In a post over on the Aerosoft forums, Mathijs has outlined what the current state of their Airbus A320 Professional development looks like.
First off, their main issue is that they cannot add anymore transparent click zones, as they are simply ignored. Since they have inserted a standalone right MCDU, they need to add click zones due to their current one not having a complete set of click zones. At the moment, this is not possible and they are waiting on a response from Lockheed Martin on the issue. Mathijs also noted that Aerosoft is not the only developer to run into this issue, but they are hit harder than others due to their practice of avoiding putting click zones on the gauges due to the performance hit. There are hopes that Lockheed will fix the issue in an upcoming update to P3D but if they don’t, Aerosoft will have to fall back onto an alternative option that will take at least a week to get up and running.
Next up, some more features have made their way to the printer. Aerosoft has added more pages to the printer, as well as a 2d gauge where you will have the ability to see the last 5 printed pages, with only the last page being visible in the VC.
Modeling is 95% completed, and only work on the reading light and some other tweaks here and there remain.
Testing wise, Aerosoft are not taking any chances. At least 10 full test flights are being completed every day and with that more issues have been found to be resolved as well as some tweaks.
The MCDU is “good enough to ship at this moment” but Aerosoft still wants to make some changes so it matches the latest versions of the real world MCDU more precisely. There are around 20 known issues with it at the moment, but Mathijs says this is nothing and the real one probably has more.
Work on the ND and PFD 2d gauges has stopped for the moment as they have found some new issues that will take some time to sort out. They will be done but it might not make it into the initial release as originally hoped,
Performance testing will start later this week, but early results are positive. Adding upon this, memory leak testing, where the aircraft is loaded for the whole night, is ongoing 7 days a week now.
The EFB is on hold at the moment due to Aerosoft needing georeferenced charts for this to happen. Mathijs says they have “pretty cool plans” for it but it simply isn’t being worked on at his time.
As a closing statement, Mathijs acknowledges that they are not working fast enough, but that these weeks are where they grind away at issues one at a time. The release is still expected to be Q1 of 2018 though.
Stay tuned to FSElite for more news and previews when they come available!
