JaneRachel

Typically these days we have a primary product team, then a much smaller support team to do the followups. The support and tidy group is usually entirely separate from the teams leading flagship titles. We are lucky that the sim has proven popular in sales, which makes a support team cost effective to create all the service packs. Sometimes in the lifecycle of a product we have to draw a line on service packs simply because the cost to develop the pack outweighs the current strength of sales revenue, based on a calculated "per head revenue" generation of everyone in the team. Keeping service teams smaller really keeps the costs down and drives that equation of salary vs revenue contribution for each dev to something manageable.

Its very much the nature of the games/sim industry. In 44 years in the games industry (and sims too), its not the spec that kills you, but the bugs that suddenly defy squashing. I had a major title held up at EA with a crash bug that took my team weeks to find. It was a simple thing, in a couple of lines of code, but brought the entire project to its knees. We had pretty much every coder and myself hunting through code to track down. Conversely, I have seen bugs that look like they are going to be mega difficult, that I have ended up fixing over a cup of coffee in minutes. You are right about hundreds of people, although in terms of many issues, that boils down to just a few talented programmers to fix, with the majority of teams being art, design etc etc.. The specialist programmers are a minority on most games and sims (for lots of reasons, but I wont write an essay 🙂 ) Back when people paid me to be a programmer, rather than to run studios and publishing companies, we had all sorts of issues, for example, with Alien Vs Predator for Atari. It was coded by just two of us, myself and Mike (a very talented programmer). Some days it was bug city which we had to splat like the Aliens. Other days life was smooth. The moral is you can never tell and projects have a life of their own when it comes to shipping dates, despite so many processes we now have in place in the big studios. I routinely factor in a 20% time contingency on every project with the studios that I lead (which indeed can be hundreds of people now). Its why sometimes that many of us wish that we made business software which is an order of magnitude easier than 3D software and games, that come with animation, physics et al 🙂 Jane

thank you Aamir, Learn something about this bird everyday. Appreciate the response! all the best Jane

Loving the update.. A couple of things I have noticed. The aircraft seems to often spawn at the gate with the gear up and promptly slams in to the ground, requiring me to go back to the main menu. I have tried Heathrow and Manchester, same result. It is not every flight so looking for an obvious cause and will report back. A slight bump on the taxiway and the aircraft sometimes goes a few feet in to the air, even at very low speed (just had this again at the payware Manchester a few seconds ago). I keep getting repeatedly asked to enter DEST data in the MCDU, even when already entered (I saw this on the previous version also) Pedantic, wishlist item - button repeat on the MCDU pls so I can scroll through the flight plan etc by keeping the button pressed as per the real unit :) Fantastic work guys. Such a lot of hard work here that is appreciated by many, all the best Jane

A head up for anyone having issues with tablet functionality. The 787 mod (787-XH) needs to be removed from the community folder and you should be good to go. This particular mod creates conflicts, which are currently under investigation. all the best Jane

and Jon's advice is really always good! He is one of the most experienced "real-world" pilots here for a major airline I will not name 🙂

I agree with you. If you have P3D only fly the FSL, if you have the new sim fly Fenix. If you have both, feel free to fly both 🙂 Are both perfect, of course not. They are though, both incredible pieces of software and we have to realise that both are developed in a completely different environment within each sim, which imposes limitations and quirks courtesy of the coding of the host sim. I spent over 15 years as Deputy Editor of PC Pilot magazine and reviewed every airliner release during that time (including the very first release by PMDG way back when). I also spent a large part of my career getting paid to do flightsims for major publishers. My honest opinion is that right now we are in a new golden age of airliners in simulation. We are flying on the desktop with an unprecedented amount of realism. The standard right now from many developers including Aamir and his team is just incredible. It is great giving feedback to developers to help them grow (nearly all quality developers love you to feedback to them!). Just remember though the incredible standard we are at now from all of these guys. When we can nitpick over minor variations in N1 to the keyboard repeat rate on a CDU, we know we are in a really great place! It is a great time to fly regardless of your choice of sim and aircraft. Jane

Agree with Aamir here, Some years ago I led a team with a Red Arrows simulation with the Hawk. We had the entire current Red Arrows team try it out and they were mega impressed at Alpha stage (it was a sim for the RAF to use internally).They were really gushing. I pointed out their team leader that actually there was a lot still left to do including flight dynamics tweaks and we weren't happy yet. His reply was that they had no idea those things could be done to that standard on a home computer. They were totally in love with the sim as not one of them had any understanding of just how realistic things could be and set their expectations of a high bar lower. Once we told them what we could do, their perceptions changed considerably and we went from gushing to real technical feedback. Happy New Year everyone, Jane

this is active on all liveries. Whether you have failures enabled or not, it is required to keep topping up hydraulic fluid. It is a "gotcha" with the current PMDG releases that you need to keep on top of this, regardless of failure settings. all the best Jane

I have never seen that happen. I will ask at work and ask Valve as you have me curious. Normally it just runs a file comparision from the server builds.

With my programmer and software engineer hat on, this can happen. Your mention of Steam points me in the direction that you are using the PC version of the software. It is not unusual for data to corrupt on the hard drive as you switch on or off a machine. Most of the time that is barely perceptible. Sometimes you end up glitching a key disk sector and you end up with all sorts of problems. Downloads and updates can sometimes corrupt in transit to your machine which then propagate the problem, but most of the time it is simple corruption of disk data. With Steam and if the problem is the app itself this is usually a relatively simple fix. Rather than delete the whole software, simply verify the integrity of the files from the option within Steam (Right click on the app name in the Steam library and select properties and there is an option to verify the file integrity). It will normally fix any corrupted data and get you up and running again. If the problem lies with Windows or drivers and all the support files that the app relies on, rather than the app itself, this gets a little more complex to fix. Most of the time though, the good news is, just asking Steam to verify and fix the files will get you up and running again with a Steam based app.

If you think about it an aircraft even now could be flown without an onboard pilot. The industry, spurred on by the military need, has got very good at drone technology and control of the drone from huge distances away. We are not far from creating a drone with seats! The technology is there, if not the will to implement it right now.

Yep, as Stearman said upthread, its really down to individual airlines. The majority of 737 operators disconnect the AT ahead of landing but not all. On the fly by wire Boeings, the situation is reversed with most using the AT into touchdown. The reason being the issue of pitch-power coupling oscillations is dampened by the software on the fly by wire Boeings which does a much better job of things than the earlier Boeings.

it does ignore the MSFS failure settings. The PMDG aircraft has its own failure settings accessible via the CDU. all the best Jane

come back if you get stuck still. I will help all I can. all the best Jane