MSFS Development Road Update November 5th

MSFS Development Road Update November 5th

In their last development update, which appears regularly every Thursday on the Flight Simulator blog, Asobo first refers to the ongoing Covid situation and the new lockdown in France. Asobo assures that they will continue to work on the Flight Simulator, but ask users to understand that the current priority is to ensure health and safety of the team. Asobo currently works mainly in the home office. Last but not least, the team would like to thank the community for their commitment so far and encourages to keep it up.

According to their Development Roadmap, a new update for Flight Simulator will be released on November 10th, which is Tuesday in four days. Update 7 will follow on November 24th. Meanwhile, we will get some Partnership Series Releases and Feature Discovery Series on November 19th and Novemebr 26th. Patch Notes for Update 6 on November 10th are still pending, but Asobo indeed already announced SDK Updates.

  • DevMode:
  • Node-based Visual Effects System continues to be improved with more and more useful features, allowing setting-up great effects in the sim. We are now focusing on improving the system’s performance.
  • We started designing a way to easily create new assets from within the Project Editor, starting from given available asset templates. We should essentially focus on types: new Mission, new Airport & new Aircraft.
  • Improvements, new options, and small features keep on being added here and there in tools.
  • To list just one of them: a new auto-hide feature is now available for the DevMode bar.
  • As a background task the DevMode team is always working on improving the overall stability of the DevMode, especially giving special focus to the Project Editor, the Scenery Editor, and the Aircraft Editor.
  • WebAssembly
  • Mouse events are now correctly forwarded when multiple WASM gauges are used in one single Virtual Cockpit.
  • Lowered memory consumption during WASM module compilation.

1 Hour of Developer Q&A

In their monthly Interview and Developers Q&A Asobo addressed several community questions. Asobo ensures that they are intending to update scenery for Russia sometime next year to make it more accurate, as they are always looking for new data sources. Regarding AI Traffic, users claim lack of consistency, realism and poor empty skies. Head of Microsoft Flight Simulator, Jorg Neumann, explains that they are trying to implement this feature for free, and they are already working on it. However, Asobo is aiming to license everything to keep it legal. Therefore, they need to contact every airline company and aircraft manufacturer and go through a licensing process. A dedicated team is working on licensing questions frequently, however during COVID-19, airline companies seem to have other priorities.

Same answer applies for the Aviators Club Livery Pack that should have been released already in September: Executive Producer Martial Bossard ensures it’s coming as soon as the licensing is done and they have a dedicated team on it, also because of the variety of models it’s a complex issue to get all liveries done.

I think it’s just a matter of time. At some point when I think about the vision of the future, I would love to be that every flying vehicle is the correct flying vehicle – as far as a model and as far as the livery. It’s just going to take us some time to get all the stuff licensed.