The Microsoft Development Team have, yet again, published another development update, showing their commitment to the flight simulator community in sharing their progress.
First of all, they have been hard at work preparing for the next World Update due for release this coming Tuesday. This update will feature the United States and is their second World Update since release.
Partnering with other aviation based companies and organisations is something the Development Team are keen to continue and develop. They have announced the partnership with EAA (Experimental Aircraft Association), a sports aviation organisation based in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. They have 900 chapters dotted around the world and are continually promoting the joy of aviation through chapter meet ups, restoration, and education. They are especially keen on educating the young.
Further partnerships continue with third party developers, 88 of which have been recently approved to provide payware. They currently have over 200 payware 3rd party developers providing airports, scenery and aircraft, and the list continues to grow. On that note, Aerosoft are making good progress with the CRJ and the Development Team are hoping for a pre-Christmas release.
The Development Team have also announced that there will be a major simulator update every two to three months. Their Feedback Snapshot seems to indicate that they are currently working on fixing bugs such as live weather issues, crashes to desktop, G1000/3000 autopilot related issues, and logbook not updating. The snapshot features below for the full list.
Items the community have wished for include synchronisation with the FlyByWire A320 Mod, replay functionality missing, multiple screens, and helicopters. Others include a freeware category in the Marketplace, and gliders and sailplanes. Much of these are either planned or started. A full list is in the snapshot below.
SDK Update
- DevMode:
- The DevMode team has mostly been focusing on the last fixes before the release of the forthcoming update.
- On the Scenery Editor side, the team is implementing the possibility to add a heightmap on a rectangle and to sculpt it. Besides that, fixes and improvements have also been achieved on the object duplication feature.
- As a background task, the DevMode team is always working on improving the overall stability of the DevMode, giving special focus to the Project Editor, the Scenery Editor, and the Aircraft Editor.
- Community feedback continues to be very helpful to identify & fix bugs and therefore making the tools better.
- WebAssembly:
- We fixed the “trigger_key_event” function in the Panels API.
- We implemented JIT compilation of WASM modules for specific use cases (decreases iteration times).
Third Party Update
- We have 1,000+ applications to our Marketplace Partner Program and 200+ are known payware companies.
- We have approved 88 payware partners (+18 from last week) already and 65 products (+6 from last week) are live in the in-sim store.
- There are over 150 other products nearing release in the coming weeks and another 250 products from 3rd party developers are in production. In total, almost 400 3rd party products are either released or are in development. Incredible!
- We are also very happy to confirm that Aerosoft continues to make good progress with the CRJ and we are increasingly hopeful that this plane can be released before the holidays.
