Introduction
Introduction from Jayne
Jayne - Hello. Hi, everyone! Welcome to our long-awaited Developer Q&A. It’s definitely been a few months since we last streamed; I think it was the end of May. But we’re really happy to be back to talk about what we’ve been up to, answer some of your questions, showcase or maybe tease a couple things coming in the near future. We’re really excited to talk about it! My name is Jayne Reynolds. I’m the Senior Community Manager for Microsoft Flight Simulator and your host for today. And I’d like to welcome back the three people, of course, you see on your screens. On your left we have Jorg Neumann, head of Microsoft Flight Simulator. Hi Jorg! How are you?
Jorg - Good to see you, everybody! It’s been three months. Great to see you!
Jayne - Glad to have you back! In the middle we have Sebastian Wloch, CEO, co-founder of Asobo Studios. Seb, how’s it going today?
Seb - Hello, great!
Jayne - Glad to have you back, too! And on your right, we have Martial Bossard, executive producer at Asobo Studios. Hi, Martial, welcome back!
Martial - Hello! Thank you. Guten tag.
Jayne - Yes! And just a few reminders for our chat, today. … Just so you know, we have two Q&A sessions throughout the stream dedicated to Sim Update 10. We’ve picked a ton of questions from the forum users based on the popularity/importance of the question. But feel free to ask your questions during those sessions, as well, and we’ll see if we can answer some live questions, as well. So, it’s time. Let’s go ahead and get started. So before we get into the meat of those questions, Jorg has a few things he’d like to share…kind of what we’ve been up to the past few months. So I’ll kick it off to you, Jorg.
Introduction from Jorg - Timestamp
Jorg - Hi, everyone. Yeah, I hope everybody had a great summer. You know, I can’t believe it’s been three months. We’ve been lucky enough to go to Oshkosh and meet some of you, which was really fun. Great memories. And, honestly, we loved the show so much, I think we’re gonna go back next year, so maybe we can meet even more of you. But really, what we should do – and I see it in the chat already, is – next slide – today is our anniversary! Yay! It’s two years. And so, happy anniversary, everybody. It’s been a wonderful two years.
Jorg - And I put the next slide together just to – I spent a bunch of time reflecting what we’ve done. Remember when we said we were going to do an update a month? We actually did! Like, so we just put here. (I didn’t have any pictures for Sim Updates.) But, we’ve done ten world updates, now. We are at the tenth sim update. We did three platform launches. We had interesting stuff like [Top Gun] Maverick and whatnot. So, it’s been a great, super interesting ride with you guys. And thank you so much for everything! While I’m super proud of the things, and – Oh yeah! Maybe if you show the next slide – I was thinking about, how do we celebrate this? And I said, “Why don’t we do something like this that we haven’t done before?” So with today, we put all of our stuff on sale, everything we’ve made internally. So hopefully, that makes you a little bit happy. So basically, a “thank you” for all you guys.
Jorg - And the next slide – while I’m happy and proud of everything we’ve done, I had this idea last night to make a slide and show all the great work that has been done by third parties, and I said, “I’m going to put pictures up from every plane ever made.” Yeah, well, I got this far. So this is the first year. So in the first year, y’all made over 60 planes, which is great. And since then, a year later, now, over 100, and then I know there’s over 300 coming. So it’s been humbling and amazing. And you know, I enjoy tons of these. And I know how much passion goes into this. So thank you for all that. And I think that was my quick little intro.
Jayne - Yes, it was. Thank you for that, Jorg. It’s been a fun summer, too. And thank you to everybody, especially the third-party dev community for all those planes. It’s been a great past few years for us. But we will move on to our Sim Update 10 session where we have a lot we want to get started and chat about. So first off, Jorg wants to talk a little bit about the readiness of Sim Update 10.
Community Forum Questions
Sim Update 10 - Timestamp
Readiness
Jorg - Yeah, I mean, so Sim Update 10 was off to a great start. We spent a bunch of time on it, as you know, and you helped us a lot. There were 30,000+ people actually playing. So, I think that was a record. So thank you for that. And the team did as much as possible to react to the feedback. Just lately, it was becoming clear that some of you see performance issues. Some people have stability issues. And based on all that, there was even a [forums] thread saying, “Hey, please don’t release this.” We agree. So we made the decision, just – I think yesterday or the day before – that we want to keep this in the oven for a little bit longer. Seb and Martial are going to talk a little bit about the things we’ve already found. But to set expectations, I think we’re going to spend another 2+ weeks to get it right, make sure that it’s stable for everybody, and [that] it is actually the performance increase and stability increase that we wanted. Alright. With that over to you, Martial, I think?
