PMDG’s Robert Randazzo shared some new information about the current three main topics of discussion within the PMDG team. In this update, we can go through some news about the PMDG 737 for Xbox, the PMDG 777, as well as the freezing issues many users had over the past few months.
The EFB in PMDG 737 for Xbox
Robert first addresses the question of the EFB on the PMDG 737 for Xbox, as there are still issues with the aircraft communication between the game engine and the external EFB engine on this gaming console. He says that Asobo already reached back with proper documentation and a fix was put in place, resulting in the EFB being functional in this version of the aircraft.
Even though the communication between the tablet and the aircraft is now existent, the EFB doesn’t react to any keyboard input, effectively resulting in an inability to put calculations and other values into it, ultimately making the EFB unusable at the moment.
The PMDG team promises to find a solution to this, and the testing will begin shortly.
PMDG Systems Freezing
Over the past few months, there were reports of the 737 aircraft systems freezing, resulting in the aircraft being completely unusable until a complete restart of the simulator. The number of reports was slowly increasing, according to the PMDG team, but the initial thought was that this is something on the user’s end, as there might’ve been a conflict of add-ons and mods within the community folder.
This, however, proved to be incorrect, as this malfunction happened during testing on the 777 as well. Robert says that there is something into this in combination with PMDG’s TCAS system in both the 737 and the 777. The bug, though, is very hard to catch, as it is almost impossible to recreate it under normal circumstances, and it happens in random instances.
Last week, the PMDG’s development team “pulled a good portion of coding resources from the 777” to investigate this problem. Through manual debugging, the team found their theory on this bug, proof of it, and ultimately, a fix.
This means that the 777 beta team will shortly get a new version, with this problem hopefully fixed, and the fix should also be soon pushed to the 737 as well.
PMDG 777 Development Still Ongoing
Robert says that the 777 is still progressing very well. A new beta version should come out shortly, as we have mentioned in the article already, and the team now progresses to “tie in” all the remaining features together, that are considered to be needed on the initial release of the aircraft.
Robert then ends the development update by saying that it won’t be long now. This means that we might possibly expect the release date announcement very soon.
You can also see some previews of the 777 in one of our previous articles here.
