Disapointed with how the G1000/3000 Update was handled

Discussion Hub General Discussion
1

As the title suggests.

I was extremely disappointed in how the G1000/3000 was communicated and how Microsoft/Asobbo intentionally or unintentionally Gaslight the community on the subject by keeping the Topic on the Update spreadsheet and then Bait n’ Switch with bringing on another 3rd Party team to do the work.

This brings up a concern the need for Microsoft to bring on another 3rd party developer team to do work on the game on an official capacity. Coupled with the announcement that Asobo has secured 3rd party investment to maintain their independence as a Development company. It is clear that Asobo is pivoting to working on other Projects/IPs outside of Microsoft Flight-sim 2020. From a business perspective, this makes sense to diversify and produce new games as new titles can generate new revenue streams. However, this means that FS2020 will have less Dev cycles from Asobo.

I think bringing on 3rd party Dev teams, that have dedicated themselves to the Flight-sim community, is a good move on Microsoft’s part. Being able to contract out to small development groups to Update, maintain, and create parts of the game that they have years of experience on (with the MODs they have made over the years) is a win-win. Unfortunately, this also causes missed commitments (E.X. G1000/3000 remediation).

Microsoft Flight-sim is older then Microsoft Windows. I have good faith that it will continue as an IP as the Aviation Community will keep it going. I just wish that there were a bit more transparency and clarity in communications with the community.

4 Likes
2

I have to shake my head at the liberal use of “gaslighting” in these forums, especially on this topic and of recent patches.

No one is being psychologically manipulated. That’s the prima facie threshold of gaslighting.

I too am disappointed at the state of the Garmin Nav Units in general. But that doesn’t make me think Asobo is deliberately twisting people’s minds about how to move forward on this subsystem.

Two things that I will say about this topic - one, it was indeed poorly communicated - in the sense that a lot of board users made assumptions about what the Feedback Snapshot was saying - i.e., that Sim Update 3 would once and for all sew up all the Garmin Flaws AND in some extreme cases of A S S/U/ME - that all key missing features would be implemented; and two - Asobo knew at some point they did not have the in-house resourcing and expertise to get it done on their own.

Anyone who’s read a Garmin Manual in the last five years knows the relative amount of missing / incorrect information is material- and that’s understating the amount of features and behind it, the level of work to get the sim Garmin even close. There’s just not enough time in between scheduled release updates to make that all fit into the Backlog (agile definition). Whether or not average Board Readers understand the volume and complexity of that gap and how to close it was clearly answered.

MS-Asobo heard that message about the poor communication - hence the Feedback Snapshot now explicitly states features will be spanned over a period of time. Good - that’s one of my pet peeves about the communication model resolved. Jorg admitted as much on the last Dev Q&A as well.

As I said when I welcomed Team Working Title aboard the other week, the only thing that is certain is things will change. Time factor? Completely unforecastable until Team WT gets up to speed (notably Matt stated somewhere their first formal meetings of the partnership with MS-Asobo were last week), so there’s a long way to go. Patience appears to be one of the few rare commodities on this board.

I guessed strongly (enough to put money on it if I had to, which means high P sub K) about 72 hours before the announcement that this was what would happen in the Partnership. Notably there had been many sly and distractional - nothing to see here comments by WT members on their Discord Server leading up to the Dev Q&A where the Partnership was announced.

More importantly, going back to a 4th Quarter Dev Q&A, anyone who even portends to try and read Tea Leaves would have had an inkling that this would happen. When Jorg OFFERED on the Dev Q&A for reach out by Third Parties, a lightbulb came on to some of us - Hey, that’s the way forward - get someone with enough time, resources, knowledge and dedication OUTSIDE of Asobo to start filling in gaps. Proof in the pudding is Team Working Title.

MS-Asobo and WT could not communicate or hint at that - ask the Legal Teams - everything is Under NDA until the deal is done. It seems board readers are angrier about being left in the dark (which is no one’s fault -that’s how JVs and M&As work) than they are about the actual state of the systems at times.

Poor communication on the Feedback Chart? You bet. Although hamstringing did occur because of the legal confidentiality.

