The developer Q&A last night should be compulsary viewing for everyone on these forums. It covered a lot of ground and will give everyone a sense of MS and Asobo’s commitment as well as addressing a lot of the bugs and issues and wish list items that are prevalent on the forums.
With thanks to @Maelmoor and @CaptClarence125 and others (apologies if I’ve not named you) I’ve combined some summaries of the key points below (and feel free to add if there is anything missing). The link to the video itself is below.
- They were very honest and open about the issues, admitting they had tried to squeeze in too much in within the two week sprints, which resulted in not enough testing being done. They explained that some bugs only appear in specific scenarios which makes it harder. They are working to improve internal processes around this.
- They will introduce a community testing group, where dedicated users can test the patch in advance to find issues, along with their own testing.
- DirectX 12 work ongoing, this is done for the new features mostly, such as ray-tracing and less for performance related things, they’ve had a team working for a while
- VR: Closed beta target late October, early November. First with focus on WMR devices.
- WorldUpdate 2 will be for US and they were very excited about the quality of this!
- SimUpdate, next one is coming in early November
- They work all the time to improve airports, a dedicated team both in-house and from OrbX are working to fix issues in airports. So they want us to keep reporting issues and those will be dealt with
- They mentioned the issues regarding LOD, AA and any such issues were not intentional, they are looking into it
- Improved draw distance up to 30000ft is been looked into and was referenced as not being expensive at long distances in terms of FPS and hence should be doable
- Particle system was mentioned, ongoing work, will be available in the SDK for 3rd party devs
- They will do more improvements for the G1000 systems, this wasn’t planned at first but feedback from both the community and 3rd party devs have made them rethink and they will do more improvements around this
- An obstacle database will be introduced, which should help adding radio towers and such objects
- Visibility request also been looked at and will come in two parts - improved aerosol slider so that visibility can be reduced to maybe 2-3Km (this to be quite quick), but to go further requires some “lighting forumula” change that will take longer, but they will get there
- ATC improvements ongoing work and some cool features being looked at together with Microsoft China
- Night light issues still worked on, two different solutions, one rather easy and one that requires more work. Tne difference is to do with a world lighting overlay (harder to fix as need better data which is at the root of the issues with deserts being lit at night) and the point lights which are easier to improve
- Press any key to start will be removed “soon”
- Metric units will come in an update, no time frame for it
- Shared cockpit and some other features for next year, main focus on solving bugs right now
- Xbox version been worked at, optimizations, such as memory optimization will benefit PC players too, one such was introduced in last patch
- They also talked about continues CPU optimizations to use more threads and some issues have already been solved
- Multi screens being worked on and they clearly understand the need to re-render side screens and not just stretch around
- They are sourcing world data from a number of sources and when they apply updated data, anomalies can ahppen - they can’t check the entire world, so are relying on the community to spot and raise these issues. Specific reference to the windfarms in the cities issue was made. So raising those zendesk reports for scenery issues is important
- They were open that they could not test everything for every sprint and this is what has led them back to the beta testers to help provider additional testing
- The mentioned data partners and finding the best world data (e.g. DEM and mesh updates) several times, and were committed to continually improving this
- NAVBLUE data coming in November, Charts+ next
- FlyByWire A32NX close ties (working on manufacture/Airbus approval)
- Further SDK tools, i.e. possible to add contrail
And thanks to @ExpressTomato52 for indexing the video:
00:00 Intro
01:30 Upcoming World Update
02:28 VR Closed Beta
05:35 Removal of ‘Press Any Key to Start’
06:36 FlybyWire and other Community Mods
08:25 Scenery Gateway System
09:38 Replay Functionality?
12:33 DirectX12 Support
14:07 NavBlue and Charts?
17:35 Multi-monitor support?
22:15 Improvements to ATC?
24:04 Night lighting on Terrain bug
27:11 Cloud visibility updates?
30:45 G1000/Garmin updates?
34:18 Hot fixes?
35:32 Pre-release community testing
39:34 Multi-threaded CPU
44:18 Improved DEM/Mesh?
46:22 SDK updates? Particle FX?
47:43 DLSS and Raytracing
48:44 More Lessons and updated checklists?
49:58 Seasons, new features, and more.
52.40 Not intentional downgrade, Anti-aliasing, draw distance increase