2 hours ago, suncoastflyer said:

I still can't believe it hasn't even been a year from release and we already have a PMDG aircraft on our doorstep. Imagine where we'll be next year - it gives me chills.

This happens when you get full developer support. Was not the case with p3d/fsx and the team at pmdg had to rely on hacks to make things work since the dev support was non existent. Pmdg CEO gives a huge praise to devs at Asobo for this in his video.

1 hour ago, kevinfirth said:

HAVENT DONE THIS WITH THE PUBLICLY AVAILABLE SDK! 

Sorry to say that Kevin but what you say is totally garbage. First there is no such thing called "private SDK" or "public SDK". When developer here refer to SDK, they refer to the APIs (Application Programming Interface) which are aka Simconnect APIs/Simvars, which add-ones uses to access the sim's functionality. These can't be private because they are integral part of the software. So if you say, they had different treatment from Asobo in terms supporting them and answering questions, I would agree with you maybe but spreading misinformation and conspiracy theories so say they are using some sort of "private" SDK without proper facts, is not acceptable. I am pretty sure you are being fed with these false info from the third party developers in P3D fourms which they have been already known of their stand against MSFS and thus, of course they would do the best at their ability to keep spreading misinformation. 

 

 

2 minutes ago, omarsmak30 said:

Sorry to say that Kevin but what you say is totally garbage. First there is no such thing called "private SDK" or "public SDK". When developer here refer to SDK, they refer to the APIs (Application Programming Interface) which are aka Simconnect APIs/Simvars, which add-ones uses to access the sim's functionality. These can't be private because they are integral part of the software. So if you say, they had different treatment from Asobo in terms supporting them and answering questions, I would agree with you maybe but spreading misinformation and conspiracy theories so say they are using some sort of "private" SDK without proper facts, is not acceptable. I am pretty sure you are being fed with these false info from the third party developers in P3D fourms which they have been already known of their stand against MSFS and thus, of course they would do the best at their ability to keep spreading misinformation. 

 

 

Exaclty, We have to stop this nonsense. If you don't adapt, you are left behind. I've seen many dev here who refuses to change and adapt. Sure they can still survive on P3D for now but for how long ?

43 minutes ago, Baber20 said:

This happens when you get full developer support. Was not the case with p3d/fsx and the team at pmdg had to rely on hacks to make things work since the dev support was non existent. Pmdg CEO gives a huge praise to devs at Asobo for this in his video.

and rightly so. ever since i stepped into tje "dev world" i have been amazed at how helpful and easily accessible Asobo's dev are. Special mention to Selmar, Lionel, Benjami', and Eric aka The Legend.

We must be happy to see the one of the flight simulation's kingpins is getting on well with the dev team...

4 hours ago, leprechaunlive said:

and to be even clearer, what really is lacking is DOCUMENTATIONS on the new features MSFS brought. Wich is why there is no special secret SDK, there are just asobos dev helping some top tier devs decypher those features . While the rest of us small devs, just wait for the holes to get filled in the docs, and also rely on some incredibly dedicated Asobos dev taking on their own personal time to give us a hand 

This is probably the most accurate criticism of the current state in this entire thread.  And you offered it without being snarky or condescending or overly confrontational.  Thank you for that.  If only more people could follow your model. 🙂

Yes, one of the current shortcomings is a lack of useful documentation on how some things work.  But there is active work going on to approve that.   And there are things in the works to further help reduce that knowledge gap -- you've probably seen the news about Answerhub, which will give people a greater opportunity to get assistance both from the folks who are in the code daily and other 3PDs who may already know the lay of the land.

As you fairly point out, capabilities are pointless if people don't know they exist.  I truly don't think there is very much that can't be figured out by a determined developer -- to the best of my memory, nothing we have released publicly at WT has used any information that we had to get from asking folks at Asobo.  Probably the closest thing to that is when the flaps bug hit, there was some direct communication going on over what had happened and what could be done as a workaround, but that information was shared readily and not kept private to favor "insiders" with secret knowledge.

Yes, figuring things out by experimentation and reverse engineering is time consuming, and making the call to do that as a commercial developer, rather than a hobbyist, is difficult.  I get that, I've had to make a lot of calls like that in my professional career.  But, as I've suggested both in this thread and others:  most of the time, the answers are there, the methods are there, for folks who are actually interested in getting them.

But yes.  That's not good enough, and everyone knows it.  Improvements are coming.

