November 5th 2020 - Development Update

[ChaoticBeauty 6,692]

NOVEMBER 5TH, 2020 DEVELOPMENT UPDATE

POSTED BY: MICROSOFT FLIGHT SIMULATOR TEAM

Screenshot by YusufWardana

 

Over the past weeks, the COVID-19 situation has evolved, and France has been affected, rolling out a new lockdown of our country this November.

At Asobo Studio, we have worked hard to ensure the safety of our staff above all, while upgrading our equipment & infrastructure. Today a large part of our employees are working from home to stay with their families. At the studio everything is put together to ensure the highest level of personal safety. Naturally, our team is committed to providing our Sim community the best service and to achieving our goals. Be sure we will do what it takes to support everyone’s sim experience even if – we know you will understand – our priority is to preserve the health of our mates. Our thoughts are with all of you around the globe facing this pandemic and with the medical professionals, for whom we are sincerely grateful.

Stay safe, everyone and see you in flight!

–ASOBO TEAM-

 

DEVELOPMENT ROADMAP

 

FEEDBACK SNAPSHOT

 

SDK UPDATE

• DevMode:
  • Node-based Visual Effects System continues to be improved with more and more useful features, allowing setting-up great effects in the sim. We are now focusing on improving the system’s performance.
  • We started designing a way to easily create new assets from within the Project Editor, starting from given available asset templates. We should essentially focus on types: new Mission, new Airport & new Aircraft.
  • Improvements, new options, and small features keep on being added here and there in tools.
  • To list just one of them: a new auto-hide feature is now available for the DevMode bar.
  • As a background task the DevMode team is always working on improving the overall stability of the DevMode, especially giving special focus to the Project Editor, the Scenery Editor, and the Aircraft Editor.

The community’s feedback continues to be very helpful to identify and fix bugs, making the tools better.

• WebAssembly
  • Mouse events are now correctly forwarded when multiple WASM gauges are used in one single Virtual Cockpit.
  • Lowered memory consumption during WASM module compilation.

 

TWITCH UPDATE

Last week we held our monthly Dev Q&A which you can check out now:

Tomorrow, our community friend ForderLearnToFly will be giving us a guided tour of Rome, Italy! All are welcome to join with us and fly over this scenic and historical location. More details can be found here.

Join us next week as we explore VATSIM with LondonController on Tuesday, at the end of the week our guests SeedyL and FactualGull will be back with us to give a guided tour of Tanzania!

 

MORE AMAZING SCREENSHOTS FROM THE COMMUNITY

Screenshot by WatchfulLand959

 

Screenshot by centeringtube

 

Screenshot by Stanty

 

Screenshot by mikeyblue005

 

Screenshot by gordongreig

 

Screenshot by KerionZoldik

 

Screenshot by BrawnierHook18

 

Screenshot by Unclebob6968

 

Screenshot by Machete3181

 

Screenshot by damiankadziela

 

NEXT DEVELOPMENT UPDATE BLOG – 11.12

Sincerely,

Microsoft Flight Simulator Team

Edited November 5, 2020 by ChaoticBeauty

[Tuskin38 5,931]

Hm next Partnership update says EAA. Googling the abbreviation related to aviation, I'm guessing it's this?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_Aircraft_Association

Hm. no info for next week's patch.

Edited November 5, 2020 by Tuskin38

[captain420 3,066]

Looking for to update #6 with the CPU optimizations!

[Dillon 2,050]

I guess no night lighting fix... Hope all stay safe over there.

[hs118 668]

I'm not seeing anything here or otherwise about all the download problems. Very disheartening. I haven't been able to use the sim since the last update came out. Tried many of the "solutions" to no avail. 

It's pretty evident this is some kind of issue with the base updating mechanism and/or the servers. 

Edited November 5, 2020 by yurei

[LarryD 132]

The most interesting thing to me is the change for the Garmin autopilot systems.  Initially it was update 9 which was thought to be in December, but now it's Feb 21.  Sounds good to me.

[CFIJose 5,484]

I'm very happy that they are addressing the live weather feature.

