AAU 3 now available

[martinboehme]

Maybe this is a good opportunity to consider how we deal with mistakes in aviation. As we all know, every accident investigation report starts by pointing out that it is not the report's goal to apportion blame; it is to prevent future accidents. In aviation, we've learned that we make aviation safer not by blaming and punishing, but by adopting a just culture that encourages people to own up to and report their mistakes without fear of blame, so that they can be corrected and prevented in future.

Similarly, good software gets developed not by pointing fingers, looking for who is to blame, and generally cultivating an "us versus them" attitude. Good software gets developed when people investigate and fix errors without dwelling on who made them or whose code they are in.

Edited October 2 by martinboehme

[fsiscool]

14 hours ago, BrammyH said:

Yet, this is Navigraph's fault? What steps are you thinking Navigraph could take with this one?

It is the same when MSFS 2024 will come out. Not every dev will have seen it, and some addons will not be available for a period of time. It is Asobos responsibility to build a new sim and once the dust settles for the devs to cope with the changes. There is no way around that.

[martinboehme]

7 minutes ago, fsiscool said:

It is the same when MSFS 2024 will come out. Not every dev will have seen it, and some addons will not be available for a period of time. It is Asobos responsibility to build a new sim and once the dust settles for the devs to cope with the changes. There is no way around that.

The difference with MSFS 2024 is that while all of this is going on, people will still be able to run their stable MSFS 2020 installation.

With AAU3, on the other hand, everyone was forced to update and deal with the instability. If AAU3 had been made available for a period of beta testing, the issue could have been found and corrected while everyone else was still running the previous version.

[fsiscool]

13 hours ago, fluffyflops said:

somone on here found the issue in 10 mins. again its not rocket science this to spend an hour or 2 testing with some addons.  this issues has plauged us in the community for over 10 years now,  the lack of basic testing on all addons, wether it be afcads, textures of fan blades, ils freq's, runway numbers etc .  its not difficult. 

Say Asobo has found an issue in testing with Navigraph. What on earth should they have done? They can't fix Navigraphs stuff. If you think your proposal to the end, you see how weird that would be.

[UAL4life]

It’s not just Navigraph I uninstalled it and I’m crashing all the word not allowed time now after this update. Thanks Asobo!

[martinboehme]

7 minutes ago, fsiscool said:

Say Asobo has found an issue in testing with Navigraph. What on earth should they have done? They can't fix Navigraphs stuff.

They wouldn't have had to, because the issue was in their code, as we have now learned.

[abrams_tank]

10 hours ago, Georgleboui said:

The issue we are all raising is that their mistake is in not doing a public beta test with this patch like they've done before. Really this shouldn't have happened, and they dropped the ball here.

First and foremost, I was part of the vocal "crew" in the official MSFS forum and in the Twitch chat during the Twitch Q&As, that kept pushing Asobo to implement a beta, and preferably a public open beta back in 2020 and 2021.  When they started doing public open betas, I stopped bothering them on this issue.

Having said that, I am going to guess why they didn't do an open beta this time is probably because the release of MSFS 2024 is approaching and Jorg and/or Seb didn't want the distraction of an open beta heading into MSFS 2024's release, and because Jorg and/or Seb probably thought the risk of a nasty bug like this was limited. 

In hindsight, they probably should have done this AAU3 release either much earlier in the summer with a quick 2 week open beta, or if the code was not ready yet, then delay it until after MSFS 2024's release, maybe delaying this until Q1 of 2025 so they could do an open beta then.

But anyways, glad they figured out what the error was.  I am not sure how that dual snippet of XML was duplicated in this release, but large software projects like MSFS are complex and unfortunately, stuff like this happens on projects as complex as MSFS (hence the need for an open beta test).

 

Edited October 2 by abrams_tank

[JBDB-MD80]

3 minutes ago, UAL4life said:

It’s not just Navigraph I uninstalled it and I’m crashing all the word not allowed time now after this update. Thanks Asobo!

Have you checked the addons in your community folder?, that could also be a problem.

[Matchstick]

10 hours ago, Krakin said:

It really isn't Asobo's responsibility to test with third party add-ons in mind. When adjustments are made and products get broken, it is up to that dev to get their stuff fixed. What Asobo has to do is ensure that proper guidance is given via proper updates to documentation for the SDK among other things.

So what happen when a company follows that proper guidance and Asobo change or break something so that files built to the guidance no longer work ?

[fsiscool]

2 minutes ago, martinboehme said:

They wouldn't have had to, because the issue was in their code, as we have now learned.

Asobo tested the default sim without addons and it worked. Adding Navigraph navdata is crashing the sim so the issue is not in Asobos code. Navigraph just has found something in Asobos code that would make them look better, if that code would be how they want. But its Asobos code and it does not crash the sim. Adding Navigraphs config is crashign the sim, so you know where to look at for a solution.

Navigraph apparently just likes put blame somewhere else. That is cheap and irresponsible. They will anyway be less important in the future, so I am not sure whether they are doing themselves a favour stressing their relationsship with MS/Asobo.

There is basically no disadvantage anymore just switching off Navigraph data, which makes this issue even less important.

[Christopher Low]

16 hours ago, Maxis said:

So what features got enhanced with this update ?

Crash physics have been improved...

[martinboehme]

9 minutes ago, fsiscool said:

Asobo tested the default sim without addons and it worked. Adding Navigraph navdata is crashing the sim so the issue is not in Asobos code

That doesn't necessarily follow. There are two possibilities here:

• Navigraph's code is out-of-spec, happened to work before AAU3, but now crashes the sim (because it doesn't conform to the spec). Navigraph need to fix their code.
• Navigraph's code conforms to the spec, and Asobo has newly introduced some bug that causes a crash when it encounters Navigraph's spec-conforming code. Asobo need to fix their code.

Without having investigated the issue in detail, no one can say which of these possibilities actually applies.

[jcomm]

They're probably getting ready to do with Nav database providers what they did with weather injection providers... (just my nasty brain cells at work...)

For 2024 they already announced an integrated flight planning tool, including if I'm not mistaken performance calculations... 

If it turns out to be fully featured and well designed and integrated I can foresse users dropping their Navigraph licenses which are, that's a fact, too expensive...

 

Edited October 2 by jcomm

[fsiscool]

8 minutes ago, martinboehme said:

Navigraph's code conforms to the spec, and Asobo

I am sure, like everybody else in their position, MS/Asobo say somewhere in their usage terms something like "specs can be outdated or missing and therefore there is no guarantee everything works at any time as described".

Other than probably almost any other game out there, MSFS is much more just a platform. The base platform alone is already increadibly complex. Being an open platform that can interact with tens of thousands of addons from thousands of devs increases the complexity to completely unprecedented levels. The dependecies are beyond imagination. What happened, is a result of that. And considering these constraints, it is easy to see that overall the project is managing the releases quite well.

[micstatic]

I posted this in the other thread.  But wanted to put this here.