 

Edited May 23, 20215 yr by kaosfere

It's what he described above + the moving target issue with all the updates. Those are the main issues, though there are also other issues, but solving these 2 problems and we will see a lot more high quality planes come to market from smaller more independent developers.

 

Edited May 23, 20215 yr by Alpine Scenery

5 minutes ago, kaosfere said:

This is probably the most accurate criticism of the current state in this entire thread

Isn't this precisely the conclusion I came to earlier here?

https://www.avsim.com/forums/topic/600748-pmdg-is-coming-to-msfs/?do=findComment&comment=4539264

Ok, I'm willing to re-evaluate my beliefs in the face of contradictory evidence - if 2 devs who have actually worked on this stuff say nay, I can't argue with that 🙂 Apols if I put anyone's nose out of joint...

It seems the facts bear out the following then:

The documentation is incomplete;

Asobo have access and understanding to the architecture to achieve things beyond the reach of others; and

They have special partnerships with some 3PDs through which they have shared some of this knowledge and understanding, or made helpful changes to the base sim code, in order to enable some 3PDs to more rapidly accomplish their particular products.

Have I got that right? 

 

7 minutes ago, kevinfirth said:

Isn't this precisely the conclusion I came to earlier here?

https://www.avsim.com/forums/topic/600748-pmdg-is-coming-to-msfs/?do=findComment&comment=4539264

Ok, I'm willing to re-evaluate my beliefs in the face of contradictory evidence - if 2 devs who have actually worked on this stuff say nay, I can't argue with that 🙂 Apols if I put anyone's nose out of joint...

It seems the facts bear out the following then:

The documentation is incomplete;

Asobo have access and understanding to the architecture to achieve things beyond the reach of others; and

They have special partnerships with some 3PDs through which they have shared some of this knowledge and understanding, or made helpful changes to the base sim code, in order to enable some 3PDs to more rapidly accomplish their particular products.

Have I got that right? 

 

yep, thats it in a nutshell. 🙂

18 minutes ago, kevinfirth said:

Asobo have access and understanding to the architecture to achieve things beyond the reach of others; and

They have special partnerships with some 3PDs through which they have shared some of this knowledge and understanding, or made helpful changes to the base sim code, in order to enable some 3PDs to more rapidly accomplish their particular products.

Have I got that right? 

I hope so, I hope the developer (Asobo) has a better understanding of the architecture than people that didn't write the code.

1 hour ago, omarsmak30 said:

I would agree with you maybe but spreading misinformation and conspiracy theories so say they are using some sort of "private" SDK without proper facts, is not acceptable. I am pretty sure you are being fed with these false info from the third party developers in P3D fourms which they have been already known of their stand against MSFS and thus, of course they would do the best at their ability to keep spreading misinformation. 

This same thing was spread at the dev forums, I never put much weight into it as being true.

That said, there are (or at least were) a lot fewer functions available in the SimConnect library than P3D, at least that is what I hear. I haven't used SimConnect yet much for what I have been doing. Also the compilers that compile the projects. You have to use both parts, and the problem is there is a lot of undocumented things across the board. 

Edited May 23, 20215 yr by Alpine Scenery

3 minutes ago, kevinfirth said:

Isn't this precisely the conclusion I came to earlier here?

Yes and no.   You talk about developers having "privileged access".  Sure, it is true there are some folks Asobo has worked very closely with, but I don't think it was done with the intent of giving anyone an unfair advantage or secret knowledge.   (Although I'm pretty sure that a few of the developers who weren't worked with as closely may see it that way, which could cause some of the toxic attitudes some legacy devs seem to have about things.)

And, while I haven't personally audited every line of code in the sim, I'm pretty sure there aren't any hidden switches anywhere that somehow enable functionality if you're PMDG or Aerosoft.  You'll have to take my word on that, but I believe it to be true.   And I think it makes sense:  conspiracy theories aside, it's in the interest of Asobo and Microsoft to have as many possible people making cool things for the sim so they sell lots of copies and everyone gets to bring home dinner.  🙂

Rather, the general purpose of that collaboration was to allow those higher-end developers to help shape the SDK into what would allow them to do their work, and allow everyone else to do cool things too.  Features that may have been added to the SDK to enable Aerosoft to build the CRJ, or PMDG to build the DC6 or 737, also ended up available to every other developer.