Gaslighting? No wonder conspiracy theories abound and take fruit in this 30 second micro-soundbyte day and age.

'Nuff said as Stan Lee would say.

28 Likes
3

Fully agree with you @CasualClick

Not managed in the best way indeed.

But keeping on with the complaints about a communications practice that has already been improved, and a confirmed commitment to deliver the end result with the cooperation with working title?

Plus the hints about deliberately misguiding the community?

Seriously?

Transparency, communication, openness and listening to the community demand has not just been better than any other popular sim release in the past. It is setting a new precedent.

Credit where credit is due.

4 Likes
4

I’m as critical of the MSFS development process as anyone, but to be blunt I think it’s a bit silly to see this as “gaslighting” or a “bait and switch.”

They have a shortcoming in their implementation of Garmin systems. There’s a 3rd party team already working on this. They have more cash than they have man hours. Makes pretty good sense to put all these three together in bringing on WT in an official capacity to expedite development.

Seems clear cut to me. I see no issues with transparency nor communication on this topic.

5 Likes
5

I look at it this way:

With years of Microsoft funding, the best Asobo could deliver was a cartoonish caricature of Garmins that have only the most basic functions enabled. And even these rudimentary functions are incomplete and don’t work right. And with every patch / update where they’ve touched the Garmins or nav system, they’ve somehow managed to make it worse. Without contest, it stands head and shoulder above all others as the worst implementation of Garmins in modern flight simulation.

Then MS noticed the Working Title team - a small team of experienced coders who are also pilots. Over the span of a couple of months, in their own spare time, and without funding, they managed to develop Gamins that were light years ahead in both terms of look and functionality. On top of that, they redesigned the entire nav system (in the CJ4) and turned a plane that was a complete disappointment into a monster near study level plane. Had this new partnership with MS not happened, their next move was to port that entire nav system over to their Garmins as well, replacing Asobo’s broken mess of underlying code.

I don’t like the fact Microsobo didn’t carry through with their promise to fix the Garmins, but seeing how it’s because MS brought WT onboard to build them right, I’m willing to wait. I honestly had very little faith that Asobo would be able to get anything remotely right in the short term. WT, on the other hand, will be knocking if out of the park when their work finally releases as part of the base sim.

7 Likes
6

For a very long time, before the simulator’s release even, Asobo have held several job listings on their website for programmers, engineers, designers and artists to work on the simulator’s systems (UI, ATC, autopilot and more) and future content (aircraft, missions, environment).

https://www.asobostudio.com/careers

They found the perfect people to work on the Garmin panels and aircraft, and those are the Working Title team. I don’t see how this is a bait and switch. They have also outsourced a lot of scenery work to Orbx and Gaya Simulations, the physical edition to Aerosoft, and there was a rumour from the Alpha that PMDG worked on the 747 as well. Asobo were never going to do everything on their own.

4 Likes
7

I’ll keep it short, and just let the OP know why it’s a good thing that Working Title was hired for the avionics. They created a very good working reproduction of the Collins Proline 21 FMC in the CJ4. They solved all the problems plaguing the default 1000/3000 in their custom code. Working Title also wrote their code in a modular fashion so that any dev could use it in their project. Asobo did the right thing here. Why re-invent the wheel, when you can just hire the guys that make the wheel?

Smart. Very smart on Asobo’s part. Now Asobo can focus on other areas, and not have to deal with the whole complex 1000/3000 thing. What will happen is Working Title will tell Asobo what they need from them to fix things, and add things, and Asobo will code those smaller sim hooks for them. Kinda like what Aerosoft did with the CRJ. Everytime Aerosoft hit a roadblock in the SDK, they worked with Asobo, to get a small fix, to move the project forward. In other words, Asobo will have exact things to code, and not have to waste coding effort broadly.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see the H135 guys get pulled in as well as contractors, considering how much they’ve done with helicopters, in a sim that doesn’t officially support helicopters yet.

5 Likes
8

Great thread, a lot of positive stuff and it’s nice to see that there are folks that understand just how large of an undertaking this is. It is exceptionally grand to see MS and Asobo welcome very talented 3rd party developers into the product officially.

5 Likes
9

Working Title Systems are not “hired” nor work for Asobo. They are an independent development company working on the platform; first party partners.

