abrams_tank

Choosing the rignt simulator to develop for matters a lot. Like if Vector decided to do this project on P3D or XP, they would probably lose a lot of money. Vector is calculating that the market for MSFS is big enough, that they can earn a nice profit in the end, despite the fact that they have to pay for the salaries of their larger team.

Yeah, I agree with you. I also think iniBuilds may release version 2.0 of their planes eventually, where version 2.0 is a higher fidelity “study level” version, and sell this to the market again, when all the Airbus and Boeing planes have been completed in MSFS. It’s another way for them to make another round of sales.

So Rhodiumcode started this project 3 years ago. Inibuilds made rhe A350 announcement for MSFS in December of 2023. So Rhodiumcode probably started work on the A350 before any credible developer had announced they were working on it. The Boeing 737, 747, and 777 had always been covered by PMDG any all the developers know that it's hard to beat PMDG in a race - plus, knowing PMDG will come out with these planes eventually, some customers may hold off their purchase of another competing product, until PMDG released these Boeing models. This left the 757, 767, and 787. Back in 2023, it wasn't for certain that Qualitywings had given up their work on the 787. And Bluebird Simulations had announced they would do the 757, 767, and 787. So when Rhodiumcode decided what airliner to do 3 years ago, the A350 made a lot of sense, as no known credible for profit developer was known to be developing it.

You can probably go on their Discord channel and give them feedback on how they can improve on the exterior model? Some people in the Youtube channel commented the nose looked a bit off, so I hope they took the feedback to figure out how to improve the model.

It would have to offer much more than iniBuilds for people to buy it. They are going to have to do a much higher fidelity level A350, something like a "study level" A350, for people to buy it. I guess it would need to be something like PMDG or FSLabs level?

I didn't see that thread. In any case, the video was just posted today, so the video trailer is new news. This video trailer is the first tangible evidence of their work. Maybe one of the mods can change the thread title to "RhodiumCode posts first trailer of their A350 today" to separate this thread from the other one.

Hi all. So not much news has been made about this, but there is yet another new group that is developing an airliner for MSFS and this time, it's the A350. So they just released their first trailer of their work on Youtube: This video is unavailable. This video is unavailable. This video is unavailable. This video is unavailable. This video is unavailable. This video is unavailable. This video is unavailable. This video is unavailable. This video is unavailable. This video is unavailable. This video is unavailable. This video is unavailable. This video is unavailable. This video is unavailable. This video is unavailable. This video is unavailable. This video is unavailable. This video is unavailable. This video is unavailable. This video is unavailable. This video is unavailable. This video is unavailable. This video is unavailable. This video is unavailable. This video is unavailable. This video is unavailable. This video is unavailable. This video is unavailable. This video is unavailable. This video is unavailable. This video is unavailable. This video is unavailable. Now I want to be a bit cautious on this news. At the end of the day, when they release this A350, the product will speak for itself. A lot of people were cynical about Fenix before they released their A320, and in hindsight, they were wrong. Many people in the flight sim community consider the Fenix A320 to be the best airliner ever made for a flight sim, especially with all the latest updates. Having said that, this team seems much smaller than the Vector team, and they are still looking for someone to help them with sounds. Also, in the Youtube chat during the video, various people pointed out the nose looks a little off, so this is something they will need to improve on. According to their Reddit post, they have been working on this A350 for 3 years now. I will just link their initial Reddit post when they made the announcement so you can judge for yourself: There was also a post in Reddit in the last week, by a random user (so someone not on their dev team), who pasted information from RhodiumCode's Discord server, to Reddit, that gave more information about the project: RhodiumCode will be competing directly against iniBuild's A350. The fidelity would have to be much better than the iniBuilds A350 for RhodiumCode to sell enough copies. My own impression after reading their Reddit posts and watching the video is that their team doesn't seem to be as solid as the Vector 787 team. Vector seems to have a much larger team, and the PR person for Vector, Ellie, worked at Orbx and iniBuilds before, so they managed to poach her onto their team. Plus Vector was able to earn the trust of FSElite, who wrote an article for them and presented them at the recent FSWeekend, so that tells me that FSElite considered Vector to be a serious company. That's not to say RhodiumCode isn't a serious company - but they don't have an established person like Ellie on their team, and they don't have a reputable person or reputable organization like FSElite going to bat for them, so it's much harder to tell, versus Vector (but despite having all this, the Vector 787 could also turn out to be disappointing, we won't know until it's finally released). However, at the end of the day, let the product speak for itself. When RhodiumCode releases their A350 we will know how good it is (this assuming that they can release it and it doesn't end up as abandonware).