Performance Issues/DirectX 12 - Timestamp
Martial - Well, regarding the performance, there’s two things: The first one is related to DirectX 12 and Nvidia. So, we are working with Nvidia to get DirectX 12 working perfectly. And we’ve got some issues. We’ve got some – I think there’s some question about that later on in this Q&A? Well, we are getting some artifacts. There is a memory management issue. The fact was that when we initially published Sim Update 10, it went with a bunch of optimizations on the memory allocations. And because it was creating some bugs, we had to remove that. So as a consequence, on DirectX 12, the performance went back to a lesser-performance build. So it’s really something we are working hard on with Nvidia. So that’s good news: Nvidia is involved in that. They are supposed to publish a fix. And as soon as we have the fix – we don’t know exactly when – but as soon as we have the fix, we will be in a position to get back the optimization we did. And then we will get more performance on DirectX 12.
Martial - That said, it’s not the only issue. We figured out that we also have some performance issues on DirectX 11. And there’s plenty of reason for that. So, we’ve spent some time to do some investigation. One of the reasons that we found, recently, was that we did an optimization for memory. And in the test case, everything was working fine. But thanks to the flighting, we figured out that in some circumstances, this optimization on memory was not an optimization on performance: On the opposite, it was costing up to 8 ms per frame. This is too much. So we are working on that. So that’s why we need some extra time to find all the problems and to bring you the Sim Update 10 that everybody expects.
Jayne - And we have a few slides here on PC performance and VR performance, if you want to talk about those a little bit.
Martial - Oh, okay. This is related. In the forums, we had some questions for stats regarding DLSS [Deep Learning Super Sampling]. So this is the one we did, too. We can talk about that already. (We’ll talk about DLSS later, I think.) So the stats we’ve got on, and to explain all, we can select your optimizations in DLSS regarding the CPU and GPU that you’re getting. So the important point, here, if you look at the cost of the GPU for DLSS, it is obvious that as soon as you want to get more quality, it costs a bit more. So we’ve done the test to show you the different settings from TAA [Temporal Anti-Aliasing], which is the default anti-aliasing we’ve got, to the Ultra Performance DLSS, which is maybe less quality but better performance. So basically, here, I wanted to talk about that because as you can see, DLSS is only a matter of GPU performance. So depending on the CPU you’ve got, if you’re CPU-bound, you can select a different level of DLSS. So on this PC, for instance, we’re CPU-bound, and the CPU was costing 25 ms per frame. So basically, you can select “DLSS Quality” without even having any drop of frames. So that’s why it’s super important to check on your PC: Where is it bound? After that we’ve got some other measurements for VR. It’s exactly the same. But basically, you can see what the difference is between DLSS and [temporal] anti-aliasing. What’s super important is that DLSS is also super effective when you’re using VR. And this is one of the questions we found in the forums.
AMD FSR [FidelityFX Super Resolution] 2.0 - Timestamp
Jayne - Thank you, Martial. And one of those questions that came in from the forums: When should players be using AMD FidelityFX versus changing to Nvidia DLSS? So they’re wondering if they can expect support for AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution, FSR 2.0?
Martial - Okay, so there’s plenty of things here, because FidelityFX is not only the VSR [Virtual Super Resolution]. So for instance, we are using CAS [Contrast Adaptive Sharpening] on FidelityFX. It’s a system that sharpens the rendering. So, and this is a non-FidelityFX [feature]: It’s not related to any anti-aliasing, or – it’s not even related to video cards. So if we are just looking at the equivalent of DLSS, it’s more the FSR in the FSR 2.0. We are still work working on this with AMD. So we’ve got a great relationship with Nvidia: We’ve got the same with AMD. So it’s not coming for Sim Update 10. We’ll see what the timeframe will be. It’s a close relationship. And we need some features from them.
Jayne - Okay, understood.
Nvidia DLSS Blurriness - Timestamp
Martial - I can see DLSS is blurry. So that’s also the next question. So this is also something we know, especially for the glass cockpits, because glass cockpits are a rendered texture and it’s not working perfectly with DLSS. So the ideal option would be to have a mask to remove this area of the screen from DLSS. So it’s a solution we’re talking with Nvidia [about], also, so it won’t be ready for Sim Update 10, that’s for sure. Hopefully, we could bring that for Sim Update 11. But it’s still R&D [research and development]. So it’s not like an option we just have to trigger. But we know that we’ve got some rendering quality issues, and we’re working with Nvidia for that.
