September 24th, 2020 Development Update - Microsoft Flight Simulator

Today, we were happy and proud to announce “World Update I: Japan” at the Tokyo Game Show 2020. As always, it took a village to produce this update and we had the help of many teams inside and outside of Microsoft to make this happen.

The Bing Maps team delivered 6 incredible photogrammetry cities and an all-new digital elevation map that increases the detail of the entirety of Japan significantly. We also had help from Gaya Simulations, an excellent scenery and airport developer. Gaya created 3 of the airports RJFU – Nagasaki, RJTH – Hachijojima, and RJCK – Kushiro as well as all of the 20 new POIs. Blackshark.ai added a new traditional Japanese building type. Of course, the team at Asobo put it all together and created three additional airports – ROKR – Kerama, RORS – Shimojisjima and RJX8 – Suwanosejima as well as the three landing challenges and all the other elements needed to make the DLC a great experience. We hope you will enjoy this update … Japan is an incredibly beautiful and diverse country.

As we’ve always said, our launch in August was just the beginning. Our goal is to provide you with a meaningful update to the sim every month. In addition to increasing the visual detail of the planet with future World Updates, we also plan to add Simulation Updates every 2-3 months that will further enhance the overall sim experience. On top of that, we are developing some exciting paid DLC that we plan to rollout over the coming months and years, and we will share more information in the future. We are on an incredible journey together and we are committed to work with you, the community, to continue to improve and evolve Microsoft Flight Simulator for many years to come.

– MSFS Team

Partnership Series Update

Partnership series announcement has been moved to next week. The announcement will feature Gaya Simulations.

SDK Update

The SDK team has been expanded to improve and expand the SDK functionality more quickly and to provide more thorough documentation. Recent work focused on:

WebAssembly: Improvements to the GDI+ compatibility layer and improvements to the ease of development and debugging capabilities is the current focus. Visual Studio 2017 support has also been added.

The glTF exporter now supports 3D Studio Max 2021.
We fixed the SimConnect facilities API and plan on expanding it.
On the Developer Mode side, we are working on improving overall usability: we enhanced the visualization for roads, terraforming shapes and exclusion rectangles. The editor now doesn’t allow for invalid ground merging parameters.

Third Party Developers

Applications to our Marketplace Partner Program have now passed 1000, which is astonishing. Every day, we see new announcements of new airports, aircraft and other useful tools and add-ons being announced and we are over to moon to see the level of creativity and quality coming to the platform. Last week, we launched 4 all-new products in the in-sim marketplace – including Carenado’s second plane on the platform and new airports from Aerosoft, ORBX and Stairport! With over 40 approved partners the next weeks will feature even more great new releases.

Feedback Snapshot

Development Roadmap

Twitch Update

Our monthly live developer Q&A is scheduled for this coming Wednesday, September 30th, at 10:30am PDT (1730Z). In addition, we will have a guest pilot, Shinji Maeda, join us on October 1st to explore the sim. And last but not least, we have a great guided tour of Japan planned next Friday. Everyone can join in a fly with us for that one! We are looking forward to answering your questions and connecting with the community next week.