June 22nd, 2023 Development Update

This has been a full week for the Microsoft Flight Simulator team! Monday started with the release of City Update 2: France and Local Legend 09: Latécoère Model 631. You can read more about both of these on our website here.

On Wednesday, we released an update (v1.0.20) to Expert Series 1: ATR 42-600 / 72-600. This update includes 35 bug fixes and improvements, many of which were requested directly by players. You can see the full release notes here.

Then earlier today, we launched Aircraft & Avionics Update 02. This update focused on improving the accuracy and realism of various aircraft systems, with the Boeing 747-8i and Boeing 787-10 both receiving very significant updates.

In Aircraft & Avionics Update 02, we added new telemetry to help investigate the “bandwidth is too low” and connection loss issues that users in the community have reported. While the investigation is ongoing, thanks to data gathered during the beta we were able to narrow down the search. For example, we now understand the issues are not limited to specific regions or locations. With the global release of AAU 02 this week, we’ll have the opportunity to gather data on a larger scale and continue working towards a solution.

We’d like to thank the community, as always, for your desire and appetite for testing out the AAU_02 aircraft. Having such a wide breadth of systems, simming styles, and viewpoints really creates a test force that is simply impossible to replicate with even infinite flight hours in QA.

The community brought forward all manner of issues, some big and some small, that made it possible for the team to locate things deep in complex systems logic only surfaced via the specific actions of a given user at a given time. Because of the complexity of these aircraft, an issue that has only a 1% chance of happening really showcases the law of probabilities; thousands of simmers trying their best to break it certainly makes those issues much more likely to show their face.

We caught massively important issues with VNAV, flight modeling, FMC behaviors, and would not have been able to track down some critical hardware sensitive optimizations without the tireless support and generosity of the community.

Our last topic of news for today: the Microsoft Flight Simulator team is attending FlightSimExpo in Houston, Texas this weekend! We have put together a helpful guide for flight sim fans to keep up with all the excitement from the expo whether you are attending in-person or following the event online.

Something we’re very excited for is on Friday evening at 5:00pm Houston time (2200 UTC): the Microsoft Flight Simulator team will be delivering a keynote address at the expo! Thanks to the FlightSimExpo organizers, everyone around the world is free to watch this keynote live on our official Twitch channel. For those unable to watch live, we will upload a recording of the keynote after it’s over to our YouTube channel.

– MSFS Team

SDK UPDATE

Asobo

• No Update this week.

 

Working Title / MSFS Avionics Framework

• Piston Engine Fuel and Turbo Updates
  • We’ve spent the last month or so looking at and tackling some long-standing issues inside the piston engine simulation relating to fuel and turbo behavior. As always, it was tricky to come up with solutions that retain backward compatibility for developers that have already worked around these issues, but still allow for opt-in and progressive enhancement for those who would like to take advantage. As a result of this work, as of SU13 developers will now have some great new piston engine CFG parameters that will improve turbo and supercharger mixture behavior below the critical altitude as well as fuel flow when the engine is too rich or too lean to deliver power. While we were there, we also added a few new tables to allow for even more tuning.

• • New Piston Engine Turbo and Supercharger Parameters
    • use_intake_density_on_mixture: Will use the post-boost density to compute mixture ratio instead of the ambient density, preventing leaning from being required until the critical altitude. (SU13)
    • density_to_boost_table: Will allow developers to specify a boost ratio based on the ambient density, instead of using just the critical_altitude based computation. (SU13)
  • New Piston Engine Mixture Parameters
    • mixture_lever_to_ratio_table: Will allow developers to specify the fuel/air mixture ratio at sea level based on the mixture lever position, overriding the default curve. (SU13)
    • mixture_ratio_to_engine_efficiency_table: Will allow developers to customize the engine power based on the mixture ratio, providing options to move the ideal mixture to power setting for a given engine. (SU13)
  • New Piston Engine Fuel Flow Parameters
    • use_volumetric_fuel_flow: Changes the fuel flow computation from BSFC times current HP to one based on the current engine volumetric air mass flow times the mixture ratio. This allows for fuel flow to continue even if no power is being delivered (too rich or too lean), and uses the engine displacement to compute the air and fuel mass used per engine cycle. (SU13)
    • rpm_on_volumetric_efficiency_table: Allows a developer to adjust the above computation by tweaking the percent of total air volume the engine ingests based on RPM. (SU13)

