On Tuesday 8th December, the Microsoft Flight Simulator Team released a hotfix (1.11.7.0) for the new simulator, which corrected an issues of crashes affecting 3rd party interactions within the cockpit.
The team have now updated the community through their weekly development update post. They start off by announcing that they have won an award for Best Simulator / Strategy in the Game Awards. The team at FSNews offer our congratulations for the accolade.
The Roadmap suggests they are still on track for the Sim Update on the 23rd December, which is reported to include VR support, with another Sim Update following on the 25th February 2021. In between these updates, a World update, covering the United Kingdom, will be released on the 28th January 2021.
Bugs fixes and community wish lists remain the same as the last update. They finish this weeks update by paying tribute to the legendary Chuck Yeager, the first pilot to break the sound barrier, who passed away recently.
SDK Update
DevMode:
- The first version of airport creation within Project Editor is almost ready. Once validated we should enrich this new wizard with some other asset types creation (i.e. aircraft).
- We fixed an important unexpected shutdown in Script Editor, lately raised by the community.
- Hierarchical instances / Grouping in Scenery Editor has now arrived at the test stage.
- As usual, the team is working on improving the overall stability of the DevMode at the same time, giving special focus to the Project Editor, the Scenery Editor, and the Aircraft Editor. The communityโs feedbacks keep on being very helpful to identify & fix bugs and thus making the tools better.
WebAssembly:
- We identified and fixed potential security weaknesses in the WASI layer.
- We changed the way WASM modules are compiled asynchronously for faster flight loading.
- We fixed minor issues with the stencil buffer in our low-level graphics API.
Third Party Update
- The creator community keeps blowing us away and our team is delighted by all the new releases and announcements. Some updated numbers:
- Airports:
- 258 airports (+29 from last week) have been released for the platform so far.
- 84 airports (+11 from last week) are already in our in-sim store.
- 45 airports (-1 from last week) beyond the released airports have been announced.
- 117 airports (-1 from last week) are not announced but in dev based on information from 3rd parties.
- In total 420 airports are either already released or are in active production.
- Aircraft:
- 12 aircraft (+0 from last week) have been released for the platform so far.
- 6 aircraft (+1 from last week) are already in our in-sim store.
- 57 aircraft (+2 from last week) beyond the released airplanes have been announced.
- 20 aircraft (+0 from last week) are not announced but in dev based on information from 3rd parties.
- So overall, 89 aircraft are either released or are in production.
- Not sure if you saw the new screenshots of the CRJ from Aerosoft โ we have tested the plane and itโs great! Wonderful job by the team!
- Scenery:
- 40 scenery add-ons (+6 from last week) have been released for the platform so far.
- 9 scenery add-ons (+1 from last week) are already in our in-sim store.
- 3 scenery add-ons (+0 from last week) have been announced.
- Airports:
Great to see the new aircraft development announcements this week โ we canโt wait for the T-45C, the A220 and the A380!
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