You cant change one thing and not compensate for what it affects. If all the flight_model.cfg files were updated as they should have (iow not doing a halfass job), then there would be absolutely no problems.
This would be seen as a positive change and 3rd party developers can them apply the same compensations. As of now, nobody knows what to do to make it ‘normal’ again.
PS: This was a breaking change and it should have been fully documented in the SDK. There is not a single mention of any changes in the SDK release notes.
It’s one thing to break mods, but in this case default aircraft were adversely affected. Luckily for me I don’t usually fly the turboprops. A more professional approach would have been to release a versioned flight model, where each plane has to opt in to using the new behaviors by updating a version in the flight model config files. It’s definitely possible to make continuous improvements without breaking existing products.
As this is not always easy to notice, and because this update was not supposed to be about the flight model, the issue was not caught by our quality teams despite all their efforts to avoid this type of situation.
It’s really surprising that you don’t have an automated test suite. If testing is done simply by people flying around looking to see if they notice anything out of the ordinary, then it’s not really surprising that bugs get through.
I’d have thought you’d test the flight model using a test suite with fixed input parameters and expected outputs, something with no human intervention required.
Whatever system you’re using, if it lets bugs of this magnitude through, then it looks like it needs some serious work. And it begs the question, what other, less noticeable, bugs have been missed?
This is unacceptable, you have to explain in detail how to fix the issue if you’re not releasing a hot fix. I don’t know how to modify the .cfg file and I should not be expected to know how to either.
Unit testing in games is hard. That said, they could just train the AI copilot for landing challenges (not the same as the generic one we have in game, but specialized for just the landing challenges) and run that as a test suite. As of now, the AI copilot will just go around when attempting to land at St Barts.
So, If I edit the flight_model.cfg, those will be overwritten once the Sim 3 update has been released? Or I should make it in the community folder? or just make a back up?
Anyway, I think this issues could be avoided having a beta phase previous to release. This way is tedious for everyone.
You aren’t expected to. If you don’t know, you shouldn’t do it. This guidance is for those who feel comfortable.
Imo they did the right thing by saying what to change, but people who are inexperienced should not be trying it I’d say. You wouldn’t want to change the wrong thing or change it in the wrong format.
If you want to try though, it’s in each aircraft’s folder (which is located in the OneStore/Steam folder in the parent folder of the Community folder I believe)
So, it’s not a solution. We all paid for software that it’s not working properly and they expect us to fix it without proper guidance.
Again, unacceptable.
They don’t expect us to fix it. They provided information on a temporary workaround.
They will fully test a fix for Sim Update 3 in early March (which could include some other flight model improvements for some of the aircraft like Sim Update 2 did).
Thing is, it seems to be part of a pattern. The best method, difficult to achieve or not, would be to have an automated test suite. They’re supposed to be top developers, they’ve received $200 million in revenue, so it’s not unreasonable to expect them to be able to do difficult things.
If they must rely heavily on human testers, then you’d expect the testers to be people who would know instantly that the flaps are wrong by 200%. You would also expect them to have caught the anomalies in ATC, icing, etc .etc.
They weren’t really testing the planes though, since this update basically was just a world update.
If they had to retest the whole sim every time, it would take an incredible amount of time to release each update. Flight sims are much more complicated than regular games, which makes them harder to test.
