It is again time for the weekly development update of Asobo Studios and Microsoft regarding Microsoft Flight Simulator. This update is relatively small as Asobo Studios are mainly focused on ensuring their workers are safe due to the new rapidly evolving COVID situation and new lockdown in place in France. As such, most Asobo employees are now working from their home, and this was an opportunity for Asobo to upgrade their infrastructure and equipment. Finally, the team reminds their commitment to the the sim community and providing a better product for all, but that health and safety of their workers remains their top priority.
Development Roadmap and Feedback
The newly released development roadmap makes reference to a partnership which will be unveiled later on November 19th with a reference to EAA without further information. Our opinion is that this will be a partnership with the Experimental Aircraft Association, mostly known for their gigantic AirVenture Airshow which takes place in Oshkosh every year. In the past, Microsoft already a close partnership with Air Venture, for example releasing FS2004 during the 2003 edition of the Oshkosh Airshow.
Community Streams and Developers QA
On October 28th, Asobo Studios held a Questions and Answers Session on Twitch ; the full video can now be found on Youtube.
Asobo empasizes three upcoming community streams which will happen on Twitch in the next week : first stream will be with LearnToFly and will happen today ; where the city of Rome will explored ; the second stream will happen next week in partnership with VATSIM LondonController the third and last stream will be a guided tour of Tanzania performed by SeedyL and FactualGull.
The next important patch for MSFS will be Update 6 which will release on November 10th, and the next development update will happen on November 12th.
SDK Update
Finally, Asobos Studios have updated their SDK with the following features :
- DevMode:
- Node-based Visual Effects System continues to be improved with more and more useful features, allowing setting-up great effects in the sim. We are now focusing on improving the system’s performance.
- We started designing a way to easily create new assets from within the Project Editor, starting from given available asset templates. We should essentially focus on types: new Mission, new Airport & new Aircraft.
- Improvements, new options, and small features keep on being added here and there in tools.
- To list just one of them: a new auto-hide feature is now available for the DevMode bar.
- As a background task the DevMode team is always working on improving the overall stability of the DevMode, especially giving special focus to the Project Editor, the Scenery Editor, and the Aircraft Editor.
- WebAssembly
- Mouse events are now correctly forwarded when multiple WASM gauges are used in one single Virtual Cockpit.
- Lowered memory consumption during WASM module compilation.
Screenshot provided to the Microsoft Community by Machete3181