The continual focus of the MSFS team is bug fixes, bug fixes and more bug fixes. We’re also getting a new PA28 in the sim as a freebie, and Working Title’s Expert Series E550 jet seems to be coming along very nicely.
Those were the headline takeaways from Wednesday’s MSFS Developer Livestream, where Jorg Neumann (Head of Microsoft Flight Simulator), Sebastian Wloch (Asobo CEO) and Chris Burnett (Working Title) took to the Twitch airwaves to answer community-submitted questions and make various announcements about upcoming features for the sim. Although there is plenty more going on under the hood which was recapped in some detail during the stream, and we’ll seek to cover all of it adequately here.
2024 Sim Update 2
Jorg kicked off the stream by launching into the latest Sim Update 2 for 2024, which seems to have been largely well received by the community. The update fixed 37 of the top 120 user-reported issues and bugs within the 2024 sim, with a further 7 receiving partial fixes. Since the launch of 2024, a total of 62 of these 120 top-priority items have now been resolved, with 24 more fixes in progress and 29 under investigation by the team. Jorg summarised by saying that overall he feels great progress has been made thus far in getting the 2024 sim to where we’d like it to be, but there is still clearly more work to be done.
Also with the launch of Sim Update 2, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is now available via NVIDIA GeForce now, a game-hosting streaming platform aimed at users on lower end hardware. The idea of the service is that, for a fee, you can access a high-end gaming system, playing the flight simulator on that with the result being live-streamed via a low latency connection to your PC at home. Jorg shared some stats showing that as of May 15th, 4000 players have already accessed MSFS 2024 via the GeForce Now product, with the average GeForce Now user accessing the platform with a system spec consisting of <16GB RAM, an Intel Core i5 2.4GHz CPU, Intel UHD integrated graphics, on a 1920x1080p display with >250GB of storage. For users on systems like these who could previously only dream of being able to run a program as demanding as MSFS2024, GeForce Now represents a considerably more affordable means to access the sim – and with the game already being in the top 50 on GeForce Now, it would seem users are happy to use it.
City Update 11
To coincide with this year’s Flight Sim Expo in Providence, Rhode Island, City Update 11 will feature the host city of the convention along with a handful of others along the US north-east. Jorg didn’t name any other cities explicitly besides Providence because there are “way too many”, but hopes simmers will enjoy the update which has a targeted release date of June 27th.
Sadly the team will not be present at the Expo this year, with Jorg saying this was because the team are very hard at work on fixing Flight Sim 2024 and can’t afford to take the time out of their schedules to attend the show this year. That being said, Jorg gave his full endorsement to the show as well as Evan Reiter of the Flight Sim Association and his team who organise the show every year.
Famous Flyer 12 (Make Good Aircraft 3) – PA28-236 Dakota
The next aircraft in the Famous Flyer series (which will also double as the third “make good” aircraft, which Microsoft are giving the community for free as an acknowledgement of the poor state of MSFS 2024 at initial release, was also revealed to be coming during FSExpo. For this edition of the Famous Flyer, Microsoft are releasing their first Piper after the company recently acquired licensing rights from the manufacturer. The PA28-236 Dakota, to be specific, is a 4 seater PA28 with fixed undercarriage and variable pitch, constant speed propeller. It also comes with a beefier engine than it’s cousins in the Warrior, Archer and Arrow – a 235 hp Lycoming O-540-J3A5D (six-cylinder, normally aspirated).
The aircraft’s high horsepower in tandem with its constant speed propeller mean it has a high useful load and great climb performance, without the complexity of a retractable undercarriage. It makes the aircraft ideally suited for cross-country cruising and utility.
The PA28-236 was developed in partnership with Carenado and is expected to release during the expo on June 27th.
2020 Sim Update 16
The stream spent a considerable portion of its overall length focussing on Sim Update 16 for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020. This is currently targeting a release date of July 1st, with Jorg citing the amusing reason for this timing being that, with so many exhibitors bringing their systems to Flight Sim Expo, if a Sim Update is pushed out during the Expo it crashes the internet with so many people trying to download it at once.
SU16 will be the next big Sim Update for MSFS 2020, with the last one having been prior to the launch of MSFS 2024. The team welcomed Lionel Fuentes, Head of Engine at Asobo Studios to the stream to talk about some of the new things coming with this update.
