October 15th, 2020 Development Update - Microsoft Flight Simulator

Screenshot by simtom2

Earlier this week we released our 4th Update to the sim which contained a variety of bug fixes and quality of life improvements (See link below for full patch notes). Unfortunately due to an oversight on our end (yes we are human) we inadvertently posted the wrong date for the “Press Any Key To Continue” change on the previous weeks Feedback Snapshot. As such this change did not go live in this update but instead will go out with Update 5 as we had originally intended.

As always our goal is to maintain transparency and collaboration with our community as we continue to evolve the sim. With that said, the team would once again like to express their gratitude for the feedback and patience from those of you who encountered some turbulence with the previous patch. The team will continue to actively work through the Feedback snapshot and keep the community informed along the way.

– MSFS TEAM

RELEASE NOTES

Check out the release notes from Tuesday’s release here.

FEEDBACK SNAPSHOT

SDK UPDATE

The SDK team continues to improve many areas of the SDK based on input from the developer community. Recent work focused on:

DevMode:
- The DevMode team is working on improving the overall stability, giving a special focus to the Project Editor, the Scenery Editor, and the AircraftEditor.
- We’re finishing the implementation of the new “Export Window” of the Project Editor. The underlying process will, among others, feature a validation step. This will ensure that packages built are valid and ready for later publication.
- We’re also working on a Global rework of the Console and logging system, its ergonomics and features, especially to help the community find out faster what could be wrong during the package build process.
- In the long-run, a dedicated team is still working hard on the forthcoming brand new Node-based Visual Effects System.
- The community’s feedback continues to be very helpful in identifying & fixing bugs and thus making the tools better.
WebAssembly:
- The MSFS Platform Toolset linker now properly reports errors in the Visual Studio Output tab.
- We added the “Generate Debug Info” linker option to the MSFS Platform Toolset. It allows users to strip all symbols from the Release version (which makes them much smaller in size).
- We changed the way symbols are exported from WASM modules: only explicitly exported ones are now really exported (which reduces module size even further). No code change is required.
- Continuous efforts to improve debugging and reduce iteration times.
- The WASI layer has been fixed to enable the usage of opendir/readdir from within WASM modules.

3RD PARTY UPDATE

Nearly 60 partners have been approved to our Marketplace Partnership Program already and the amount of available content is accelerating! Last week we added another 5 airports to the marketplace and we are excited to see the progress aircraft developers are making. Some big launches ahead! Can’t wait to try the Long EZ!

MARKETPLACE UPDATE

Five new products have been added to the Marketplace today:

5 NEW PRODUCTS

TWITCH UPDATE

This Friday, we will be hosting a community fly-in guided tour over Moscow, Russia using one of the new 3rd party Marketplace Items, Moscow’s Landmarks from Drzewiecki Design. Our newest Community Manager, Alex, and his father Andrew, will be giving the tour. They are both originally from Moscow, Russia. Andrew was also one of the developers for Microsoft Flight Simulator decades ago. Come with questions, and all are welcome to fly along! More details can be found here.