Asobo Team Q&A

Hi everyone!

In a few weeks we will be celebrating our 1-year anniversary, and with that we have a really fun schedule of events coming (that will be announced later). We though it would also be a fun time to have some Asobo Flight Team Members that you don’t see too often face-to-face to say hi and answer a few questions from you!

Rules

  • This AMA is not about bugs/issues or requests for new features, but is focused more on the person, their mission/job, and their relationship with flight sim.
  • We will select two questions total per participant to answer in August
  • Please reply to this post with the name of the Asobo team member you would like to direct your question to, and your question. Examples:

This question is for Olivier:
What has been the most challenging moment for you this year in the community?

This question is for Thomas:
As a QA Tester, how did COVID effect how testing was run and executed?

Asobo Flight Sim Team Participants

  • Olivier - Community Manager/Developer
  • François - Aircraft Designer
  • Alyzée - SDK Associate Producer
  • Romain - Build and Release Manager
  • Thibaud - Video Director
  • Benjamin - Art Outsourcing Manager
  • Francois - Lead UX Designer
  • Thomas - QA Tester
  • Lionel - Technical Director

Please do not casually chat in this thread as it is meant for questions. Any inappropriate questions will be removed.

14 Likes

This question is for Thibaud:
Is all the video done in game, or have you included real world video of aircraft, flyovers, scenery. If both what is the ratio between them.

3 Likes

I hope I didn’t make too many questions… I’ll put an asterisk on those I feel are more important to me.

This question is for Francois:
What were the main challenges when updating the UX for both Xbox and PC, in order to guarantee a easy to use interface that is welcoming for both new players and old players?

*This question is for Thomas:
How useful or helpful did flights/insider previews such as “performancePlus” turned out to be when it comes to helping Asobo fix out bugs for final releases?

This question is for François:
Do you have any favorite aircraft that you have designed? If so, why?

*This question is for Lionel:
How positively do you feel SU5 has impacted the Sim? What other performance improvements and other related technical improvements (performance related or not) do you have in mind for the future of the sim?

This question is for Olivier:
What is the most positive way you feel the forums help establish a good communication between Asobo/XGS and the community?

4 Likes

I’d like to ask Romain if there is any timeline for release of ray tracing in the MSFS scenery part.

I’d like to ask Benjamin if MS/Asobo has considered to aquire technology to improve trees and seasons.

Question for Francois:

Would be really interested to hear the process for a Lead UX for a sim. In the app/web app world we have design sprints, wire framing, prototyping, user feedback all feeding into development work. Is it similar in your world?

Question for Thomas:

When you are testing, I know sometimes you have to let things pass that meet the functional requirements but also don’t actually work that well in practice or don’t look that good. How much tension is there in your personal pride vs. what has been asked of you?

3 Likes

Few questions to Thibaud…

-What is his job / education background?

-What exactly does a video director do?

2 Likes

This question is for Lionel:
Why is ze world so big? Jokes aside, how do you think this massive technical feat that is MSFS will grow over the course of the next decade? What aspect of it are you most excited about?

1 Like

Question for Alyzée

I would like to see Matt from Working Title appointed to be a key interface to 3rd pty developers to perform and elucidate SDK parameters and tech overview to those developers that have yet to bring planes into MSFS. This would be MSFS reaching out to third parties as an outreach for SDK elucidation and assistance. Tollis is a good example of an excellent small developer on Airbus for example who would fall into that category. Does the SDK team have anything like this at the moment is someone reaching out to 3rd pty developers in respect of the SDK/?

3 Likes

A question for Romain and Francois :

Do you consider bringing back the feature that makes the menu tool windows remember their on screen positions from the last flight ? It was a very favorable feature until WU II USA, whereby it seemed to have been broken.

May sound like a petty detail but it’s pretty cumbersome to try to bring them into their favorite positions at each and every flight.

1 Like

Hi all! Just a reminder about what this “Team Q&A” is:

Question for Thomas: Was it hard to try and keep up with testing the whole platform before each release? How much time are you usually given to do integration/regression testing before a release?

2 Likes

This is for Oliver:

Are there any plans to create other games derived from technologies brought together to create MSFS?

For example, driving or sailing simulator.

1 Like

this question is for Olivier:
There has been a lot of questions around 3rd and 1st party content and some updates being the same, how do you manage this monster, and do you see changes in the future?

This question is for Olivier:
How do you translate community feedback into a more efficient way for the developers to digest, and what could we do to help?

This question is for Thibaud:
How many minutes (or hours?) of in-game footage are usually accumulated for a single trailer?

This question is for Benjamin:
What is the process of determining which art assets will be produced in-house and which will be outsourced, and how do you select the most suitable partner?

This question is for Lionel:
Which do you feel was the biggest technical hurdle of the engine the team had to overcome?

7 Likes

This 3-parter question is for Thomas, Oliver and Romain:
What kind of challenges have your respective teams faced when reading bug reports and general feedback, in both zendesk and the forums and communicating those to the respective teams in the last year? How have you learned to process and differentiate the ranting vs positive criticism in the year the game has been released? Has implementing feedback been a challenge or do you feel the pipeline from “bug reported” to “fix implemented” has made progress looking back on the previous year?

3 Likes

Question for Thomas:

Initially starting my Engineer career in Testing and building/running Test teams (for a variety of software solutions, but never gaming). I’m curious about testing techniques you employee. The world is so vast that it’s impossible to cover every permutation at it relates to user hardware, quality of data, physics simulation, aircraft models etc.

How do you balance pre-defined test cases vs a more loosely defined exploratory testing, unit-testing, static and dynamic analysis (and the gamut) in a setup that is as complex as this one?

3 Likes