Firstly, the Game Development Kit or GDK has been refined to improve memory usage. This should benefit all systems but in particular Xbox Series S users of FS2020 will see greater platform stability on their system as fewer resources are now required for the same result. A few other backend improvements will also be coming to the console edition with the update, including long-awaited mouse and keyboard support.
Working Title are also bringing a handful of fixes and improvements to various aircraft and avionics suites, although these are mostly items which are already present in the 2024 sim and are now being pulled back into 2020, bringing parity to both versions of the sim.
2020/2024 World Data Alignment
Feeding into SU16 is the broader goal of World Data Alignment between the two sims. From SU16, MSFS 2020 will use the same world data as MSFS 2024. This change will mean updates for users in the older simulator to aerial imagery, DEM data, vector data including roads, building footprints and water bodies, as well as generic airport data. It will not affect TIN city photogrammetry data (as this is already unified), nor will it affect TIN countryside photogrammetry at places like the Grand Canyon. This countryside photogrammetry is 2024-exclusive will not be ported over.
World Data Alignment does not mean that 2020 users will get access to a handful of other bespoke 2024 features, either. 3D trees, seasons and snow, ground detailing, crop fields, cliff mapping and photometric rendering will all remain as 2024-exclusives.
Some of the benefits of this new process were shown on screen, at two particular locations. Aspen, CO, was shown in the current patch to have a false data flag for a river. In reality this river flows underground, but the sim shows an awkward blue line stretching cross the terrain where this simply isn’t present in reality. In the new update, instances such as these will be fixed.
Lionel also highlighted that a new trees mask will be coming into 2020, the same one present in 2024. This is derived from Microsoft’s ground surface type analysis, which is machine learning based. This is more precise than what is in MSFS 2020 currently, the and the before/after screenshots show it.
Also coming very soon will be a tiny update to change the name of the older flight sim. Although the lingua franca within the community is already “MSFS 2020” and “MSFS 2024”, officially the names of the sims are “Microsoft Flight Simulator” and “Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024”. This will soon change with the older version of MSFS being officially renamed to include “2020”. Users can expect to see this land soon as change to the game’s title in their Xbox, Windows or Steam library.
2024 Sim Update 3
The team didn’t dwell on this for too long, but it is clear that the focus of the next sim update will be bug fixing and performance improvements, with the number one wish list item in Jorg’s material being “FPS performance – VRAM bug?”. Users will be pleased to hear that this item, along with the vast majority of items in the top 50 of the wish list, are flagged as “In Progress – SU3”.
Embraer Praetor / Expert Series #2
Chris Burnett then launched into a progress update on the upcoming Expert Series Embraer Praetor, which was first announced back in March. The business jet seems to be coming along nicely, with a highly detailed interior and exterior model with textures applied being showcased in all of its glory. We could also see from these screenshots that lighting has been complete too.
Chris then turned attention to the avionics. He says he wants to “redefine the standard” for expert series aircraft, and this is to mean complete cockpit modelling with no inoperable controls, all electrical circuits modelled, a fully functional HUD, support for the various display layouts including display reversion, accurate data sourcing for the displays – all of this is planned. Chris said the screenshots are early work in progress, but the team still wanted to show them. He also pointed out that the image showing the FMS is actually showing one of the systems that the team has managed to get working at this early stage.
The aircraft uses a fully-modelled Proline Fusion avionics system, with dual FMS’s running on their own modules calculating separate outputs individually. A full set of Fusion flight planning tools are in the roadmap for development, including alternates, multiple destinations, secondary flight plans, flight plan uplink, custom waypoints, offsets and more that the community has been asking for in high-fidelity payware addons for years.
To really ram the point home on this being a new benchmark for Expert Series, Chris gave the example of the positioning system. This will feature an IRS system with accurate gyro compassing alignment times, which will be based on aircraft latitude and other characteristics like noise drift. All 5 of the Praetor’s navigation modes are being simulated, including GNSS (with SBAS accuracy and error), DME/DME modes, DME/VOR modes, IRS AHRS and of course good old fashioned dead reckoning. Navigation sensors will generate position estimates individually which in turn will generate uncertainty figures depending on the discrepancy between each estimate. These estimates are then used by all of the aircraft’s systems such as synthetic vision, the FMS and the map. So the aircraft won’t be using a 100% accurate GPS location all the time, it will be using the calculated position based on all of these simulated systems working in tandem.