 

THIRD PARTY UPDATE

• As of 06/12, we have now approved 210 (+0) third parties into the in-sim marketplace and – so far 196 (+1) have released 2,198 products on PC (+49) and 1,911 on Xbox (+56).
• In total, 3,135 products (+4) have already been released in 3^rd party stores and the in-sim marketplace. Beyond that, another 819 products (+6) from 3^rd party developers are in production (350 announced, 469 unannounced). In total, over 3,962 3^rd party products (+10) have either been released or are in development.
• Airports:
  • 1,973 airports (+5) are either released or are in various stages of development.
    • 1,729 airports (+2) have been released on the platform so far in various stores.
    • 1,185 airports (+0) have been released in the in-sim marketplace.
    • 121 airports (+0) beyond the released airports have been announced.
    • 123 airports (+3) are not announced, but the dev let us know that an airport is in production.
• Aircraft:
  • 610 aircraft (+0) are either released or are in various stages of development.
    • 251 aircraft (+2) have been released on the platform so far in various stores.
    • 186 aircraft (+0) have been released in the in-sim PC marketplace.
    • 167 aircraft (+0) have been released in the in-sim Xbox marketplace.
    • 206 aircraft (-1) beyond the released aircraft have been announced.
    • 153 aircraft (-1) are not announced, but the dev let us know that an aircraft is in production.
• Scenery:
  • 914 scenery packs (+1) are either released or are in various stages of development.
    • 814 scenery packs (+0) have been released on the platform so far in various stores.
    • 337 scenery packs (+0) have been released in the in-sim marketplace.
    • 22 scenery packs (+0) beyond the released scenery have been announced.
    • 78 scenery packs (+1) are not announced but the dev let us know that scenery is in production
• Mission Packs:
  • 184 mission packs (+1) are either released or are in various stages of development.
    • 159 mission packs (+0) have been released on the platform so far in various stores.
    • 98 mission packs (+0) have been released in the in-sim marketplace.
    • 0 mission packs (+0) beyond the released missions have been announced.
    • 25 mission packs (+1) are not announced, but the dev let us know that they are in production.
• Livery Packs:
  • 248 livery packs (+3) are either released or are in various stages of development.
    • 158 livery packs (+0) have been released on the platform so far in various stores.
    • 153 livery packs (+0) have been released in the in-sim marketplace.
    • 1 livery pack (+0) beyond the released scenery has been announced.
    • 89 livery packs (+3) are not announced, but the dev let us know that scenery is in production.
• Ships & Watercraft:
  • 33 ships & watercraft (+0) are either released or are in various stages of development.
    • 24 ships & watercraft (+0) have been released on the platform so far in various stores.
    • 14 ships & watercraft (+0) have been released in the in-sim marketplace.
    • 0 ships & watercraft (+0) beyond the released scenery have been announced.
    • 9 ships & watercraft (+0) are not announced, but dev let us know that scenery is in production.

Community Video

Wednesday, June 21 was the Summer Solstice in the Northern Hemisphere. For lots of people – including many pilots – the summer months are a time to get outdoors and enjoy nature.

In this week’s video from YouTuber rodsott, we see a relaxing virtual depiction in Microsoft Flight Simulator of back-country bush flying and camping in Idaho. Enjoy!

 

You can submit your screenshot via Twitter with #MSFSchallenge or the Weekly Forum Post! This week’s screenshot challenge: Lone Star State

This past week’s Screenshot Challenge was “Rainbows II“!

Weekly Screenshot Challenge Winner: CpuGeta486 (Twitter)

Screenshot by DiscoDave50 (Forum)

Screenshot by EejayX (Forum)

Screenshot by HolmesCZ6127 (Forum)

Screenshot by klrkjp1 (Twitter)

Screenshot by KotetuP (Twitter)

Screenshot by MihamaBlend (Twitter)

Screenshot by r3s1st4nce (Forum)

Screenshot by SPERABrentH (Forum)

Screenshot by ukaka5656 (Twitter)

Screenshot by ZILLNIAZI17 (Forum)

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NEXT DEVELOPMENT BLOG UPDATE – June 29th, 2023

Sincerely,

Microsoft Flight Simulator Team