Can we please seriously discuss quality management?

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Did they skirt around it? Did you miss bits? Since somethings were repeated in places or clarified later on.

Seb talked about new [game] engine tweaks and improvements to RAM usage that improved FPS levels about ~5-10 or so. The rest was trying to ease the CPU bottlenecks I believe.

I’d hardly call that “skirting”… Additionally, by the time the stream finished it was almost 9pm in France… Seb and Martial are likely to be tired after a working day is over and then they have to join the Q&A on top.

No, however, optimising software is easier for standardised hardware. So, no doubt it makes the development process easier. And the feedback from that actually means improvements to the PC version.

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Crosby is a really good resource. One of my colleagues had actually been through a course by the man himself. He was a bit of an evangelist for what he termed “The Crosby Method.” :slight_smile:

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I wrote: “Would you agree that they have higher quality standards for their Xbox version versus PC?”

Your response: “No, however, optimising software is easier for standardised hardware. So, no doubt it makes the development process easier. And the feedback from that actually means improvements to the PC version.”

Following your line of logic, “optimising software is easier for standardised hardware,” then why do you suppose they have held off releasing the xbox version?

After all, the xbox version is easier right?

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Maybe some of the optimizations they are talking about in the Q&As won’t transpose as-is on the PC version in the end, or maybe they will, but they don’t seem to even know themselves, because if I’m not mistaken, he also said during the Q&A that “he is hoping the stutters improvements made for the Xbox will work on PC”. For now I’d take these “improvements” with the same grain of salt as Sebastien himself.

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54

That makes little sense, though.
If no one touched the flaps no one flew any aircraft after the build … therefore no one knoew there was a problem.
Simply getting an intern or two to fly all the planes all day long would soon have had them going “hang on, it didn’t act like this yesterday … the flaps 1 is like flaps 3 !!!”

SImilarly, flying the big jets, or even smaller aircraft near any airport with AI would have shown that suddenly your aircraft went dead and you fell out of the sky near an airport.
We (the community) told them that it was as if the AI were turning our systems on and off and altering our knobs, switches and settings when we got near airports.

Maybe the issue is not having a fully live offline replica of the online services, and so they cannot mimic online play, well, they need to address that by getting an offline mimic of the online services for testing, and two or three interns flying four or five aircraft for a few hours every day.

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There were two separate instances; one in which he refers to improvements to the engine and another in the xbox branch that’s helped them in their optimisation efforts to identify something dragging down the performance.

In short, Seb knows what he’s talking about. However, people in the evenings do tend to get tired and may slip up when English isn’t their native language, so please be fair here.

I would also suggest that perhaps some people on here should slightly alter their tone, this passive aggressive sarcasm is not really conducive to anything good.

It’s predominantly a PC platform and they wanted to focus on bringing that up to speed no doubt considering that’s where the community mostly lies. This could have been a bad move on their part to do it that way, but, it’s rather pointless to discuss such things when you have the luxury of hindsight.

Anyway, it is 2am where I am, so I’m going to go to bed.

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No one here is being sarcastic or passive aggressive. I’m just trying to understand your thought process. I apologize if this upset you.

I respectfully disagree regarding why they have not release the xbox platform yet. I believe that they have a higher standard of quality for the xbox because they understand that tarnishing the reputation of Microsoft’s next generation console would have the worst consequences.

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Well, like i said elsewhere before, a considerable portion of the audience of this game consists of casual players that don’t care much about real world procedures and just want to look at some nice scenery while telling themselves they’re flying “a realistic simulation”. Now, there’s nothing wrong with being one of those people. Everyone can and should have fun in this sim. The problem is when your beta test group consists exclusively of such people. And that seems to be the case. I don’t think anyone used flaps during the testing phase. Most planes in game don’t need flaps.

They really need to find all willing real world pilots on this forum and have them take part in any and all testing they’re willing to join.

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You cannot possibly know that. Did you do a survey of those 300 people? No.

Most planes in the game don’t need flaps? LoL
Most planes use flaps for landing.

One issue we have is that it is NOT a sim, it is a game/sim.
Some people want to treat it as a game, some as a sim.
Only MS or Assobo can know those details and percentages, and only they will know the percentages of people in the 300.