There's also the complicating matter -- and one that can be really difficult for nontech folks to understand, which makes the matter even more muddled when it hits the forums -- that there are basically two different dev stacks for the sim.   You have the HTML/JS side, and the C++/WASM side.  And there hasn't necessarily been 100% feature parity between them.   To do some things you may have needed to dip into one stack or another. 

There are a few things on the CJ4 we've had to use WASM for.   It wasn't our preferred tech stack for that plane, but we had to use it to make things we wanted to happen happen.  So we sucked it up and did it.

But some developers aren't comfortable with that, either for reasons of knowledge or an interest in protecting what they may consider to be their own super-secret sauce.  (Or, perhaps, sometimes just laziness.)   There have been a number of cases of developers publicly stating "we can't do this yet", and other people taking that as gospel, when what they really meant was "we can't do this yet with our preferred technology".  Those are two different things.

(Incidentally, this is one of the things we're really passionate at WT:  getting full feature parity between the two tech stacks, so developers can do what they want with either stack and that argument goes away.)

But none of that changes what I feel is the underlying fact, though, that it's currently possible, using one stack or the other, to do almost everything necessary to create a high-fidelity, complex aircraft using what's available in the sim today -- and perhaps, at times, a little bit of reverse engineering.  And the lack of documentation that forces that reverse engineering is being worked on.

I hope that answers your question. 🙂

33 minutes ago, kaosfere said:

.  Probably the closest thing to that is when the flaps bug hit, there was some direct communication going on over what had happened and what could be done as a workaround, but that information was shared readily and not kept private to favor "insiders" with secret knowledge.

 

Yea, im talking daily to DCDesigns, Lionheart, Iris, Wing42, SWS and many others, none of them have heard anything about a super duper secret SDK. (we both know SDK doesnt actually mean anything anyway). 

And unlike your team, as newbies, yes we figured tons of stuff on our own, but we also absolutely HARASSED the Asobo devs i mentionned with our noob questions and "bug reports that werent actually bugs but just us not having a clue" 😄 and thethey always happily replied to them. We actually managed to find some major bugs that were fixed a day or two later (due next update).

Im claiming the CG bug as my own finding, i spent many nights trying to figure this one out, and for me to find a major flaw in a AAA game, reporting it directly to the devs, having conversations about it with them, and eventually finding a workaround and then later a fix, is both a big achievement for me (im a nobody that started this BS a few months ago, not having any clue about anything) and also a testimony as to how open, friendly, and dedicated Asobo is....but im french, they only talk to their fellow french citizens we all know that 😄

 

Being that ASOBO hired what....4 or 5 new people specifically for the SDK team?...and hired WT to basically fix the default aircraft and systems, as well as some of the base code...the extremely fast rate of updates to the core sim...there is no way that P3D or XP is the future.
My view is that the sim should have been delayed another year to begin with, so the way I see it, is; they're right on track.  🤪

When you look at it, we really just need weather fixed up and the default flight plan manager working in the immediate future to be 'Vatsim' ready.

As far as PMDG goes, it seems like having potentially 3 complex products out before the end of the year, seems really ambitious.  That in itself, is a pretty bold statement/prediction. IMO.  Just having the 37 out would be enough for me and would make a bold statement about the future of the new sim.

To add to that we still have the DX12 release, and several sim and world updates between now and then.  I think it should be pretty clear to anyone that ASOBO and MS are pretty serious about the new sim.  While I would have like to have the core features working already, it is what it is.  At least we're making forward progress and at a good clip.

3 minutes ago, leprechaunlive said:

we both know SDK doesnt actually mean anything anyway

There's that, too.  Folks wave around "the SDK" as if it's this single concrete thing that's the cause of, and solution to, all of the problems with the sim.   It bugs the picky nerd side of me, and so I sometimes put it in quotes in discussions like this to represent that -- but I figure it's a convenient shorthand for folks to use to talk about the general dev toolchain.

At least it's slightly more meaningful than "study level'.  😄

 

Edited May 23, 20215 yr by kaosfere

7 minutes ago, Jeff Nielsen said:

Just having the 37 out would be enough for me and would make a bold statement about the future of the new sim.

It is interesting to hear RDR explain that is was indeed PMDG's intent to bring out the 737 first, but that after 1.5 year's of work, they decided to go with "Plan B", the DC6 because there were glass gauge problems that had not been solved as yet..

Now, the 737 is still planned for later this year, so the problems are being worked on, but it gives you a sense for the state of affairs..