Aamir Thacker, the lead developer of Fenix Simulations, has taken to the company’s Discord server to announce that the highly anticipated “Block 2” update of the popular Airbus A320CEO addon, which is set to include the long awaited IAE engine option, will be released in the month of October after a decision was taken to hold back the impending release.
Writing on Discord, Aamir said “today we learn about project management and why it sometimes sucks”, before announcing that the update will be delayed by one month. Every cloud does have a silver lining, though. In this case, that is the fact that the new CFM external engine model has progressed much faster than expected. Aamir originally forecast 4 months for the work to be completed, but it is actually now in a state of near completion after just 6 weeks.
The Fenix team could push out the Block 2 update as planned right now with the new IAE engines. However, as Aamir explains, this would entail having a “mixed infrastructure”: “[we would] have the CFMs running the old FM, old engine model, old FADEC, and a bunch of other old code in the background, and then alongside that we [would] have the IAEs running a completely different set of code for pretty much anything that has to do with the engines. Basically, it will get rather soupy.”
So to simplify the whole process, the team has opted to delay the update and then push out the whole package, including the new CFM model, in October a month later than planned. This means that once the update ships, there only needs to be a single round of bug fixing as opposed to two, since the aircraft will now only be operating on a single, updated code base regardless of the engine variant being used as opposed to two if the update was pushed tomorrow.
The delay has been met with some criticism, but from what we can see the reception has been resoundingly one of mutual understanding and respect between the community and the Fenix developers.
Additionally, Aamir shared an extra bit of good news with us. The Block 2 update is now confirmed to have a completely rebuilt cabin, simultaneously packing in more details while decreasing the hit on performance including frame rate. This will now according to Aamir “ensure it is possible to realistically represent many more airlines”. That could be alluding to a number of things, although if I were to put my own speculation hat on (this is my own opinion and not that of FSElite), I would hazard a guess that this could mean the inclusion of business class cabins for the airlines who operate them.
Regardless, Aamir tells us that there is much more to come in due course on the cabin.
FSElite will continue to keep you abreast of the latest news concerning Fenix Simulations and their A320 product line.
