is constantly changing so it's not so easy to reproduce.

However, if you are able to reproduce the lightning bug without live weather, using the same game location and same game settings, and the lightning bug appears every time, then post details of how you were able to reproduce it in the Bugs & Issues forum at the official MSFS forums and get people to upvote that thread.  Then this will help Asobo to fix the issue.

Edited October 28, 2020 by abrams_tank

[RobJC 2,069]

7 minutes ago, ChaoticBeauty said:

One hour is not really enough to go into the specifics of each issue. They already had to skip over most of the Feedback Snapshot and forum questions to talk about those specifics, which did not happen in the last Q&A and the community manager probably did not anticipate this. Some preparation could have helped, though I'm not blaming anyone specifically.

To be fair, at least she corrected the question about the scenery gateway system that she had gotten wrong in the previous Q&A.

Exactly. One hour. This is a high level update. Personally, I think these are great. I always walk away feeling better about this project. 

[Maxis 1,857]

1 minute ago, espent said:

msfsim@microsoft.com 🙂

Good luck to whoever has to filter through that mailbox...

Considering the multitudes of people on that twitch channel i dont know why they chose to give that email out just like that for everyone to copy down. Oh well. Indeed good luck for the person sorting through it.

Their inability to reproduce the LOD and AA degradation since the Japan update is deflating. At least they detected the excessive lightning issue. The explanation of the flybywire systems and how it affects elevator authority on approach was insightful. Hopefully they can properly iron that out so i don't feel as if I've completely wasted money needlessly on the premium deluxe version since i got it only for the 787 and have only ended up using it once..

We will see if they are able to deliver on the content and fixes 

[marsman2020 1,310]

10 minutes ago, abrams_tank said:

Because they can't reproduce it.  I haven't really noticed the lightning problem either when I play.  I do see the lightning problem when other people live stream MSFS. 

I think anything involving the live weather is hard to debug. If they login days or hours later to look at something, it might not be present anymore.  In my flights in south Texas for FSEconomy I've seen a lot of annoying random lightning.  In my Alaska around the world trip, not so much. 

Later in the stream they mention adding tools to allow users to visualize what the weather is doing and how it's impacting the aircraft.  Maybe with those tools it will make it easier for us to communicate weather related issues for debugging. 

One thing I took away here is that they go back and read the chats from the Q&As after the fact.  So short of spamming the the poor person who filters the e-mail address mentioned in today's stream - posting clear and concise information in the chat for the Q&As might be the best way to get read.  I saw someone point them to the forum post about tree height vs draw distance, which hopefully someone goes and looks at. 

[abrams_tank 7,393]

Just now, marsman2020 said:

I think anything involving the live weather is hard to debug. If they login days or hours later to look at something, it might not be present anymore.  In my flights in south Texas for FSEconomy I've seen a lot of annoying random lightning.  In my Alaska around the world trip, not so much. 

Yup, live weather makes it way harder for Asobo to reproduce the bug.  So if people can reproduce the bug without using live weather, and post their game settings, location in the game (maybe even the longitude & latitude), and the pre-flight weather settings, it may help Asobo to reproduce the issue and fix the bug.

[leprechaunlive 1,852]

In other news, France is going back to lockdown mode for Covid, and with Asobo studios being in France, possibly many delays ahead of us. 

[RALF9636 1,920]

5 minutes ago, marsman2020 said:

I think anything involving the live weather is hard to debug. If they login days or hours later to look at something, it might not be present anymore. 

 

2 minutes ago, abrams_tank said:

Yup, live weather makes it way harder for Asobo to reproduce the bug.  So if people can reproduce the bug without using live weather, and post their game settings, location in the game (maybe even the longitude & latitude), and the pre-flight weather settings, it may help Asobo to reproduce the issue and fix the bug.

So here is another reason to implement historic weather. Weather bugs could more easily be reproduced using historic weather.

Still no word from them on historic weather I'm afraid.

 

[pjs37 319]

I left this pretty positive.  They kinda touched on a lot of things and sounds like they are talking to the developers a lot which is good and the issues I thought are two sided 1 part existing code and 1 part lacking in the SDK.  But actively working with developers through these issues is good.  The scenery thing is good as well I think people lose sight of just how complex this is they are rendering the whole globe at a detail not done to that level before.  Sure I wish things happened faster but I it was a pretty upbeat Q&A.

[ChaoticBeauty 6,692]

Jayne has made some posts in the official forums regarding the lack of responses for AI traffic and weather: https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/live-q-a-via-twitch/309101/

Quote

The conversation started to go towards liveries when asked about AI traffic. I asked again to bring it back towards AI traffic, but won’t push a third time live. I will send out a message to see if I can get a written responses instead, perhaps its a topic they needed to think more about instead of answering it live. It can often be overwhelming for them when put on the spot though I believe we all do our best on these streams but have definitely made some mistakes whether on me or on the team. Hopefully each dev Q&A going forward gets better and better! Apologies.