Multi-Monitor Support - Timestamp
Jayne - Okay, yeah, that’s really interesting solution, Martial. Alright, so we’ll move on to multi-monitor support. As you know, in Sim Update 10 beta, we added that experimental feature in the menu. So one of the questions from the community is, “Can we expect field of view projection adjustments in future iterations of multi-monitor support?”
Martial - Well, I’ve seen that, and I think also in the forums, there’s some confusion between the bezel correction and bezel distortion. So what we did so far on multi-screen, you can extend your display up to seven screens. And on each screen, you can move the camera in order to have the right position, the exact position you want. So it’s like up, down, and roll. (So it’s mainly rotations.) And you can also change the field of view [FOV] by changing the setting called “Zoom”. So if you look at the question about the bezel correction or end of the bezel distortion, what it does is that, basically you’re using these corrections to take into account the side of the screens. So basically, you’ve got this kind of feeling that you’re looking [into] the game as [if] you were looking through a window, and this is already doable by just playing with the rotation we’ve got. So basically, you don’t need so some much bezel correction if you do a proper setting of the rotation on each screen. What we don’t do – and maybe something we could bring later on – is that we have just one, zoom, well, FOV setting. And this could be an issue if you’ve got different-size screens. So maybe later on, we will bring a solution in which you can select every screen and have a proper setting on each screen for the FOV. But this is not done yet.
Low Power Mode - Timestamp
Jayne - Great, thank you for that explanation, Martial. Alright, the last point on here is low power mode. That all also came in the Sim Update 10 beta in the Experimental menu.
Martial - Okay. This is also for me, then.
Jayne - Yes. One more question for you. So we’re just wondering, yeah, given the feedback around it, if you could talk a little bit about that implementation, and any future changes?
Martial - (I’ve got the feeling of being Sebastian [Wloch], talking all the time!) So yes, we looked at the feedback that the community made for implementing low power mode. And basically, what we did now is focusing on the GPU load. So when you navigate on the menus, instead of reducing all the framerate, we all know doing some work on the GPU frequency. So, low power mode is still a feature in the Experimental menu, because we still have to work on that and collect feedback from the community. So please, if you’ve got some feedback on these features, please give us some. So basically, the system is working based on vsync [vertical sync]. So most of the time, vsync on monitors is mostly 60 Hz. Sometimes it gets higher. So when you’re using vsync, there’s two things: First, the user can choose to divide the framerate by two or three, which reduces the consumption of the GPU, obviously. And there’s two automated features: So when you’re downloading a package through Content Manager, it’s also dividing the frequency of the image by two, and we are dividing the frequency by three when you minimize the game window. So by doing that, we hope that we will bring most of the requirements that the community was asking. If there’s more, don’t hesitate to put some comments in the forums. And we will read that.
G1000 Nxi with Matt Nischan, Working Title - Timestamp
Jayne - Perfect. Thanks, Martial! I’m seeing a few good questions in chat; I have noted them here. And we’ll ask some of those a little bit toward the end in our next session, but thank you for asking them. I wanted to move on, though, to something very fun that we’d like to talk about, which you can see, here, is the G1000 Nxi. So coming in Sim Update 10, the G1000 NXi will be the default G1000 in the simulator, which is fantastic. We’ve had the Marketplace free version for about a year now from Working Title. And this update’s going to bring a whole number of new features to the G1000. Really close to the real Nxi unit: it’s going to have VNAV, procedural turns, holds, arc legs, a whole bunch of stuff. So to talk a lot more about that, we’ve invited back someone you’ve seen on the stream, before, to talk more about these features. He is the founder, the lead architect of Working Title Simulations, Matt Nischan. Welcome back, Matt!
Matt - Hey, everyone. Thanks for having me on!
Jayne - Absolutely! Glad you could join us! So tell us a little bit about what’s coming with Sim Update 10 and all the fun features that we’re gonna see.
Sim Update 10 - Timestamp
Matt - Yeah, so Sim Update 10. As you all know, we’ve had the Nxi in the Marketplace for a while. I think it’s been there for just maybe a little under or a little over a year. And yeah, that’s gonna be the default G1000, now, as of Sim Update 10. If any of you are already in the [Sim Update 10] beta, you’ve seen that, but just wanted to talk to, real quick, some of the cool features that are coming along with it for folks that haven’t seen it, yet.