Working Title have also used the 2024 SDK to build a custom EFB app specific for the Praetor. Chris said that he hopes this will act as an example for other third-party developers going forwards, showcasing how to build a custom aircraft app within the EFB framework of MSFS 2024. He posited again that this was still very early, however the app already has the capability to show readouts from all of the systems covered above with the ability to disable various sensors and systems on the aircraft, akin to user-generated failure modes. All of this, Chris says, is to give “the real Expert Series experience”.
Q&A
As always, the developer stream was filled with Q&A sessions, with a selection of pre-picked questions as well as some taken from the viewers on Twitch.
There were far too many questions for us to include them all, but below is a selection that cast some light on features we’ve not previously heard too much about.
Q: Are there any plans to revert to pre-SU1 lighting/exposure settings? It was one clear improvement from 2020 to 2024 and lots of people were complaining during SU1 beta but it was not changed in final release of SU1. A) The final release of SU2 should have fixed this, but if users continue to notice something that is not right, please let the team know.
Q: Might we see multiplayer liveries make a return in SU2? It was an awesome feature in 2020 that we would love to see come back in the new sim. A) Yes, this is a work item for SU3. Chris Burnett from WT is working on the modular 2024 aircraft liveries for multiplayer. This will be in the SU3 beta, users are encouraged to offer feedback if they have any.
Q: Loving the sim but the setup of peripherals is still a major pain point for me. Are there any plans to improve/simplify this process? A) 28 fixes were made in SU2 for this with more to come in SU3. Please continue to report issues as they come to the team so they can identify and fix.
Q: Can we expect more work on VRAM usage improvements? A) SU2 has cut back about 1GB of VRAM usage in some situations, but it is certainly not the last time the team will be looking at this and the next sim updates including SU3 will make further improvements to the VRAM situation.
Q: When can we expect to be able to download content locally? A) Sim Update 3 will bring in this feature and it is already available via the SU3 beta.
Will a refreshed lifetime bug list for FS2020 be returning to the weekly developer updates? A) Yes, Jorg says he will bring this back starting next week.
Q: What are your focus areas for Sim Update 3? A) Right now we are still very much focussed on bug fixing and performance optimisations. The option to download content locally is coming, but the primary focus is and remains bug fixing. iniBuilds have also been working hard to make their planes compatible with the career mode and we’re confident this will be coming in with SU3 at release. Gaya have also been working hard on optimising airports, now they’re on POIs, and after that they will be looking at ships.
Q: Will there be improvements to the VR experience in SU3? A) Yes, the team is looking at this and there are already some VR-specific items addressed in the SU3 build notes.
Q: Can you share some analysis based on telemetry data? For example, usage of 2020 vs 2024, the change in stability in 24 since launch, usage between platforms? A) Jorg says he’s not allowed to share the actual telemetry data, but he can tell the basic story that data tells, which is that of course 2024 saw a massive influx of users at release. That has since subsided and it’s actually non-simmers who have been checking out the new releases primarily so far. Right now there are more users in 2024 than 2020 but there are still a “fair number” of simmers daily driving the 2020 platform. Stability-wise, this is tracked on a weekly basis.
Q: Could we ever get a custom scenery for Oshkosh? A) The team will not be at Oshkosh this year sadly, but Jorg thinks this is a good idea and suggested this could be something that the team does for next year.
Q: Will dual-jetway support be coming to MSFS 2024? A) This came up in a previous developer stream. It is definitely not going to be coming to 2020 but the team alluded to the possibility of it coming to 2024 one day. Right now, the team says the focus is entirely on fixing bugs and improving performance and stability before adding new features, but this may be looked at down the road when the sim is in a better place.
That about sums up this recap. The team also went into some detail on the stream on a new toolkit being developed for third-party developers to make their aircraft compatible with the career mode, and the team took plenty of other questions during the 1 hour broadcast. To watch the entire stream, check out the msfsofficial Twitch channel here!
