It has been a long time since we last heard any progress on the Aerosoft A330. However, Mathijs Kok has taken to the forum to describe, in detail, what’s been going on and when we can expect it.
He opens up his forum post letting us know that the modeller behind the project, Stefam, is currently working on a different project. Whilst it wasn’t disclosed what the project was, but it was confirmed that is a project that will enable Aerosoft to grow in new ways and is also financially beneficial to them. The project may come to the simulator, or it may not.
As for the 3 other developers, they are now focused solely on A330 development. Beforehand, it was focused on the A320 platform, but as Mathijs describes: “95% of the code they are doing for the A320 series is part of the A330.” From the forum post, it would appear that there are still over 500 issues that are on the bug tracker. Some are small problems and some are bigger ones. Whilst development on the A330 is now firmly on the front-burner, fixes and changes will be back-tracked automatically to the A320 code base.
What this means is that those waiting for Service Pack 1 for the A320 family, it will no longer be coming. Instead what will happen is that when the coding is complete and fixed, the update will be pushed out to the community. An example of this is the PFD, which is being rewritten. Another example is Connected Flight Deck, which has started performance testing today.
Mathijs then went onto talk about schedules. What he is hoping is that instead of a singular large update, users will start to see more frequent updates which will push out big and small changes as things are fixed and developed. He said that they are “getting a better idea on the causes of the big issues”. He then went onto say that whilst they make every effort to fix bugs reported, sometimes bugs appear in the real-world too, giving examples of when an aircraft doesn’t slow down at certain waypoints.
Finally, no sort of release date was given regarding the A330. He has “no idea” when it will be released at this point in time and will commit to releasing once fully comfortable with the aircraft.
Mathijs concluded that if anyone were to have questions, they should head to the Aerosoft forums and ask them. He assured users he would be as honest as possible, providing he could realistically answer them.
