On December 4th 2024, the latest developer Q&A live stream took place with regulars Jorg Neumann (Head of Microsoft Flight Sim), Sebastian Wloch (Asobo CEO), Martial Bossard (Executive Producer, Asobo) and hosted by Jayne (Sr. Community Manager). The panellists were of course primarily speaking about the launch of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 and providing the community with an update on how things will improve moving forward. The original stream is over an hour long and below is our recap of the stream.
Jorg kicked things off by firstly thanking those that sent words of support during, what he described as a, “awful launch experience.” They saw all the frustrations, videos and comments during the launch period and gave an apology to along with letting the community know they have plans to make things right. Jorg explained that neither the server and client were not the issue, but instead it was the CDN between them all. He said on the first day alone, there were “100 billion package requests”, which is resulted in the long load times, poor quality streaming and other issues that locked people out the sim.
They tried to increase capacity, but in the end moved the infrastructure and it’s working much better. A few graphs were presented showcasing the errors. You can see the bumps during the launch hours and other subsequent times. Below is the package CDN.
This chart shows the world scenery CDN.
The new CDN (set up on Friday morning) shows the hit on the cache, with the number of errors now incredibly low. Finally, another chart showcasing the servers were shown. Asobo says that they are now pleased with the set-up.
Bug Fixing Candence
In terms of how bug fixes will look like, Jorg gave a brief overview. We have already seen 2 patches released, with patch 3 due out next week. He said that any issues with the world, aircraft or career mode can be fixed server side (no update for the end user). As with MSFS 2020, we will see regular sim updates once a quarter in 2025.
Q&A 1
A round of community-asked questions was next on the docket, and all three took turns answering questions. Performance, texture quality and LOD issues were a big concern and Microsoft/Asobo are assuring people that they are making efforts to ensure they mitigate as much of these issues as possible through improvements to the cache system, texture streaming, and in-sim updates. It’s an area of continuous improvement for the team.
Microsoft acknowledged that their is a demand for an offline mode, but they said that due to the ever-increasing size and scale of the sim, it won’t be possible to make the whole thing offline. That said, they do plan on allowing users to install selected aircraft and airports to reduce to need of streaming.
For hardware, more updates for profiles will come, but won’t need sim updates to add them as they can be done as packages similarly to aircraft/airports.
The Marketplace, which was delayed originally, has been delayed to “early 2025” to enable third-party developers more time to adapt to the new platform and test products.
Feedback Snapshot
As we have seen with MSFS 2020, the team are keen to track bugs and feature requests from the community. Then those with high number of votes are then reviewed by the developers and given a status update. The top 20 are listed and some are then discussed on the stream.
Starting with the bugs, a number of well-discussed bugs have already been fixed with the upcoming patches, or are currently under investigation by the teams. This includes unrealistic airport and night lighting, the ability to unselect packages in MyLibrary, and various hardware issues.
As for the Wishlist, 19 have been identified (so far) by the developers. Many of them are ‘under investigation’ and some such as creating own flight plans in career mode are already planned. You can see the full wishlist below.
Working Title Update
Working Title’s Matt Nischan was this month’s special guest on the stream who gave a brief update on the the flight planning tools. He said they were excited by the partnership with LIDO which gives them a huge amount of data. Tens of millions of charts have been served, hundreds of thousands of requests per minute, terabytes of charts and maps downloaded already.
In the future, he said that calculations for performance planning is complete and coming soon. Other things under investigation includes real world routes, more weather layers and aircraft position sync for the web planner.
2025 Sustain
Despite the launch issues, Jorg and the teams are keen to make amends in 2025 for simmers with a range of new content.
World Update 19 – Brazil
Although it was initially intended on launching this week, the team felt it was more appropriate to launch it a little later. Right now the plan is Jan/Feb 2025.
Local Legend 20: Cap-4 Paulistinha
Developed by iniBuilds, the Cap-4 Paulistinha will be the next local legend. It will be released as a “make good” to the community as a free product to apologise for how MSFS 2024 launched.
Famous Flyer 11: Cessna 185F
The next Famous Flyer will be the Cessna 185F, developed by Carenado. It will be released as a “make good” to the community as a free product to apologise for how MSFS 2024 launched.
4 ‘Make Good’ Free Aircraft for All
Jorg is acutely aware of how the launch of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 fell below people’s expectations and wants to do right by the community. Alongside working to fix the issues, work on wishlist requests, and provide updates to the community, he has said that they will release four aircraft completely free for the whole community as a ‘make good’ gesture. As mentioned above the first two will be the Cap-4 Paulistinha and the Cessna 185F, with the other two yet to be announced.
In Summary
Jorg wrapped up the stream by saying they have great teams doing awesome work and are continuing to work hard. “We will do better, we will fix this and make it the great sim platform it can be and will be,” Jorg concluded. Seb and Martial also joined in to say thank you to the community for providing plenty of feedback and data to enable them to bug fix as quickly as possible. They appreciate how much detail people go into when documenting problems.