[marsman2020 1,310]

Garmin and AP fixed moved from Update 9 (~late December) to 'Feb 21` 😞  6 months of having basic avionics features totally broken after release.

Night lighting fixed marked as 'released' even though they introduced a lot of new problems with night lighting. 

Metric units marked as 'released' enough though there are major issues with unit conversions related to the ALT bug and pressing the ALT HOLD AP key.

Nothing else of note in this.  Everything we voted on is either 'Backlog', 'Under Investigation', or some other non-statement.

Lots of screenshots.  MS Screenshot Simulator 2020.

Not much of a roadmap.  The only thing we seem to get with Update 6 is a 'partially fixed' on the lightning that was introduced several updates ago.

Edited November 5, 2020 by marsman2020

[Tuskin38 5,931]

5 minutes ago, Dillon said:

I guess no night lighting fix... Hope all stay safe over there.

They didn't even give patch notes, and most people over on those forums don't seem to mind it.

[andrecarli737 177]

No marketplace update? Lame

[fppilot 4,256]

What the heck?

Lightening in mostly sunny skies?  Is there a language problem here?  The lightening issues I have experienced in sunny skies are closely adjacent to live weather showers. The issues have been lightening and thunder in areas where there are rain showers but not thunderstorms.  And then the issue where the sim is producing lightening and thunder, it is so relentless and non stop that the world seems to be coming to and end.  Totally unrealistic.

G1000/G30000 & Autopilot issues:  Started, February 21 update????  February 21st?  Not trolling here, but this with certainty answers the S vs G question.  Unbelievable.
 

 

Edited November 5, 2020 by fppilot

[marsman2020 1,310]

5 minutes ago, andrecarli737 said:

No marketplace update? Lame

They broke a lot of SDK stuff in Update 5, so maybe they put all the new Marketplace updates on hold until they can get that sorted out.

[Dillon 2,050]

5 minutes ago, Tuskin38 said:

They didn't even give patch notes, and most people over on those forums don't seem to mind it.

I'm avoiding night flying at this time because it's so bad.  On a human aspect to make it easy on Asobo dealing with the Covid situation just revert it back and table it for now.

[andrecarli737 177]

1 minute ago, marsman2020 said:

They broke a lot of SDK stuff in Update 5, so maybe they put all the new Marketplace updates on hold until they can get that sorted out.

I mean, one or two people should be managing the marketplace products and updates. There are some 3 weeks to 1 month old products that either haven't been updated nor it was introduced to the markeplace.

[marsman2020 1,310]

9 minutes ago, fppilot said:

What the heck?

Lightening in mostly sunny skies?  Is there a language problem here?  The lightening issues I have experienced, in in sunny skies, are closely adjacent to live weather showers. The issues have been lightening and thunder in areas where there are rain showers but not thunderstorms.  And then the issue where the sim is producing lightening and thunder, it is so relentless and non stop that the world seems to be coming to and end.  Totally unrealistic.

G1000/G30000 & Autopilot issues:  Started, February 21 update????  Not trolling here, but this with certainty answers the S vs G question.  Unbelievable.

This and the fact that they let people badger them into VR instead of leaving it for later after the actual simulation was done... 

You need high framerates to avoid motion sickness in VR.  Very few systems (if any!) are going to deliver 90fps to the 2 2160x2160 displays on a Reverb G2 to avoid simulation sickness.  Spending any time on VR now is totally stupid.  They've put all the VR Beta people under NDA though, and I'm sure they will send entire tower PCs with 3090s and make sure the YouTubers who review the "awesome VR experience" are doing so under controller conditions (GA aircraft only, smaller airports, for short durations to avoid motion sickness due to low FPS) to make sure that the reviews are good to drive up sales of the "simulator" and their partners VR headsets.  Then when people complain about motion sickness on their actual computers + expensive new VR headsets they will just add a link to where to buy airsickness bags or a recommendation to only use VR for < a few minutes at a time to the UI and mark it as 'released' and 'fixed'.

Edited November 5, 2020 by marsman2020