Here is the update that Bluebird Simulations posted on Reddit. They entered phase 2 of their beta testing. The last phase of beta testing is phase 3. https://www.reddit.com/r/flightsim/comments/1sym9ck/bluebird_757_update_weve_entered_stage_2_and_our/

If you are using an Nvidia card, make sure the Nvidia app isn't overwriting your settings. The Nvidia app can set the graphics settings for your game, such that when you change the graphics settings inside your game, and you exit the game and reload it, any graphics settings changes you made will be overwritten by the Nvidia app.

Make sure you turn off Dynamic Settings. Dynamic Settings is on be default. If it is on, MSFS 2024 will try to preserve the target frame per second (FPS) that you have set. But in order the preserve the FPS you have set, it will tank the graphics, including making everything blurry, so that you can keep your target FPS. The disadvantage of turning Dynamic Settings off is that your FPS may go lower, and you may even encounter stutters, but your ground textures and the terrain won't be blurry anymore. But if you are stuttering after you have turned Dynamic Settings off, it's an indication that you graphics settings you have set, is too high for the hardware that you have.

It doesn't look like SU5 will release this week then, if another beta update was just released today.

Thank you, it's very useful and objective feedback Aamir, on how the API can be improved! Hope that @MattNischan and @SeedyL can take this information in, as it is coming from the head of Fenix himself!

Thanks for the reply Matt! Well, from the API perspective, what else is missing from the API after tilt has been added?

So what was largely missing for the weather radar for MSFS 2024 was the tilt function. My understanding was that it was Asobo who upgraded the weather radar capabilities a few years ago so that it was 3D, but they didn’t add the tilt feature. Anyways, it looks like Working Title picked up the slack and there will be a tilt feature in SU5: With the tilt function, I think that is the last major missing feature for the weather radar in MSFS 2024?

Hi. I just saw that MSFS 2024 sold 245K copies on PS5 so far, as of April of 2026: https://alineaanalytics.substack.com/p/starfield-has-sold-140k-copies-on Most of us are PC users of MSFS 2024 so on the surface, you may not care about this much. But the MSFS marketplace will eventually come out on the PS5. 3rd party developers having a significant market to sell to other than PC and XBox, means they can make more money. And 3rd party developers do affect us if we are PC users. The more 3rd party developers for MSFS, the better, because we ultimately get better add-ons to choose from, and and a wider variety of add-ons. These look like pretty good sales numbers. At the minimum, I think the scenery add-ons from 3rd party developers should transfer over to PS5. So it will be a nice cash injection for the 3rd party scenery developers. For 3rd party plane developers, let's see what the PS5 allows. It's unknown if PS5 would allow a high fidelity plane like PMDG yet, so we will have to see what is possible on the PS5 and what isn't. BTW, I think Simbol mentioned something like 1/3 of the sales for FSReborn for one of his add-ons came from XBox. So console sales for add-ons can be a significant revenue source for some 3rd party developers. I do hope with the launch of the MSFS marketplace for PS5, the 3rd party development community for MSFS can grow even further.

The photos were posted 20 days ago in the official MSFS forum: https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/5-years-in-and-pretty-much-zero-improvements-to-clouds/637016/1999 But this is an ongoing issue with XP 12. I have seen photos and videos of XP 12 with this lighting/shadow problem with clouds for a while now. It's not a new issue, it's an issue that has been there in XP 12 for some time.

