Totally understandable they cannot maintain their schedule at this moment. However, they could change their schedule and do things that have a minimal impact on the simulator. Fix missing airports for instance. Must be lots of things someone can do from home for which no or minimal testing has to be done.
What is ‘minimal impact’ for you isn’t the same for everyone. I couldn’t care less about airports.
I’m grateful for whatever work they can do, especially resolving the installation and running issues.
2 Likes
Given the appalling Covid infection rates in Europe (and indeed America), anything Asobo can do to keep their staff safe and working should be applauded.
Whilst Covid is generally less problematic in younger people, they are not immune and Young people can suffer the long-covid effects and worse still, some may die.
We do not need this to happen to anyone let alone the Devs working on this project.
Testing will certainly be impacted by WFH practices but there will still be progress.
We need to support Asobo in this difficult situation.
6 Likes
Not sure about the usefulness of a development roadmap published on Nov 5 which takes us all the way to Nov 30. Shouldn’t we be dropping August? September?
IMO, an inexpensive computer game has zero priority when compared to saving lives. I’m thankful to MS/Asobo for what they’ve already done, and for what they can accomplish at present. Please do it safely. There’s no hurry. It’s just a game.
12 Likes
I disagree. Devs at home should/can have a large HD or 4K screen, Thrustmaster Airbus throttle/joystick, Honeycomb or Saitek yoke, min spec graphics card.
Split the hardware high/low combos between multiple developers so that everyone tests everything.
A second monitor is essential for debugging, so they can test dragging PFD/MFD to a second monitor and addons like AirManager, Mobiflight. Give half a touchscreeen because that is in the pipeline.
It’s all achievable and GitHub allows them to synchronise code whilst anywhere in the world.
Could you give me your number, please ? You’ll be the one I wanna call, when the pandemic & lockdown hits my game studio, to manage all my dev equipment sharing & moving around.
What does this has to do with… Anything ?
I might be wrong but I truly hope they had a VCS before the pandemic hit or else it would explain a lot of things here.
(sorry lads, had to get that one out)
Not very useful but shoutout to Asobo: Especially the release managers, preflight & QA teams…
And all their movers 
Stay safe & if you have a bit of time left please let us have some of those nice and juicy fixes out there 
2 Likes
Github allows the developers to keep up to date with the daily master copy of the software (or any branches) and merge their mini branches into the master.
That allows developers to work physically distant, but merge their code into the next release. Thats exactly what the A320NX mods have been doing.
As for testing, us the users have done a great job of testing the software with our simulators at home, ergo so can Asobo developers.
I heard Austin say the Xplane developers are spread around the world (around 2 BC, before covid)
One company I worked for was huge, and linked development across multiple continents and multiple time zones with Github and a network of virtual servers.
Yes, Github is a distributed VCS, I know. That’s why I allowed myself to joke about it.
Glad to talk to a peer 
Although, sorry to ask but does any of your statements here guarantees that all Asobo’s dev teams already had those practice in place ? Have you worked with Asobo’s organization & management, or in any location/workplace related to Asobo ?
On my side, I haven’t so I wouldn’t use my personal & professional experience to relate to their org. IMHO every team is different, every studio is different. Especially in nowadays.
I agree. We don’t know but if a guess would count, they are probably using Visual Studio Live Share for collaboration since it’s heavily built around MS products. Not a public VCS.
1 Like
Whatever they are using, it does “sync” their private code versions between workstations. Don’t forget that Git & Github is getting more and more love in MS’s dev suites since MS bought Github. Even Google has private projects over there.
But all of this still doesn’t matter since they had those tools way before the first release of MSFS… Way way before. AND most importantly we are all off topic here: Those “everyday” dev tools are not a factor here for MSFS updates and such. Test suites maybe, QA maybe, but again it’s too specific to each company to be talked about here.
