It would be interesting for Asobo to know how many users would like more of a priority put on
The flight model and fixing known bugs to correct aircraft operation such as the ILS issue and wind direction or
The improvements and updates to the scenery
I do appreciate the updates even though I sometimes need to put some settings back as they were. I haven’t forgotten the loss of FSX support so it’s nice to know that the Asobo team is working on improvements .
As a purely personal view I don’t really mind how good the terminal car park looks but I do want the flight and aircraft response to be as close to my real world experience as possible. That’s not to say that the scenery doesn’t play a big part but
Is the balance going the right or wrong way.
Considering it’s completely separate groups of people working on these 2 very different aspects of the sim, both.
One team’s resources don’t take away from the other team’s resources. In many cases, the POIs, airports, autogen assets, etc aren’t even done in house. They’re farmed out to Aerosoft, Gaya, Orbx, and other big-name 3rd party scenery makers.
1st Asobo has and is doing a hell of a job on the new world. A huge undertaking.
2nd I’m the kind of a tech that enjoys the nuts and bolts. So it drives me crazy that the flight physics are not great.
But it’s really the synergy of both that is driving the product.
I’m know I’m impatient. In my career I was paid to fix the electro/mechanical stuff that didn’t work. Now I’m retired and I know I just have to be patient. We used to turn the flight models inside out. Now we can’t even help to fix them.
If I have to choose one, flight model and the system. Then eye candy is already good enough. I just want to have more realistic feeling of flight dynamic. I don’t want other flight simmer call MSFS as a game.
It’s going the right way. The people who design the scenery aren’t the ones who are squashing bugs. It’s as Crunchmeister71 says. They should post a big sticky about this as it’s still floating around on the forum that they are one in the same. Yeah, they are all working on MSFS but no, not all in the same capacity at all.
It’s going to be what makes more financial sense. Supply and demand. Right now there is an influx of newcomers to the sim world that are in awe of scenery and rightfully so. So there’ll be more resources allocated to world updates. Once the hype starts to die down there’ll be a battle for more hardcore/aviation enthusiast type audience. You are starting to see it slowly and surely. PMDG which is a gold standard of payware add ons in terms of simulation, physics etc etc, just released their DC6 as a trial shot. If that works well, and by all indications it is working well there are no major issues with that plane, their 737 is coming over next and after that it will start to snow pick up pace. Meanwhile there are three camps of people those who want scenery only and fly FS2020 those who want planes only and fly Xplane and P3D only and those who want all three and fly all three. I’m in the last camp so I happily fly all three and enjoying the living lights out of all them at the moment. Compared to the initial release FS is a decently flyable sim for VFR now, took about a year as expected.
Given the size of the various development teams currently working on the Sim, I suspect there would not be that much improvement in velocity of fixes even if they moved everyone to bug/fixing flight model stuff.
Not everyone working at Asobo and partners will have the right set of skills to do bug fixing, flight model type work. The main problem in increasing the velocity is co-ordinating and integreation testing of so many complex components. I think I saw some where that they had many tens of code branches. That’s a hell of a lot of merging and integration testing.
I understand that people have been underwhelmed by the sim updates and I suspect a big part of this is that a very large chunk of the people with the right skills to do this type of work have been concentrating on getting the game ready for XBOX.
The best case is that the PC user base will massively benefit for the optimisations that have been done for XBOX. Obviously some of that effort will have gone on building all the accessibility features Asobo have been trailing.
I like to be optimistic that the release of the Xbox version will free up a large chunk of highly skilled developers to work on some of the sim issues.
The highly skilled developers have been working on the Xbox / DX12 version for months now. There’s a reason the latest sim updates have been to scant on actual updates and fixes. There’s not much point in writing a bunch of code for a version of the sim that will be tossed out come July.
More than likely, fixes and other enhancements that have been promised in the road map yet continually pushed back are going to be either found in SU5, or the next couple of SUs after it now that they’re working with the new code base.
The group working on the current DX11 version is likely quite small and has been for months now.
*If * it were the case that we had to prioritize one or the other, I would shift more resources to Item #1. I lovelovelove the scenery and always look forward to expansions and improvements there. But right now it exceeds all my expectations. As I fly 90% in VR, immersion is important to me. The scenery is working great. It’s the “under the hood” things that need attention. More often than not, they are the things breaking immersion in my little FS universe.
“The areas I fly are already updated so focus only on flight model, weather, etc screw the rest of the world and all the world building dev’s they would have to fire to hire more flight model devs, then fire those devs when the flight model is good and they need to work on scenery again.”
I don’t think same people are working on these very different things. Scenery updates and 3D modelling is an easy but time consuming job, basically 1-2 people can do it. Avionics and other aircraft “stuff” is more complicated so i guess another group of people are responsible for it.
Besides asobo is working on a new highly anticipated game. So they definitely have different teams/groups pf people assigned to various tasks.
If this is a sim and not a game, then we need to focus on realism and flight models, the scenery is good enough now even for VFR, need to move focus away from this and come back when the game is optimised to add better scenery etc. Sadly, the Xbox players will just want the eye candy rather than realism…so we focus on this. Quite frankly I don’t care about some small updates in Norway if we continually get 20fps, ctds, worse clouds etc
History has led us to believe that they both are mutually exclusive, but they don’t have to be.
We’ve got a big team working on a revolutionary product. It’s gonna take a while before all aspects are satisfactory for the majority of sim users.
They’ve mentioned that their biggest priority right now is XBOX, which is a good thing because it’s an important part of the plan to keep the money rolling to fund future development.
I guess this is also the reason why their development roadmaps haven’t seen any updates in a long time. Once XBOX is out the door, I’m sure they can tackle these issues head on.
Like many of you I was not happy with the flight model of the supplied C-172. Flew it with a friend who is a real world pilot, and he was underwhelmed. Heard about the Just Flight Arrow and looked at the online reviews claiming it flies like the real thing. Well dang they were right, the Arrow seems very accurate down to being able to do a credible slip.
So it appears that most of the plumbing is there to do a realistic simulation but either they have dumbed it down or just not spent enough energy on flight modeling for the default planes.
Avionics has been outsourced to Working Title. By extension, they also have to address Flight Planning and Routing because they’re intertwined. Give the solid job they’ve done to date with just freeware mods, the tech transfer of what they piloted in the CJ4 is coming to G1000 NXi next month, and eventually cascades to G3000 and G3X. None of those are consuming core Asobo resources, so there is bandwidth to address scenery and environment.
Jorg mentioned getting other developers on as 1st Party similar to Working Title for things like Traffic AI. There is a plan.
Ten year journey. Haven’t even passed the one year mark as of this post (June 2021).
