Asobo is looking for ways to speed up the Marketplace package profiling step in the Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 SDK, after third-party developers said it takes far too long. Profiling is at this moment required when a developer wants to release their addon for PlayStation 5. The discussion is taking place in a thread on the MSFS DevSupport forum, where Asobo’s Eric replied that the team agrees the process is too slow and that experiments to shorten it have already started.
The profiling is part of the SimObject Statistics Profiler, a tool introduced with Sim Update 5. It runs a benchmark on a SimObject and flags any statistics that exceed performance thresholds, with the aim of improving performance and stability, especially on consoles. Asobo says it first mentioned the tool in June and published an FAQ on October 19. According to the studio, it later became active on PS5. A reply from Asobo quoted in the thread says the profiling is now mandatory for submissions to the PS5 platform, which is why developers are only now running into it.
Developer Jim Stewart described the practical impact. For his product, with 24 presets and 5 liveries, the tool needs 129 profiling runs. At around two minutes each, he calculates about 4.3 hours per full pass. He says this could be a recurring cost across a product line with several aircraft updates pending, and he worries that a long overnight run could be interrupted if the sim crashes.
One developer commented: “See you in 3.4 hours. I guess I can use that time to have a very disappointing conversation with myself about yet another 3.4 hours of lost productivity and development costs.“, after using a stopwatch to measure that 2 objects took 2 minutes to profile.
Another developer, Flightsimware, made a comment on its Discord server commenting that updating a single aircraft addon in their portfolio can take up to 15 hours of profiling, making it unviable for the developer to release updated versions of its aircraft for PlayStation 5. For now, Flightsimware has stopped working on PS5 compatibility updates.
FSReborn, who created the thread, and developer behind the Phenom 300E, has commented that it took them 10 minutes to go through 9 of 204 objects, on a computer with an Intel i9 14900k and an RTX 5090 GPU. Later in the thread, he added that after 2 hours of profiling, only 50 of 204 objects were completed. At that rate, the profiling for a single addon would take about 8 hours. In reality, after 4 hours, the process wasn’t even half complete.
While multiple developers are considering quitting PS5 support, Eric from Asobo defends that even a AAA studio needs to follow some rules, looking into options to shorten the duration of this problematic profiling system. One option the team is considering is skipping files that were not changed.
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