October 22nd, 2020 Development Update - Microsoft Flight Simulator

Screenshot by c0mmanderkiller

“I’m more than happy they’re making an effort to keep the development process open, and to give us updates about the progress. I’d say keep publishing updates on a weekly basis.” – Avsim user

You got it! You’ve heard us say it a thousand times, “This is just the beginning,” and we mean it. Weekly Development posts will continue as we focus on providing updates to the sim on a regular basis and ingest your feedback daily. We are prepped to release Update #5 next week and will provide more details then. We aren’t going anywhere!

Speaking of, our next live Developer Q&A is scheduled for next Wednesday, October 28th at 10:30am PDT. Scroll down to the Twitch section of this update for more information.

– MSFS TEAM

PARTNERSHIP SERIES UPDATE

The first seven episodes of our Partnership Series introduced key partners that helped us in the creation of Microsoft Flight Simulator like meteoblue (real-time weather system), Blackshark.ai (procedural building generation, etc.), VATSIM (online air traffic control and flying community), Bing Maps (satellite and aerial imagery as well as DEM), Textron (close partnership in the development of 10 of our 30 launch planes), Gaya Simulations (development of airports and POIs for World Updates), and Aerosoft (retail edition and feedback on our SDK).

We could not have created the simulator without these teams and are very grateful for the fruitful partnerships we have formed with these experts during the past years of development. In the coming weeks and months, we will continue this series and will present our collaborations with Azure Cognitive Services, NAVBLUE, key third party partners, several plane manufacturers, peripheral makers, and a few surprises.

AROUND THE WORLD SERIES EPISODE 5 – NORTH AMERICA

VR CLOSED BETA

Good news! We are on track with our upcoming VR build and will be sending out emails next week to our first wave of VR testers. As a reminder, Wave 1 is for WMR (Windows Mixed Reality) VR users only and Wave 2 will be for non-WMR users. Stay tuned and we look forward to working with you.

DEVELOPMENT ROADMAP

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 new Export Window is ready and will be made available in a future update.
- The node-based Visual Effects System is about ready to be used in production by the internal team. We will make it available broadly after the internal tests are complete.
- Improvements, new options, and small features continue to be added here and there in tools. To list just one of them: an optional auto-hide behavior is currently being implemented for the DevMode bar.
- As a background task the DevMode team is always working on improving the overall stability of the DevMode, giving a special focus to the Project Editor, the Scenery Editor, and the Aircraft Editor. The community’s feedback continues to be helpful to identify & fix bugs and thus make the tools better.
WebAssembly:
- The WASI layer filesystem functions have now all been implemented.
- Mouse events are now forwarded to gauges through a new callback.
- Preparing the new GDI+ implementation for release.
New samples (windsock and bears) have been added to the SDK.

3RD PARTY UPDATE

65 partners have been approved to our Marketplace Partnership Program and the amount of content keeps growing! We added another 5 airports to the marketplace last week and we are excited to publish new aircraft from IndiaFoxtEcho Visual Simulations and IRIS Simulations soon. We are also very pleased with the progress Aerosoft is making with the upcoming Bombardier CRJ. It’s exciting to see the progress aircraft developers are making!

MARKETPLACE UPDATE

This week we have 6 new products in the Marketplace:

6 NEW PRODUCTS

TWITCH SCHEDULE

We have a ton of fun content coming next week! But don’t forget, tomorrow at 1900Z we are welcoming back community member SeedyL 2 as he gives us a guided tour of Banff National Park in Canada! If you are interested in joining us for this flight, check out more details here 13.

Next week, we will kick off the streams by bringing Chewwy94 5 back to the channel! He is a fantastic flight simmer and content creator in the Twitch community and we can’t wait to fly with him.

On Wednesday, our monthly Developer Q&A 6 will be live and you can post or upvote questions for that stream here 11. In this stream, we will go over the Feedback Snapshot, announcements, and your community questions.

Last but not least, we will host a special “spooky” community fly-in on Friday. We currently have a livery contest going on in Discord 2, so if you love creating liveries come enter! Have a great weekend and we look forward to spending time with you on Twitch.