And as technical experts as we can get (& show ourselves), I really feel uncomfortable to talk about it: Nobody should use their own knowledge and own experience to relate to “how” Asobo’s teams work. And nobody should say : “Hey, I’m a senior dev, level 75, and I know how each and every dev team in the world works”.
If I seem to show or say this in a descent tech interview, I wouldn’t pass the first interview stages… At all.
1 Like
Good luck and stay safe. Working from home can be challenging especially with online home schooling and shoddy pandemic internet speeds.
Silver lining, I’m relieved not to have to find workarounds for new issues for a while haha.
1 Like
Apologies as I missed the joke and got too serious, with too much detail. 
I just wanted to explain there are ways Asobo could work at home. I do hope they find a lockdown solution that suits them - it can demoralising if you suddenly can’t do the job you like.
As you alluded I only know Asobo is a successful games company, and don’t know how they organise internally.
Watching the development videos I feel a bit sorry for them. They seemed to have generated what would be a fun and adventurous Xbox game,
but now have to deal with the technical and procedural flightsim community who expect something at least as good as Xplane, Zibo 737 and everything FSX could do with all it’s addons.
The management seemed very relieved that Quality Wings promised a 787 (?) for
2021.
The architecture of msfs is bold and ambitious, certainly one giant leap for mankind!
I do wonder that Bill Gates forced them to release early, strapping them to the wings of a stunt plane for a wild ride to the land of gold !
1 Like
If you consider release was probably planned for Christmas, February is not such a long time
Not meant as an excuse but keeping this in mind might help in managing expectations.
Devs needs powerful hardware for their tools/compilation time. You don’t want to “punish” some devs with slow hardware.
For testing, I imagine that they have some test bench of multiple hardware configurations (especially for the QA team) and it’s where the lockdown could limit Asobo (especially for a complex game as MSFS).
I’m not saying that it’s impossible to develop from home (this is what I do), but just that it’s limitative for testing purpose.
And, mostly, I’m not saying that they should go work in their office, I’m just responding that : Yes, Covid and lockdown can slowdown the development and we should accept that.
I agree about not “punishing” devs. But having the fastest graphics can be a tricky situation. Yes you can develop a wizz bang feature, but you have to see things from the customer perspective who will have older hardware.
The nightmare scenario was customers with laptops with unique GPUs that didn’t have regular driver updates for later Opengl versions.
The dilemma is developing better features that advanced customers want, verses holding back for older hardware.
My thoughts on the lower graphics is you have to honour the minimum spec, so test against it.
That forces devs to be creative, like creating Parallels threads that work fine for a simple CPU/GPU, but automatically go 100 times faster if you have 1024 CUDA cores. Everyone is happy and they see a clear benifit of upgrading, when they have spare cash.
1 Like
Not a long time? I think most would disagree to fix autopilot which should have worked initially
Same with the rudder issue since release. Hard to understand how that made it out the door. I mean really, think about that. Don’t market as full controller support if you can’t deliver. I would like to ask face to face to the dev how they effed that up, i wonder how many silly excuses they would feed me? I assumed it was a big mistake and the first patch would have the simple fix…NOPE. Hard to fathom, wish i could get my money back.
Honestly that’s not an issue that takes priority among flight sim users. I’m sure they will fix it, but serious simmers use joysticks, yokes, etc.
Most of us would rather see them focus on the systems side of things.
Even Asobo won’t have every possible combination of hardware and software in there QA team that can be found in the big wide world. It would therefore be impossible for them to recreate this in their Dev’s home environment.
I’m sure most of the Devs working on this project will have reasonable home IT environment to work on but I also appreciate the home distractions, (wife/kids etc) can make home working a bit more challenging [been there myself over many years].
When I read some of the complaints on this forum I often feel there is little understanding of the complexities of this software and the development process & challenges.
Yes we all want something perfect that will work on any IT environment but that’s not the real world.
Personally I’m enjoying MFSF despite its bugs & limitations.
3 Likes