If you’re not familiar with Mettar Simulations, they are a development company headed by Twitch and YouTube personality Matt Davies. They are perhaps most known for their hugely popular projectFLY, but recently have had their name tied to their study level A380 in development. While many flight sim development companies are notorious for their communication, and lack thereof..,Mettar aims to be better about communication with the community. Their solution is to start a development blog where they’ll post weekly developments on Thursdays detailing everything that happened at Mettar the previous week regarding their various ongoing projects. With this out of the way, lets dig into Dev update #1!
Housekeeping
Before we get to the exciting stuff, first must come the more mundane-but-still-exciting-ish housekeeping information. The Mettar Simulations team has now grown to a size of 10 which will allow Mettar to utilize anywhere between 400-500 hours of development time per week, an increase from the 10-20 in the past. This massive increase in development time will mean that we will now see significant development updates regularly, including a weekly update regarding projectFLY,
projectFLY
First off, Matt notes that open beta 8 of projectFLY is now available, with the massive beta changelog being available for viewing here. The team acknowledges that they’re hugely being on support tickets but have 2 team members solely dedicated to clearing out the backlog. Once this is completed users can expect ticket responses in a timely manner, with no more long wait periods for those with unsolved issues.
The promised Mac/Linux versions of the app has been long delayed due to a required code signing certificate needing to be implemented into the app in order for it to work without any security issues. This certificate was purchased about 5 weeks ago, but the company’s drawn out verification process has incurred a huge delay on the delivery of the certificate. Matt states that once this certificate is in hand, they can implement it and then finally release the versions that were promised long ago.
Speaking of long delayed things, this leads us well into the dispatcher. The dispatcher is currently at the top of Mettar’s list and they’ve been working with a new design team to improve the dispatcher and get it out in a timely manner. All development on future features has been halted until the dispatcher has been released, and Matt states that we can expect to hear more about it in future weekly dev updates.
The highly acclaimed projectFLY radar has undergone massive backend changes and improvements to get it running better than ever, though network date from VATSIM, IVAO, and PilotEdge is still disabled (but that should be up and running next week). In addition to this, it has been stated by Matt that projectFLY as a whole is currently undergoing a major rebrand that will be phased in over the coming weeks and months so that’ll be interesting where the team takes it in the future.
Lastly, due to GDPR, a new privacy policy will be releasing next week along with some other service changes to ensure compliance with the new policies.
Simstall
Not much was said by Matt except that development has begun and they’re keeping everything related to the platform close to the vest until they have enough to share.
The A380
Now for what no doubt what most have come here for, the A380. Sadly, nothing was shared about this project except that it continues to be in part time development while the team focusses on projectFLY and Simstall. Hopefully future dev updates will have something more for us, but until then why not check out a few cockpit renders shared by Matt back in September?
That was all for dev update #1, but be sure to check back next Thursday where we’ll have a full breakdown of dev update #2 waiting for you! (provided Mettar get one out on time, of course)
