Asobo has beta patches slated for Update 9, according to the Roadmap.
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Hi,
M/icrosoft/Asobo has entered into partnerships with other publishers. Even though the current version is a âbetaâ, there is still an obligation to allow partners to develop on a basis that is not turned upside down with each new patch.
It is imperative for these developers to have a base that evolves but without regressions.
My 2 cents.
PS: I am also French freelance developer and this last patch has âdestroyedâ 3 week of work (Cessna 150K Tibush).
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Itâs clear that Asobo should test some aircrafts from the marketplace before delivering an update, as they have a store.
But we should keep in mind that :
- The SDK is in beta.
- New tools needs to be learned with MSFS.
I known that the documentation is not complet, but for the long term support (and content quality), it seems not good to sell aircrafts which use deprecated elements like 3d gauges in XML.
Itâs the same for the ModelBehavior and WWise sound engine.
Hi all, just thinking aloud about things that have been written here.
I would like to point out / remind that there are some very strong examples of projects / teams that are very well organized, working on daily basis and delivering amazing results. Yes, Iâm talking about these amazing guys from A32NX, WorkingTitle, all the independent community content creators concentrated on flightsim.to, many many others to mentionâŠ
They are able to continue in their development despite of having direct support from MS/ASOBO or not, they are very flexible in terms of adapting their work with literaly every update of the ASOBOâs codebase. And they are rather keeping fixing things than sustainly âcomplainingâ, providing to US, MSFS users, the content that is really valuable and in the final consequence it helps to make the whole platform better and more popular. They are simply willing to take a risk and work in these unstable âcombatâ conditions.
Iâm of course aware of big difference between these community projects / volunteers based development who are doing things for free and for fun and a real payware creators who is doing thieir stuff not only for fun but also for profitt. Iâm almost sure that ASOBO/MS is aware of both these groups and their importance to their product success. Iâm mentioning these community creators mainly because there are currently really large amount of them, statistically very important amount of them. Several times more AT THE START of the the platform lifecycle than at the start of any other sim before. Thatâs very strong proof of that this works despite of problems that needs to be solved. An this all is happening just two months(!) from the official launch, just to put things in context.
Yes, there are bugs, there are also unfinished things that need to be fixed, tuned and finished, early growing pains of unexperienced developer, etc. But we all are continuously learning from our mistakes, changing our minds and processes, improving things, trying to listen to communities, iteratingâŠ
TBH I thing that one of biggest problems of âpresent daysâ is that the world is âspinning too fastâ. Almost everything is one-click away from our comfortable chair, a lot of people I know (especially younger people) really need everything ânowâ and if they donât have itnow, they get quick nervous and angry, like there is no tomorrow. I believe that ASOBO is very aware of this trying to provide us things quickly (in 14 days iterations), but there is also a downside of this - bugs, big rush, not enough time to do some exhaustive complex testing, ⊠In the past it wasnât so easy for us to point out issues MINUTES from the release. No it is, unfortunatelly for the developers. 
Iâm just thinking about the FSX era. There was the initial release (with issues, bugs, unfinished things), then SP1, then SP2 nad it was all. It was easier for add-on creators to develop their things on stable platform, with just these two major updates. But nowadays this approach is simply not applicable, because people are used getting things so quickly. I believe that majority here checks for some updates every single day(!) and expecting at least some new information. 10 years ago it wasnât so common behaviorâŠ
So finally, itâs obvious that there is a lot of things that need to be done on ASOBO side. And sometimes it might be very painful process for all. But there are things that we simply need to consider, not to be overseen, for example that things are continuosly changing and thing just need some time to be stabilised, finished and ready.
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1- The SDK is incomplete I agree⊠But what is there should be relied upon
2- New tools HAVE been learned ( And used ) over a VERY Steep curve
3- We ( And I assume other developers ) Are not stupid enough to use Deprecated elements in a commercial product , The Modelbehaviour aspect has seen a lot of change and these changes have been implemented. There are No Deprecated elements in our product However we DID not expect the newly added or amended sections of the process to drastically change without warning that they even Might
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Is the communication between Asobo and third party devs so bad that they have to go to forum to get their attention? For example, guys from flybywire were sending emails to Asobo since they started to work on a320 (for FREE), they had no response, and during the latest Q&A head of MSFS said that they dont know how to get in contact with them, they donât know anyone at FBW, pathetic.
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They mod a default aircraft. You can hardly expect the owner to help. Developers with a certain reputation like A2A, PMDG, even Aerosoft have praised the communication. They enjoy to work with Asobo.
The problem the early 3rd party devs have is that they released to a very early version. They knew it and released anyway. Of course things change. And of course these big changes break addons. If we want improvments we have to expect and deal with changes. If we prefer a stable simulator we have to deal with a fact that it has been dropped. Only then it will remain in its current state. A sim thatâs constantly to be improved WILL change and WILL break its addons. Thatâs natural. Anything else canât be the goal.
It is the same problem for buyers of weather addons. With the cloud update, gamers with graphics cards under GTX9xx will get screen flickering and Asobo recommends to disable the clouds. These users will no longer be able to use their purchased addon. Effectively they had maybe 4 weeks of fun with their weather addon. I find the whole way Asobo deals with their product and the third party manufacturers very worrying. If Asobo continues like this, I donât see a future for MFS. Especially not the planned 10 years.