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Overall, these guys are creating a digital earth…

So I’m going to cut them some slack

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All I know is, I just flew the A32NX into Sydney in some really cloudy weather in VR, on “just” a 10600K with a 2070 Super, and it was smooth, where formerly Sydney was an absolute slide show, even in a Bonanza. That includes overflying downtown (twice, as they sent me around the first time), 2 full ILS approaches to 34L, and taxiing in some pretty scenery dense stuff, and I was pleased.

Now, I have no idea what my fps were because I don’t use frame rate counters any more, just my eyes. But they were happy.

I think way too many people are expecting miracles, and boy, nothing like “patch day” to bring them out of the woodwork.

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They’ve gone to great lengths to explain that many, many people were taking flying lessons, etc.
Scott

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This is more a “live with it or go home”-statement. We shouldn´t live with it, we should support companies in solving the underlying problem.

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I must be totally out of the loop. What new bug is in the sim now?

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Yep. I am working at such a place. In the financial industry. A single “migration project” (“from banking system A to our system B”) costs more than Microsoft will ever make, even when selling 5 mio copies of FS2020 at an average price of, say, 100$. For a single bank (that is not money we earn, just to make sure here - that’s what the entire project costs, with all consulting companies etc. involved ;))

In such a setup you can afford “4 eye checks” - and tons of integration and migration path tests.

And yet: “mistakes do happen”. It is simply naive to think that the person looking at the code will spot every tiny little detail such as a wrong “flaps uplift multiplier”, given that this other person is usually also another developer with some tight “time budget”. 4 eye checks do make sense - and my colleagues have spotted many “WTF! copy & paste mistakes” I made. But detecting “logical flaws” is very hard if you did not write the code yourself (especially if the “code domain” is not familiar to you! Many companies tout about “team work” and bla bla, but in many cases you have just one specialist working on a topic - hiring more developers, sorry, no budget).

That is something only projects can afford where people’s health and life (think NASA, medical instruments etc.) are at risk, and where the code basis is “small” (relatively speaking) and especially “the purpose of the software very well defined (and limited as well)”.

Here on the other hand we are talking about a game! Microsoft has to make money, with every copy they sell. And again, we are talking about a 150$ product (yes, in a high volume market: 2+ mio sold copies is impressive, especially for a “niche product” such as a flight simulator). And I am pretty sure they do have automated tests in place.

But certainly not for every single flight system of every aircraft.

There is a particular wrong image in your head about developers being lazy here: for the most of the time developers do what they can, with the resources (time) they are given. Personally I do not know a single developer who wouldn’t want to “stabilise the code first!” (yeah sure, there are average, good and top players out there - but everyone makes mistakes!) - instead of throwing yet another redesign of the “needs to look webish!” UI at the product.

Managers, project leaders and stakeholders on the other hand…

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Hello there! :wave:

Yes, Asobo (or informally their employees - I must admit I can’t remember whether it was an “official statement” or rather some comment given by an “insider”…) does report here every then and when. It just gets burried under a lot of “negativity” and “can’t play this anymore!”-rants :wink:

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Totally agree! Why should anyone develop for MSFS2020 if they keep braking things for developers?!!!

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Martial completely spaced out for a few seconds at one point during the Q&A. It’s pretty obvious that they all may have been pulling some long hours to get this update out, and that at the very least yesterday was a particularly long and hard day for them.

You believe what you want to believe. Did you do a survey of those people then?

Just because they use them it doesn’t mean they need them, especially considering the quality of the default planes. Planes will not crash and burn if you try to land without flaps.

I have a feeling that the people who keep bringing that up don’t actually know what a sim is…

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The log book data loss was similarly swept aside. I’ve not been hit by this, and I have the luxury of knowing how to back up my local copy. I feel sorry for those that have had their logs cleaned. I do understand that they may have only just heard about that issue, but I think they should treat it with more importance now that they are. I don’t necessarily agree that they could not do a remote recover. The only way that could be true is if they don’t keep scheduled backups of the cloud storage our logs are uploaded to.

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And yet the responses to some of my tech support tickets sound a bit like they are coming from people who have no experience with the interface of any other sim or any input device other than an Xbox controller.

It’s wonderful that some of the team have taken a few flying lessons but all the hard work of that element of the team will be for nothing if the person who is supposed to test for and catch the snags has only ever played Minecraft.