October 8th, 2020 Development Update - Microsoft Flight Simulator

Screenshot by c0mmanderkiller

Our dev team has been hard at work fixing bugs and implementing updates, and we are ready to bring you Update #4 next week! As stated in our recent live Dev Q&A, we are listening to all our communities (lookin’ at you Avsim, Reddit, Discord, Forums) and hope to provide a better cadence and more transparency in our work. You can now expect more frequent updates to our Feedback Snapshot and Development Roadmap, as we continue to tweak the information we provide on bugs, feature requests, and more. Thank you for your support as we move forward!

– MSFS TEAM

VR CLOSED BETA UPDATE

It’s been a week since we opened sign up for VR Closed Beta and have received many eager applicants. Thank you for expressing interest in testing VR with us! We are currently evaluating the specs and making decisions at this time. We will provide another update here once emails have been sent out to participating testers.

PARTNERSHIP SERIES UPDATE – INTRODUCING AEROSOFT

PATCH NOTE HIGHLIGHTS

The Patch is set to release October 13th. Here is a brief overview of what’s coming. Full patch notes will be posted once the patch is live.

Bug fixes (VFR Map, Avionics black screen, etc.)
Navigation data updates
UI updates
Aerodynamics updates
Activity updates
Marketplace updates
World updates

DEVELOPMENT ROADMAP

FEEDBACK SNAPSHOT

With the Feedback Snapshot ever-evolving based on your feedback, we have added two new columns. The first column shows the status of the top bug/feature. The second column shows when it is planned to be released. Here are some terms defined:

NOT STARTED – We have not started to investigate this issue yet.
FIXED – This issue is fixed and ready to be implemented in an upcoming patch.
WIP – This issue is a Work In Progress. This means the development team is actively working on fixing or building the bug/feature.
UPDATE #X – The bug/issue will be released to the public in that patch version number.
BACKLOG – A database of items we plan to work on in the future.
TO BE INVESTIGATED – Work is needed on our end but we are planning on triaging the issue.
STARTED – Work has already begun and we are looking at the issue.
UNDER INVESTIGATION – Actively being triaged by the development team.

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 Progress:

Project Editor:
- - We are working on the Project Editor to facilitate Package exporting for community and marketplace targets. A package validation process is also being added to this new publish process, with user-facing error feedback.
  - Besides improvements on the Project Editor, we are also working on the Console window to improve its ergonomics and add features which should help better understand what is going on in the sim.
Aircraft Editor:
- - The tool keeps on being improved thanks to community feedbacks and bug report, which are systematically taken into account and most of the time addressed straight away.
Scenery Editor:
- - General stability improvements.
Nodal Visual System:
- - We keep making progress on the new nodal visual effects system, which should be ready for production soon.

WebAssembly:

We continue to work on improving debugging information and iteration times.
We are further extending the GDI+ compatibility layer

We are fixing the external FsPackageTool for users of the Steam version of the game.

We updated and fixed part of the documentation.
We updated the AirportVehicleSample.

3RD PARTY UPDATE

Our Marketplace Partner Program has seen over 1000 applications already and well over 200 of these are known pay-ware companies. Over 50 partners have already been approved and have either released content or are about to release content to the marketplace! With over three dozen airports and aircraft published in the first 6 weeks since the release of Microsoft Flight Simulator, the quality of the creations and the incredible enthusiasm of the creator community continue to exceed all our expectations. Dozens of new aircraft have been announced already and nearly 100 airports are in various stages of production and we can wait to try them all out in the sim soon!