Lockheed Martin

Our friends over at HeliSimmer were lucky enough to be able to sit down and chat with Adam Breed, Engineering Project Manager of Prepar3D. Not only that, but they asked us here at FSElite if there were any questions we wanted to ask the team. Much to my surprise, they sent the questions to Adam and got some neat responses back from him.

Sergio from HeliSimmer then gave me permission to post a snippet of the interview here to entice some of our community to head over to HeliSimmer to read the whole thing. As you could guess from the title of the site, HeliSimmer is primarily focused on helicopters, hence a lot of the questions are geared towards it. However, we hope that some of it you’ll find interesting and a good insight into the workings of the large company.

You can read the whole interview here.

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You attended Flight Sim Con last year, you’re engaging with the community via Reddit and partaking in interviews (like this). Is this part of a longer-term plan to engage more with the community who are moving on from other platforms? *

Absolutely. I greatly recognize that without the flight simulation community and the Prepar3D ecosystem we would not have a strong platform. For example, in June we will be bringing some of our team to FSExpo in Las Vegas to talk with our user community and developers. Our users and developers greatly influence our platform and help us choose what we develop.

We plan to continue to engage and be as transparent as possible to solidify and grow our user base.

How would you describe your relationships with developers and publishers lately? There are a lot of developers who are very vocal at how much you’re listening to their needs for improving the sim. *

We have strong relationships with our developers and publishers. Prepar3D v4’s 64-bit architecture is something developers have requested for years. The v4 release now enables developers to create content that was never possible before, so there is a lot of excitement about new capabilities that can be achieved with the platform.

Additionally, the team dedicates time to reach out and support developers to ensure their products are as performant and stable as possible. We recognize that the success of Prepar3D is directly correlated to the success of the ecosystem.

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Thanks again to Sergio for allowing us to post and for taking the time to interview the team at Lockheed Martin.

The developers of Prepar3D, Lockheed Martin Tweeted earlier that they’ll be hosting a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) on Tuesday 26th September between 1pm – 2pm ET. During which time, they’ll be open to questions from the community VR, augmented reality and the software itself.

What’s most interesting is the Reddit thread (link here), has now been deleted, whilst the Twitter post currently remains active. Why? Well, we think it has to do with the fact they may have accidentally revealed that version 4.1 of the simulator will be out very soon. Quoted from the Reddit post, they said “we just released v4.1, so we thought this would be a great time to answer any questions you might have”. I was quick enough to capture a screenshot of the thread before it was deleted. Also note that some of the comments question 4.1 as well.

(Note: 4.1 is NOT released! We have just checked and it’s not available to download)

However, if you then head to the account which posted this thread (u/LockheedMartin), you will notice they’ve posted a new thread, with the above quote now missing.

We’re expecting that the release of version 4.1 is pretty close now and I’m guessing we’ll know for sure by Tuesday. Hopefully this means that beautiful looking A320 from FSLabs isn’t too far behind either.