I would at least have expected that third party vendors are informed of internal code changes before an update is released, so that the third party vendor can react quickly. But if even that doesnât work, why should third parties bother with the MFS? I would probably jump off and invest my working time in P3D, X-Plane and FSX.
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not only Weather Addons,any Addons are waste of Time and MoneyâŠ
i will never buy any addons for this Sim,if it goes that wayâŠ
i have a 1080 ti,so when will it stop working with these Card?
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Sorry, but youâre blaming the wrong ones. There is an SDK and Microsoft/Asobo offer even a Marketplace and praise/promote contents there and talk about third party aircraft being released in their development updates.
They ADVERTISE the use of the SDK to create and release content instead of saying everyone to wait for the SDK to be finalized, but didnât seem to bother coping with the results that 3rd party is already heavily relying on it. Seems like now theyâve gotten aware of the issues at least, so letâs hope there will be a solution for that. Bad enough that it had to come so far.
By no means should one expect that it is âtoo earlyâ for 3rd party devs to release anything. Thatâs all on Asobo/Microsoft for their communication and regression testing.
I love the sim and also participate on a free mod for a default aircraft. All I expect and hope for is to have a pre-release patch provided to developers or whoever wants to test and provide feedback. Now that most game-breaking bugs are ironed out, it shouldnât be an issue to have each patch in beta-testing for a week prior releasing it to all users.
Thatâs just common practice in IT development where canary releases, betas, proper release notes and backwards compatibility are exactly the way to avoid these issues professionally.
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I agree that the one to solve it is Asobo but I think that the problem is somewhere else.
One example: The folder structure is terrible. One community folder for 500 addons? Loading priority by name? This will bring us maaaaany aaaaa and zzzzz addons. I think Asobo will have to rebuild many parts of the sim from scratch once they get the point of the problem. They will need to tidy the sim up and once this settles a bit addon developers can seriously put their stuff where it belongs. Aircraft subfolders, airports, scenery, tools and utilities, weather, etc. IMO a good structureâs one of the most important requirements for ANY addon development. And while they sort these things out 3rd party devs will continue to have a really hard time, the cost of early releases. Eventually Asobo will get it, Iâm sure. But Iâm also sure that the sim will change a lot.
Only if Asobo doesnât change anything.
Everything you suggested might be correct, but it doesnât mean that such changes need to be breaking for existing addons.
You can introduce a new addon structure while still supporting the legacy one.
You can introduce new autopilot logic by versioning it instead of changing it globally affecting and breaking every aircraft that they didnât actually update to adhere with the changes (which affects everything third-party).
If you donât manage to make something backwards-compatible, give everyone a heads-up about changes and provide a migration/update HowTo.
All of that is no rocket science.
IT development in more complex business areas does that every single day since interfaces, functions, etc. always change and still they manage to not break everything around them with a single patch.
Of course it requires more effort and time to do it properly, but then again MS/Asobo highly benefit from the addons and mods since without them MSFS would not be accepted by most simmers.
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Good points, absolutely.
I think this is the biggest part. As you say, global changes donât work, there is too much involved. And yes, maybe it wouldnât break addons if there were transitions or test versions for developers at least.
MSFS is in an ongoing public Beta. They are relying on the enthusiasm of users and particularly developers to get the coding correct. MS has achieved an amazing feat in my opinion. They have managed to get third party developers who should be using the SDK to create their own products, to essentially tell MS/Asobo where the SDK is broken and recommend how to fix it. MS is effectively getting pro bono development work from many developers that canât currently work on their own products.
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I have had an unusable program that crashes to desktop since update 5.
This horrible piece of coding has even managed to corrupt my Microsoft store probably from the several times I have deleted and reinstalled.
In 25 years of simming this is the worst most unstable sim I have ever used, it is simply hopeless .
Listen to your customers for real and stop telling us you are listening when every update creates 2 new bugs or crashes than the past one.
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The problem is not primarily the SDK. The sim itself changes, and as it changes, it breaks the functionality of some addons and even some included content. This is common in beta testing, but highly unusual in the finished sim. FSX had 2 updates, and they did not break previous addons.
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Yes, but considering that Carenado has DECIDED to sell their PAYWARE products, and most of us have paid for these (!!!) Carenado needs to patch QUICKLY whenever itâs required! They took my money! Cannot always be the end customer who loses. They could wait to put their products on the market. Point.
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Dont blame Carenado !
These bugs have been introduced by Failures in ASOBO PlatformâŠ
As a Dev I fully understand their situation âŠ
having built their product in good faith under MSFS SDK we would not expect it to fail on the next update 
i wait also for a fix of the Birddog wat i have
http://www.blackboxsimulation.com/index.php/products/fs2020/cessna-l19
Asobo fix it pleaseâŠ
- I would not consider the platform stable enough to release any content for it, let alone payware content. Everything released for it at this point is experimental.
- I would not trust that built in store with any real money at this point.
- How can a serious developer release payware content for such an unstable platform that still has so many core issues (including but not limited to a proper SDK)?
- What if the project turns out to be too complex for Asobo after all and never becomes the platform we all hope for?
To me, everything with MSFS is experimental at this stage and far from a product I would want to throw additional money at.
Sure, playing around with free content is fun and I enjoy doing that.
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