Hi, funny that you mention the cloud lighting in XP 12. Because XP 12, since it was released, and for all subsequent versions of XP 12, have constantly had issues with lighting and shadow with its clouds. Here is a good example from a thread about clouds in the official MSFS forum: Specifically, the lighting/shadow of the clouds in the top 2 photos just look unnatural and weird. Something looks a little off with the lighting/shadow in the bottom photo too. But this is an ongoing issue with XP 12, LR still hasn't fixed it. MSFS 2020 used to also have major lighting/shadow problems, as known with the "volcanic ash" looking clouds, but these "volcanic ash" looking clouds have been greatly reduced by MSFS 2024, because they rewrote the lighting/shadow algorithm for the clouds. I personally think the lighting/shadow algorithm for the clouds in MSFS 2024, is superior to the XP 12 lighting/shadow algorithm, because I see far fewer videos & screenshots of clouds with odd lighting/shadow in MSFS 2024, than I see in XP 12 (to be fair, that's not to say MSFS 2024 never has odd lighting/shadow in the clouds - it does too, but just far fewer instances than XP 12). Furthermore, I have mentioned this many times before, the XP 12 clouds are blurry. But it was Ben Supnick from LR, who said that clouds are very resource intensive. This is my educated guess, but I am guessing LR could be throttling the sharpness of the clouds, to help with performance. But we know that XP 12's architecture is not as efficient as MSFS, because Torsten from Toliss said MSFS's architecture is more efficient than XP 12, because MSFS is able to utilize more CPU cores, and because the architecture is more asynchronous: What MSFS lacks though is the variation of clouds, as many people have mentioned in this thread. This is something that XP 12 does better than MSFS 2024 at the moment. Having said that, for the clouds that MSFS are able to render, because you can make out the definition of those clouds because they are less blurry (clouds are not that blurry as XP 12 in real life, you can make out the definition in them), and because the lighting/shadows of MSFS 2024 clouds is better than XP 12, I personally prefer the clouds in MSFS 2024, despite the lower variation of clouds in MSFS 2024. But I guess everyone has their own preferences.

Yeah, a lot of people were asking Toliss to bring their A330 to MSFS when the Aerosoft-Toliss A340 came out. It seems like the Aerosoft-Toliss A340 was a very successful release and if Toliss considered it to be a successful release, I think there is a chance that Toliss brings their A330 to MSFS, maybe in another collaboration with Aerosoft again.

Yeah, that's what I meant by "dipping their toes" in MSFS. Meaning Heatblur isn't heavily involved with MSFS, but they do have a solo project for MSFS now that they are doing themselves without any cooperation with India Foxtrot Echo this time, the F4E: https://fselite.net/content/heatblur-announces-f-4e-phantom-ii-for-microsoft-flight-simulator-2024/. So they are kind of "dipping their toes" in MSFS, making additional money on the side. But I assume their main focus is still on DCS World.

I also think it's MSFS and the competition in it that is raising the bar further. We have way more 3rd party developers in the MSFS ecosystem now, competing against each other, and the competition leads to more progress. Obviously, MSFS 2024 is light years beyond what we had back in 2019, and it's the most advanced civilian flight simulator right now. Look at the default GA avionics for MSFS, no civilian flight simulator had default GA avionics as good as MSFS back in 2019 (thanks to the Working Title team of course). And look at the FPS you can get with MSFS 2024 - with the latest multiframe gen module, people are getting over 200 FPS with just an RTX 4090, nevermind using an RTX 5090. But aside from MSFS 2024 being such an advanced flight simulator, the 3rd party community for MSFS is extremely strong now. The MSFS ecosystem isn't just supporting virtually all of the P3D developers that moved over to MSFS, it's even supporting some XP developers that have dipped their toes into MSFS (ie. iniBuilds, Toliss), and even supporting some DCS developers that have also dipped their toes into MSFS (ie. Heatblur). With even more 3rd party developers competing in the MSFS ecosystem compared to before MSFS, I think the competition has raised the bar.

I didn't upgrade my PMDG 737-800 to MSFS 2024 yet, but if the new textures are this good, I may finally pay the "few cups of coffee" upgrade fee because this looks really good.

It's real, the Cessna 172 is coming to MSFS from A2A! From Lewis in the A2A forum:

Please post your videos here. I don't see anything wrong with it, it's related to MSFS. As for the video itself, I found it informative. The performance of MSFS 2024 with SU4 is probably some of the best performamce among all flight simulators now. And having this new framegen is just icing on the cake.

Wow, the A2A Cessna 172 is really coming to MSFS! This is something I am interested in if the price is right.

Yeah, I am looking for the hint that it's an April fools day joke, but I don't see anything obvious on their screenshot or in the forum post.