The Microsoft Flight Simulator Developer Q&A monthly recap has come and gone over on Twitch. We watched the stream to bring you the latest information. During the stream, two special guests joined the usual panel of Jorg Neumann, Sebastian Wloch and Martial Bossard.
User Engagement
Jorg began the stream by updating the community on how the Antonov 225 sold and how much is going to be donated to charity as part of the efforts to either restore or rebuild the plane. The team confirmed that over 90,000 units were sold and will be donating $1.5m to Antonov.
User engagement has also been the highest it has been in the past 43 months. This has been helped by the recent Dune expansion pack, which saw 2.6m sessions. Overall, Dune has been the 3rd most downloaded pack in the simulator.
Scenery and Weather
The first series of questions is all related to scenery and weather. The first question was about bringing back water masking to the simulator after it appeared as though elements had been removed in the past few months.
Asobo has written a tool to help improve water masking. Some previews were shared on the stream and confirmed that they’re all back. The masking effects were uploaded and should be available to see in the simulator now.
The next question was about cloud turbulence and its effect in general. Seb took the lead on this question and tested some turbulence in the simulator by exploring a storm in Africa. Asobo is working on improving the effect following an extensive research period.
A user then asked about bridges, to which Jorg confirmed that a team is dedicated to ensuring that on a city-by-city basis (in the world updates) they are cleaning these up to improve them. Jorg then answered a question about square scenery patches that randomly appear in the simulator, and he confirmed this is fixed and will be coming out soon.
Frozen bodies of water was also addressed by Sebastian by showing Meteoblue data that highlights how the data is injected into the simulator. He said that they collect ice shelf data from Meteoblue, but it only is on oceans and the resolution of it isn’t too good. This is why they use snow data to help form frozen bodies of water in the simulator.
Jorg took the next question, which related to small and medium rivers. He said that the DEM data is what forms the rivers. However, he has spoken to the Bing Maps team to see if there is work that can be done to improve this. In some areas of the world, however, there is a fallback for where the data may not exist and they use 30M DEM. They are working with other sources to try and get the information they need to improve this in more and more locations.
Next up, it’s about weather APIs. Martial took this question by saying they use Meteoblue’s data to provide the weather. He said it is hard for them to expose data that they do not own.
A user then wondered why seasons were moved to MS2024. Sebastian took the question by saying that seasons is “much more”, including different field colours, animals migrating, etc. In the current sim, the snow layer is present, but the team wanted to take this to the next level. It’s a big plan and required a lot of re-writing, hence the move to Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024.
Sim Update 15
Sim Update 15 is currently planned to be released on 26th March 2024 and comes with a lot of stuff and fixes. It may move by a few days, as Microsoft want to get it right
Additional topics that the team spoke about were stability, WASM memory and LOD changes on Xbox. A number of bugs and crashes were fixed and general memory management was improved (particularly on the console). There’s more density and variety with live traffic which had a big impact on Xbox. This is why the team needed a few more weeks to ensure that the update was more stable.
Much of the improvements in Sim Update 15 was covered heavily in the last developer Q&A which you can read here.
Seb took the lead on some of the tests that the team took with the recent update. They said that they went aggressive with one of the Flighting Tests for Sim Update 15, but took the feedback on and refined it further so that they find a good compromise between quality and performance improvements. This was particularly important for users on Xbox.
A user asked why can’t Xbox users choose between quality or performance modes. Seb took the question and said that most people on consoles have a TV which displays 30/60FPS. He said that is a variable quality within the simulator on Xbox to hit 35FPS stable so that there is a bit of wiggle room to adjust performance for users. It adjusts things dynamically to get a smooth experience. He said for a performance mode, you need to be stable 60fps constantly, which they cannot do in reality.
iniBuilds A320
Cameron from iniBuilds is their first guest to talk about the A320 version 2. He started to talk about the engines within the aircraft and we saw some new previews of the engine detail. He said that many of the external details are using decals to ensure there’s no quality loss. In the cockpit, Cameron said that everything should operate as you would expect. One of the cooler details he said iniBuilds has included is that the engine will crank to cool itself down after a certain period of time.
Other functionality Cameron shared were movable windows (including accurate operations), accurate ground handling, and an onboard EFB. He also said that they have accurately modelled the fly-by-wire systems which kick in at 80knts in the A320NEO. When asked, the team said they have optimised the plane as best as possible to ensure that the performance is better than when it was last seen in the beta.
Cameron confirmed it should be coming with Sim Update 15 on March 26th. This will be a default aircraft and will be in addition to the original Asobo one released back in August 2020.
Aircraft and General
The first question in this section was about adding ray-tracing effects to the simulator. The team is currently investigating improving the current system (Ray Marching). It’s a big change to make something more like ray-tracing so will not likely come to the current sim.
Seb confirmed that more features from Sim Updates (e.g. better prop simulation) will be coming to aircraft in the future. But it takes time as they want to not just ‘add a feature’ but improve the experience overall.
A user wanted to know about the camera API, to which the team replied they said they would look at this again.
As for dynamic LOD, Seb confirmed this said this will probably going to the backlog as he said it is a great idea. It’s an “easy addition” as it’s already part of the Xbox code.
City Update 6 – South West Germany
The next City Update (number 6) will be South West Germany. It will update many cities within Germany, including Mannheim, Stuttgart, Kehl, Strasbourg, and more. Furthermore Friedrichshafen Airport (EDNY) is being developed by iniBuilds and will come part of the City Update.
Cities Included (what we captured anyway):
- Mannheim
- Heidelberg
- Stuttgart
- Esslingen
- Kehl
- Strasbourg
Local Legend 15 – Dornier DO 31
It has been confirmed that the next Local Legend (number 15) will be the Dornier DO31. Developed by iniBuilds, the aircraft is unique that there are only 2 airworthy ones in the world. It’s an experimental, jet-propelled, vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) cargo aircraft that was designed for military use.
Michael from iniBuilds did a quick demo of it on the stream, including a VTOL take off. He said that it’s a complex beast to fly, so reading the manual is really beneficial to fly this new Local Legend.
World Hub and VR
A user asked if they could add default library objects in order to the World Hub updates. Right now, the team wants to take small steps and then they will expand it over the coming years.
Microsoft has worked with Bing to acquire new map data, which 250TB of world data is going to be gone through. This raw data will be shared between both Microsoft Flight Simulator and Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024.
Roadmap
We now know what the next City Update and Local Legend will be.
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 – Aircraft / Developer Announcement
During the stream, they will start to talk about aircraft and the developers. Jorg explained that the CEO of Cirrus wanted the Vision jet in the base simulator.
He confirmed that FlightFX is bringing the Vision Jet to Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 as part of the base sim. Jorg said in the stream that “the level of quality of aircraft in FS2024 is payware quality from great developers like FlightFX.”
During the reveal of the Vision Jet, Jorg asked the community about whether they should pull the current version from the in-sim Marketplace. He said he didn’t want to “buy this in September or something, and right after that comes Flight Simulator 2024” and then stopped short of saying anything further. He’s contemplating having it removed in “June or so” but is open to suggestions from the community.
Microsoft Will Attend FlightSimExpo 2024
The team loved attending last year and confirmed they will be coming back along with confirmation that they will exhibit.
They will talk about some stuff to do with Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 and more.
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This wraps up everything from the stream. A video-on-demand will be made available on Twitch and YouTube.
If we missed anything, let us know and we’ll update the article.
Edit: We misprinted a quote from the stream and have updated it accordingly. FSElite regrets this error.
