Discussion: February 4th, 2021 Development Update

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106

They have a large team as is.
I have heard upwards of 40 people mentioned.
They are broken into teams.
Some fix issues, some create new features, etc.

The problem is that “too many cooks spoil the broth” when it comes to bugs.
A fix for an issue generally affects the whole sim.
You would very quickly get into scenarios where somebody fixes one thing, the next person does something to cure another issue, which in turn changes the cure the first person did, etc.
Then you have an even bigger mess.
Bug fixing is very exacting work, and as you can see, you can only throw so many people at an issue.

Scenery issues are scheduled to be (hopefully?) corrected with the World Update 3 release.
I think you will see most of the remaining large bugs with planes and ATC corrected with the March Sim Update.
They want this done before the upcoming X-Box release as they want MSFS to be a big draw for X-box.

107

Sure, but should that stop them from releasing world updates? Should they fire the graphical artists and Bing maps people?

I’m all for bugs being fixed, I was just stating that releasing world updates doesn’t have anything to do with it. It’s not a zero sum game.

108

While I agree it’s dissappointing, I think you’re being a bit hard on poor old Asobo :grinning:

Don’t forget they did the last six months of development under sudden covid conditions, working at home is fine for many aspects of software, but working in teams, communication between members and managing them are probably not some of the things that work better.

Recruitment of extra resources would also be made harder by covid.

Plus I suspect the release date 18th August was set without proper regard to when it would be ready. They were told they had to release it then, regardless of anything else. So the programmers were given an impossible task, and probably had to finish off many things without them properly working, just so the sim would do something. I bet this wasted them at least a month of coding time for each team member.

All these ‘bodged’ things would have to be re-coded properly at a later date - whilst meantime they were trying to fix all the hastily added in bodges to make them do something more useful when they had a bit more time. All time wasted I bet!

Personally I prefer to cut them some slack. With complaints coming at them from every side, they added VR in four months from scratch it seems!

To be honest, I think they’re doing rather well.

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109

VR is a bit of a sore point with me, I’m afraid.

Based on their original misguided promise, they certainly threw a lot of effort at it, and made a lot of noise about it. Even after release, it is still using resources to fix the inevitable new bugs. All of this for the benefit of a small but vocal minority of the user base.

If they had used that much effort (with the same developers) on the basic problems, we might actually have a working sim now, which would of course have benefited everyone, VR users included. (Interesting to note #1 on VR Snapshot list is “Improved Performance/Graphics”. What a surprise - who could have seen that coming?)

110

I will be interested to see if the photogrammetry in the imminent UK update really does “look great” as Asobo asserts in the trailer. The PG in the USA is rubbish for me so I have not used the sim untill I turned it off in the global settings and a Community Mod fixed the spikes issue.

111

I certainly don’t understand why there even is VR before multi-monitor support, which is a feature every sim had from release. Shows which audience they are targeting and prioritising at this stage. Not the home cockpit builders and anyone wanting to use MSFS as a professional tool to enhance skills, thats for sure. And then the long laundry list of missing features and bugs, most of which I summarised here:

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112

I’ve been thinking about all this a lot recently, essentially how they deal with all the different priorities for the existing sim community, bringing new blood into the sim, making money vs perfecting what’s released.

From the Q&A’s, interviews and dev road maps they seem to know about the bugs that need fixing and features that many people want. But they are also working a lot on the things that will bring newcomers to flight sim, and I can’t help but feel that the things like world updates and VR are things that they have decided will attract new people.

Of course the trouble with being seen to be spending lots of time on those things is that others will feel left behind.

I class myself as somewhere in the middle of newcomer and long time simmer - I’ve been playing flight sim since FS 2004, and was playing FSX on my MacBook in bootcamp for the past few years! But it’s FS2020 VR that made me stump up the cash to buy a gaming PC and quest 2. Of course I have no idea what percentage of FS2020 users I represent.

Now, I’m not suggesting that they’re leaving the existing community in the dust.

I can understand that with Xbox coming up which will open the sim to a whole new universe of gamer, they must be working pretty hard on that. And you’d HOPE that by focusing a large proportion of their current effort generating sales and revenue, that will filter down to bug fixes and much-needed features for the flight sim community, new and old.

I’m definitely lucky because I sit as someone who’s priorities have been largely met by the sim as it stands. But then you’ve got all the people who have invested a ton in their home cockpit setup who desperately need multi monitor and avionics fixed.

People who miss big features, experience bugs and CTD, have every right to feel peeved about that I totally understand their frustration - autopilot and FMS bugs are a big one for me. It’s totally important to keep badgering asobo about these things, deserting the existing community isn’t something they will do.

I think that market research and silent voices of those yet-to-be simmers have to take a high level of priority with a company developing a new version of a long-standing title. Jorge himself has said he really places value in bringing new blood to the sim, and that makes sense.

It’s hard for us to see that in a quantifiable way, particularly in a forum who’s purpose is to highlight bugs, issues and feature requests. It will leave many of us feeling left behind until they turn back to fix things.

As was said a few posts earlier, covid will have had some kind of effect, and I have no idea how their teams are structured, I have to assume sensibly in the current pandemic…

I guess the end of my train of thought is that the way the sim is being developed and updated makes sense to me so far, even with the bugs, AS LONG as the newcomers and added income enable the bugs to be ironed out as the next priority. It was always going to upset people along the way and push some people to the sidelines short term, but I really believe it’ll all come out in the wash.

Please don’t read this as me trying to shut anyone down, this is just my view on Asobo decision making at the moment.

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