Another week, and another development update from the Microsoft Flight Simulator development team, but this time it comes with slightly disappointing news.
There was supposed to be a World Update 3, scheduled for the 26th January, but this has been postponed for a week. The developers are working hard on, what they claim to be, the massive United Kingdom update, and being so big it is causing a few headaches. When released it will feature 70 POIs, 5 airports, two landing challenges, and 5 new photogrammetry cities. It is the cities that are slowing down progress.
In the meantime, they have shared some screenshots of what can be expected with the World Update, which are shown below:
As usual the developers have posted their current progress with the bug fixes and wishlist, as well as their promised Feature Discovery episode.
SDK Update
- DevMode:
- Visual Effects Editor is in an UX/UI refinement phase. The first available effects will be contrails and landing smoke effects. They will be customizable through the editor.
- We added a new feature to the Scenery editor, which allows users to rename, group and reorder the objects in the Scene list. It comes along with its own documentation if you need any help with this feature.
- We fixed an issue related to UTF8 encoding in the BGL Compiler.
- WebAssembly:We tweaked our system to avoid hampering module debugging with recurring exceptions
Third Party Update
- The creator community continues to release cool content and announce new projects at a brisk place. We just passed a big milestone for the in-sim marketplace – 100 partners have been approved to date! In total, there are 752 add-ons (+33 since last week) that have either been released already or are in production. At this pace, there will be over 1,000 add-on by the end of March!
- Airports:
- 512 airports are either released or are in various stages of development.
- 341 airports (+17) have been released on the platform so far in various stores.
- 98 airports (3) have been released in the in-sim marketplace.
- 63 airports (+2) beyond the released airports have been announced.
- 108 airports are not announced, but the dev let us know that the airport is in production.
- 512 airports are either released or are in various stages of development.
- Aircraft:
- 100 aircraft are either released or are in various stages of development.
- 17 aircraft (+5) have been released on the platform so far in various stores.
- 8 aircraft (+2) have been released in the in-sim marketplace.
- 65 aircraft (+5) beyond the released airports have been announced.
- 18 aircraft are not announced, but the dev let us know that the aircraft is in production.
- 100 aircraft are either released or are in various stages of development.
- Scenery:
- 140 sceneries (+16) are either released or are in various stages of development.
- 137 sceneries (+26) have been released on the platform so far in various stores.
- 10 sceneries (+0) have been released in the in-sim marketplace.
- 3 sceneries ((+0) beyond the released airports have been announced.
- 140 sceneries (+16) are either released or are in various stages of development.
- Some Highlights of the Week
- We love the FA-39 Vampire announcement from IRIS Simulations! Looks incredible!
- So good to see some of the classic warbirds being worked on like last week’s new images Mk1A Spitfire from Aeroplane Heaven. Many of us are big fans and can’t wait to try it!
We continue to make progress with the teams at Working Title, Fly By Wire and others and are hopeful to present news about this soon – it is, after all, your #1 Top Wish.
