Progress has been made on the hugely popular A320 by Fenix Simulations, though the IAE engine variant of the airliner has seen an unfortunate setback, according to a post by their developers.
Until now, only the CFM engine model has been available for Microsoft Flight Simulator users, but in a recent Reddit Post, Fenix Simulations’ Aamir revealed the conflict in Ukraine has seen the developer leading the IAE’s integration to be ‘without power and heating for days’, thus majorly delaying the team’s progress.
However, the post did reveal that progress is being made elsewhere on the IAE side of things, with the implementation of fast lookup algorithms, which Aamir claims ‘makes the engine model math more performant by nearly 1000x.’.
Additionally, the aircraft’s EFB is being rewritten, with over 400-hours having been spent rewriting the ‘underlying architecture to support the performance, scalability, and maintainability of the EFB’. The post highlights that although users will not see any visual changes in the EFB, it will enable future features such as ‘a more robust state-saving system.’
Finally, Aamir’s post provides an update on the substantial visual upgrade the A320 is undergoing, with the team’s artists completely rebuilding the visual model of the aircraft.
Speaking of the enormity of the task, Aamir writes ‘it wouldn’t surprise me if we were the first to start active development of an airliner in MSFS back in 2019, before any art or development tools were available.’
The post goes on to add, ‘now MSFS has mostly matured and stabilised, it’s clear that we ‘undershot’ a little bit on this front and left a lot on the table. Dubbed ‘V2′ internally for the near total-rebuild, this will be a substantial, and free, upgrade to our A320 product; hopefully making it the benchmark for visual quality and accuracy.’
You can read Aamir’s full post on Reddit here. Be sure to check back to FSElite for further updates and announcements on the Fenix A320.