Quote

No problem. We had all the weather questions written out but as we saw the time was ticking down had to skip a whole lot of them. I think Seb could talk about that subject for hours!

 

[Moria15 950]

I was very interested in the comment that anything that was server side based..  such as Metars, some weather effects and their 3d models of aerial turbulence didn't need to wait for the main updates to change.. they have a different schedule and can be applied more frequently and at different times.

This would seem to explain why sometimes I see small things changing in the sim with regards to certain aspects..   and the comment that they sometimes try things in different server areas, or on a select few planes to see if their ideas are correct.  It also explains why I have had messages in regard to Zendesk issues I have raised asking me to re-check and confirm post a certain date and time.

It was interesting and reminded me that when filing a zendesk issue, it's important to also log the time and date of the issue as this may be relevant to a server update..

Graham

Edited October 28, 2020 by Moria15

[Steku 158]

Listening to MS/Asobo managers today I developed following theory:

Severals months/years ago they developed a plan how to build this new sim. It took longer (it always takes longer in the gaming industry) so the executives started being afraid of the costs. So the MFS team decided to release the in-progress product, supported by effective marketing campaign. It generated a lot of revenue, so the execs were happy and allowed keeping or even expanding the team. 

What, I believe, they are doing now is just continuing the original development plan. They are aware of the missing/underdeveloped components and they are focusing on them, without mentioning it too much. For example the performance optimizations. They know that a lot of code will still change, so it would be a waste of time working on the related bugs. 

This would explain:

- why the patches are so big, with very limited change logs referring mostly to the well known bugs, 

- why they ignore the superb input of people like CptLucky8 (the author of "tall buildings fix") regarding LOD/draw distance - they know that there are much more underdeveloped pieces which must be addressed first, 

- why they plan to issue so many patches - I would rather call them releases.

Let's hope they know what they are doing and that they will be able too keep/expand the team and deliver the release ready version as originally planned, probably mid 2021. Weren't you surprised when they set release date in August? We were probably all excited about this, but we also felt it was to good to be true. Maybe they were forced to demonstrate that they are able to generate the revenue, so they did. 

It's just a theory... 

Edited October 28, 2020 by Steku

[iFlySimX 748]

This all sounds positive! The futures looks very bright and even today while the sim is far from perfect, I still love it and I don't think I could go back to any other sims. 

[bobcat999 8,444]

3 minutes ago, Steku said:

It's just a theory... 

There could be a lot of truth in that.  I would still rather have the sim now and acknowledge the issues, as I have been having a lot of fun with it, and judging by youtube, so have lots of others. 🙂

[RALF9636 1,920]

15 minutes ago, Steku said:

Severals months/years ago they developed a plan how to build this new sim. It took longer (it always takes longer in the gaming industry) so the executives started being afraid of the costs. So the MFS team decided to release the in-progress product, supported by effective marketing campaign. It generated a lot of revenue, so the execs were happy and allowed keeping or even expanding the team. 

What, I believe, they are doing now is just continuing the original development plan. ...

It's just a theory... 

Sounds plausible to me.

Somewhere along the way they shifted from "we don't do things half-arsed" to "launch is just the beginning" and "going broader instead of deeper".

I'm not complaining though, I enjoy MSFS as it is now more than I ever enjoyed any other flightsim before and I wouldn't want to have missed any day with MSFS. It will mature in the coming months, we already have a fantastic freeware modder community with some outstanding high quality products and payware developers will thrive around MSFS soon when the SDK gets more matured - certainly going both broader and deeper.

I am looking forward to the further development.

 

 

Edited October 28, 2020 by RALF9636

[sanh 823]

1 hour ago, Tom_L said:

Unfortunately the "community manager" doesn't seem to be up to her task: Apart from the poorly structured "interview" there were very specific questions for "AI" and "Live weather", very well summarized and condensed by the OP's in the top posts of the respective threads in the Q&A forum - and it seemed as if she hadn't understood them at all. To me it seemed more improvised than prepared - and a wasted opportunity sadly.

Disagree. The AI question was half a page long. If you want straightforward answers you have to ask straightforward questions. Loads of people on the msfs forums asking why the lack of ai traffic was not answered. Well if the question was "why is there no or so little ai traffic at airports?" them it would be answered. Half a page of questions to be answered on a live q&a only 1hr long is always going to be a mess. The community needs to come up with clear questions rather than vague rambling questions.

Edited October 28, 2020 by sanh