10

Are they still uploading new versions of the WT mods, or do we need to wait until the official release?

11

Nevermind! they just released a new version 3 hours ago…

12

Please see the FAQ from Working Title here regarding the Partnership and what the distribution approach will be short-term.

13

Me too. Microsoft have promised ten years of support for this product so may be 5 to 10 years from now we might get a Garmin suit that’s useable online for IFR flights on VATSIM, Pilotedge etc. The ‘Approach flyback’ bug (where you execute your approach in the 530, 430 or G1k and the plane flies you back to the departure airport) existed since day 1, still haven’t been fixed and one of the recent feedback snapshots says they are merely starting to work on it. Meanwhile there’s never been a lack of nice and shiny POIs and world updates for our upcoming honourable and VIP Xbox users and eye-candy enthusiasts. You should clearly realise by now what their development priorities are.

MSFS 2020 (for now, and subject to change if and when Jorg changes his stance) is a video game for gamers to fly close to the POIs and appreciate the beauty of the world we live in, and that’s amazing. But for anything remotely serious when it comes to aviation and to simulate/practice real world flying procedures, my advice is to use and invest in the other actual “flight” simulator software out there that are based on FAA-approved training platforms and ecosystems.

4 Likes
14

there will be a long list of disciplines of people who work at Asobo/MS that have absolutely nothing at all to do with the G1000 etc and how it works, so moaning that ALL these people are working on other content given the G1000 etc and how it works is totally outside their remit only serves to show your ignorance.

1 Like
15

I honestly have very little faith that Asobo would be able to fix anything in this sim, it’s been seven months since release, and the game is in worse state now than when it was released, I’m surprised MS has not fired them already.

16

It will be interesting to see if WT can address the flight planning logic in the sim. It affects not only how the routes are created before flight (and hence loaded into the Nav Units), but also how the in-flight re routing logic operates when a user decides to modify the plan Enroute.

Navigraph has noted many times how the sim inserts non-existent user waypoints (even now in Post SU3) which totally undoes any real world planning techniques and takes away immersion.

Whether or not that code is something WT can access as partners is another story. Fingers crossed.

2 Likes
17

This is not Jörg’s stance nor is it any of our stance. The reality here is that the simulator is absolutely massive, on a code scale that most folks just don’t quite realize. The amount of code is easily 5x most game codebases I’ve worked with. It’s just a super huge project. The development team size, as Jörg has mentioned, is well above 100. So you have to do both. Keeping the pace of the flashier updates high keeps the lights on and keeps teams that otherwise can’t contribute to these super deep, complex avionics specific verticals productive, so that the sim can continue to be refined into what we all want it to be: the best simulation platform, period, no exceptions. That truly is the goal.

Even simple sounding things like “why is the flightplan so goofy” are inherited over decades of sim code going back to FS9 and before with tons of layers to unpeel and dozens of connected systems that all need to work together and not break (ATC, the world map, specific handling by each avionics stack, backcompat to previous APIs, etc etc).

However, there is a distinct focus on those types of issues, and specifically we at Working Title will be tackling a bunch of that category of item with the FS team over this year’s updates. The fact that we were brought on to use our expertise in these areas where it may have been lacking before is exactly evidence as to the team’s commitment.

I’m not asking you to be happy or gracious, just want to be clear as to where the team’s mind is at. This is a sim for everyone, from the person who wants to GTA their way around bridges in external view all the way to the procedures enthusiast who want to see APPR LPV show up at the exact right time during an RNAV approach. And we, specifically, will be working hard this year to deliver to the latter.

-Matt

9 Likes
18

Matt - I just need G1000 v1.0 with Virtual Pathways please. :wink:

I kid, I kid. Well partly. I really do want 1.0,but I’m doing everything I can with 0.4.:v:

Hats off to the WT Team. Hoping to see the fruits of the Partnership soon!

2 Likes
20

Not quite. The WT team had to form a proper company. They are now contracted by Microsoft as a partner in MSFS. They aren’t employees of anyone. The team members work are employed by Working Title LLC. They’re an independent company under contract.

1 Like
21

I misunderstood then. My bad

1 Like