The team behind Microsoft Flight Simulator has posted its weekly development update. Time to take a closer look at what’s been happening behind the scenes and what we can expect for the future of this simulator.
First and foremost, the sim’s first world update was announced. We’ll get to the intricacies of that later. The new Partnership Series update is postponed to next week. We do know it’ll feature Gaya Simulations. An SDK update was released as well, along with a roadmap update and other community related things.
World Update: Japan
This world update is a collaboration between many companies, not only Asobo. The Bing Maps team worked on 6 cities and a new elevation map. Gaya Simulations worked on three airports: Nagasaki (RFJU), Hachijojima (RJTH) and Kushiro (RJCK). They worked on 20 new points of interest too. Asobo put all of this together in the simulator, but they developed three airports themselves too: Kerama (ROKR), Shimojisjima (RORS) and Suwanosejima (RJX8). Three new landing challenges are included too.
They explained further that they would like to release an update to the simulator once a month. This can be a World Update, like the one announced today, or a Simulation Update, expected once every two or three months. These updates aim to improve the overal simulator experience. That’s not all, because the team is also working on paid DLC that will come in the next months and years. More information about that will follow later. The team is dedicated, this project won’t be abandoned right after release.
SDK Update
Many developers will be happy to see that an update to the SDK has been released. An SDK changelog is here:
- WebAssembly: Improvements to the GDI+ compatibility layer and improvements to the ease of development and debugging capabilities is the current focus. Visual Studio 2017 support has also been added.
- The glTF exporter now supports 3D Studio Max 2021.
- We fixed the SimConnect facilities API and plan on expanding it.
- On the Developer Mode side, we are working on improving overall usability: we enhanced the visualization for roads, terraforming shapes and exclusion rectangles. The editor now doesn’t allow for invalid ground merging parameters.
Marketplace Update
More than 1000 applications for the Microsoft Partner Program have been submitted. 40 of them have already been approved. We could see some of them release new products that have been included in the marketplace, like the Carenado Mooney M20R Ovation or Aerosoft’s Trondheim. Included as well is Orbx’ Darrington Municipal and Stairport made its tribute with Saint-Tropez.
Development Roadmap
The development roadmpa was updated as well. This month’s news has all released. For Octover, there is more to come. We can expect Around the World videos for Europe, North America, Central and South America and the Caribbean. Three more partnership videos are coming, one of them featuring Gaya Simulations as mentioned before. In the second half of the month, we can look forward to two more Feature Discovery episodes.
Forum Feedback
Users of the forums has to possibility to vote on the most important bugs and wishes the community has. The top 20 for each can be seen in the screenshots below.
That’s all for this week’s update. You can find screenshots previewing Japan above and new screenshots about the sim in general below.
