February 25th, 2021 - Development Update

[regis9 4,013]

Just now, tweekz said:

Exactly, they need public beta testing.

I would love to see this through an opt-in system for the beta.  I know it’s a far less complicated sim, but this is the approach that American Truck Simulator uses with great success.  I’m currently playing their 1.40 open beta and it gets updates every day or so based on community testing feedback.  I always know that if a beta really borks something up I can revert to the stable 1.39 and keep enjoying the sim while they sort out the beta.

[pmb 5,137]

1 hour ago, regis9 said:

I would love to see this through an opt-in system for the beta.  I know it’s a far less complicated sim, but this is the approach that American Truck Simulator uses with great success.  

X-Plane and Aerofly have this, too, and it works pretty well. If no one else does, I will put this forward for the next Q&A just announced in this Development Update.

Kind regards, Michael

[neil0311 366]

8 hours ago, sanh said:

Regardless of the fix there are certain tests they have to be performed before releasing an update irrespective of the changes made.

Then I would hardly expect them to work weekends for this.

So a week sounds reasonable. 

I can't help but feel reading these comments that some people are confusing Microsoft with an indie developer.

Exactly, or a $100 commercial game for something else. 

[neil0311 366]

2 hours ago, pmb said:

MS/Asobo will inevitably have to introduce a stable and a development branch.

They do need some kind of beta test or ringed deployment methodology, but they’re also delivering updates very quickly.

Would the community rather see updates every 6 months that underwent 3 months of beta and RC testing, or quicker release?

We have people here bitching about a week delay to an update, so you can’t have it both ways.

 

[RXP 2,338]

18 minutes ago, neil0311 said:

Would the community rather see updates every 6 months that underwent 3 months of beta and RC testing, or quicker release?

We have people here bitching about a week delay to an update, so you can’t have it both ways.

But isn't this argument somewhat of a fallacy?

The "game" has been beta tested by thousands of users and as far as I can see, most bugs reported today from a simmer expectation are still the same reported back then. The very reason they have to release frequent updates and why people are expecting them is because there are blatant bugs remaining in the product preventing using some of its features entirely, or they are wrongly implemented rendering their use questionable for a simmer point of view.

Should the bugs and issues reported during beta would have been corrected and all the feature set for a simmer would have been functional, maybe not 100% but "sufficiently", I'm certain most would be fine waiting 6 months for an update because during that time, you could still enjoy the game for what they pretend it is, a simulator for simmers.

Having said this, their decision to lock out 3rd party (except the ones they work daily with and spend late weekends implementing their needs) is not helping either because I can say without any shadow of a doubt most problems can be solved by 3rd party if only they unlock the core, as it has always been over the last 20 years I've been contributing to the franchise,

[pmb 5,137]

49 minutes ago, neil0311 said:

They do need some kind of beta test or ringed deployment methodology, but they’re also delivering updates very quickly.

In my opinion, it's not the speed of updates. Rather these updates should converge to a stable state from which the developers can go on with new features. So those users (and developers) wanting to rely on the stable version can do so. While those wanting to try new features can opt in for an open beta branch - and return to the stable one if they are fed up.

As already noted, this scheme works for a lot of other games like ETS/ATS, X-Plane, and AeroflyFS. It certainly would require an internal re-allocation of resources, deployment of some infrastructure etc. from the side of MS/Asobo and thus it's non-trivial - but in my mind inevitable.

Kind regards, Michael

[sd_flyer 6,038]

So I checked marketplace this morning and found no changes. Oddly enough Las Vegas which had couple a bunch of positive rating before now has zero review. Seems like they loaded  week old backup or something ?

[Nedo68 533]

1 hour ago, RXP said:

Should the bugs and issues reported during beta would have been corrected and all the feature set for a simmer would have been functional, maybe not 100% but "sufficiently

this only happens in a dream world, a bug is not the same bug, maybe some bugs needs month and even more to be corrected, but this should not stop new stuff to be added, if so we would be not even at world update #1

Edited February 26, 2021 by Nedo68

[marsman2020 1,310]

11 minutes ago, sd_flyer said:

So I checked marketplace this morning and found no changes. Oddly enough Las Vegas which had couple a bunch of positive rating before now has zero review. Seems like they loaded  week old backup or something ?

I've seen a bunch of comments over on the MSFS forums of people leaving star reviews on the Eurofighter Typhoon, but it shows no stars.

This is after Jorg stated in the last Dev Q&A that they don't plan to curate the quality of Marketplace content and people should use the star reviews....

[RXP 2,338]

5 minutes ago, Nedo68 said:

if so we would would be not even at world update #1

I agree, we would most likely be at Simulator #1 instead and this is not leaving in a dream world, it is delivering what it is marketed for. Please understand I'm not talking a bug free product either, just a "simulator for simmers" feature complete product instead. Feature complete doesn't mean no bugs either, and some might argue there are always new features to add and it is never complete and I agree with this argument. But what most are talking about in these board I believe, but might be wrong, are features as basic as properly handling ground friction, prop wash, ground effect, etc... just to name a few and to illustrate what I'm referring to. But this is a very small set of core problems and actually maybe not even illustrative of the many more problems a simmer wouldn't expect finding in a simulator. For example I've posted this one this morning about controllers:

https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/interview-with-jorg-neumann-head-of-microsoft-flight-simulator-on-future-updates-and-plans-ai-the-airport-gateway-the-xbox-version-the-garmin-and-a-lot-more/360920/220?u=cptlucky8

Edited February 26, 2021 by RXP

[marsman2020 1,310]

7 minutes ago, Nedo68 said:

this only happens in a dream world, a bug is not the same bug, maybe some bugs needs month and even more to be corrected, but this should not stop new stuff to be added, if so we would be not even at world update #1

This simulator was released as a hot mess of barely working and incomplete stuff, tossed over to marketing and YouTube "influencers" to get the hype-train going.

Plenty of software is better developed and released more complete, and I'm frankly exhausted with people suggesting we a customers should accept a poor product because "software is hard".  Everyone who wants to make that excuse should just go make a single "software is hard" thread and go stoke each other's egos about hard software over there.

I have over 500 games in my Steam library and this is probably the most bug-ridden non-Early Access title I have every had to deal with. 

Personally I think all the gaming press owe it to consumers to come back and write about how we've had 3 server outages in two weeks, game breaking bugs, terrible avionics, weather that is wrong half the time, and how so few items flagged by users (including totally game breaking things like overall stability/CTDs, being unable to interact with cockpit items with the mouse, or being unable to load into the game at all due to corrupted cloud profiles) have been addressed after 6 months.  They created the hype-train and it should be on them to come back and tell the real story.

Edited February 26, 2021 by marsman2020

[Nedo68 533]

3 minutes ago, marsman2020 said:

bla bla bla

sorry but to be honest.

[JBDB-MD80 1,473]

Contrails coming, yea. Just ignored the other mess in this thread.

[frankla 44]

Where did you see that contrails are coming?

[frankla 44]

45 minutes ago, jbdbow1970 said:

Contrails coming, yea. Just ignored the other mess in this thread.

Where did you see that contrails are coming?