Navigation - Timestamp
So yeah, so this first screenshot, here, is…one of the things that people really wanted, obviously, was VNAV [vertical navigation], you know: “When will we [be] getting coupled VNAV?” All kinds of stuff like that. So the G1000 Nxi has coupled VNAV. You can see the little magenta caret there, you can see the TOD [top of descent] marker in the middle of the map, you can see we’ve got VPTH [vertical path] armed up in the corner, which is super cool. And if you go on to the next slide…
Matt - So, the other thing that’s really cool about the Nxi that people really wanted, were curved legs, RF [radius to fix] legs, we do DME [distance measuring equipment] arcs, all that kind of stuff. So you can see here, kind of an example, this is going into Palm Springs. This is a very cool approach. It’s this big curved thing. You come from super high, and the autopilot flies it perfectly through everything. You’ll get VNAV all through the turns. It’s super a lot of fun. So, yeah, we’re excited about all the VNAV and navigational stuff.
Lean Assist - Timestamp
Matt - Yeah, here’s another picture of that same approach. And then, on the left side, you can see, here, a cool feature that was brought to the real Nxi, which is this lean assist. So if you get to the engine page, there’s a lean assist page. And as you change your mixture, you can see exactly how far you are away from the peak of your exhaust gas temperature [EGT]. And you know, you can adjust your mixture so you get that perfect spot, you know, 25° rich of peak or lean of peak, whatever the engine manufacturer recommends.
Navigation (continued) - Timestamp
Matt - And then over here, we’ve got, the other big thing was going to be RNAV [area navigation], so people were really asking, “We want to be able to fly RNAV,” “When do we get to fly RNAV?” “It’s important to IFR!” Here, you can see we’re doing an LNAV+V RNAV approach. So “+V” is like that Garmin kind of advisory guidance. But, we do the whole thing, we do LPV [localizer performance with vertical guidance], LP [localizer performance], we do LNAV [lateral navigation], VNAV, all that stuff. It does them all and picks them all up from the right place with the scenery nav data. So it’s really super cool.
Matt - And then, here, you can see the crazy legs that we’re able to do now. Over on the left corner, you can see we’ve got a procedure turn there at URBAH [waypoint]. And over on the right, you can see at DUCEV [waypoint], there’s a full hold there. So, you can see the line is a little bit thinner. That’s because it’s in the missed approach. So yeah, we have missed approaches, too. It’ll do those. You can fly those, as well, and it’ll do the holds and it’ll calculate the proper entries and all kinds of stuff. So yeah, all the IFR procedures are there from top to bottom.
Quality-of-Life Improvements - Timestamp
Matt - And then as far as quality-of-life stuff goes, here, we got a little yellow highlight. You can see around the ident of the waypoint, and there’s a little keyboard icon there. Now, you can click in either those places and use your keyboard to type in the waypoints instead of using the knobs. We know the knobs are real fiddly. It’s kind of hard to do, especially if you’re in turbulence, or especially on Xbox. This works on Xbox two, which is awesome. It’ll bring up the onscreen keyboard, you can put in your waypoint and then it’ll close it. So you know, we try not to sacrifice realism for that. But for these kinds of things, you know, they’re helpful for people. Not everybody can use all the different kinds of controllers. We want to make this accessible. So that was a big deal.
Procedures - Timestamp
Matt - And then the other thing that we added, which is a thing that the real Nxi also added, is the ability to do these visual approach procedures. You can see two waypoints here, STRGHT and FINAL. You can you can create a procedure into any airport. So, some grass strip, you want to fly your 3° glide path with your autopilot, you could totally do that. It’s super cool. So yeah, that’s another big one, there. And, I think that’s all we had.
VFR Map - Timestamp
Matt - So the other thing that we want to talk about is the VFR Map. So one thing that I know people have been asking for a while, is some updates to the VFR Map: “How do we get more information on it?” You know, “Where do I get data?” Now all that stuff is on the VFR Map. We’ve added to that. And you can see on the right-hand side, here, you’ve got all the runways listed, what the runway surface types are, their lengths, you had all the COM radio frequencies, you get ILS frequencies, and there was a great piece of feedback – We just want to thank the community for the feedback because it was a good thing that we didn’t think about – which is the ILS course. And we were able to sneak that in during the Sim Update 10 beta period. So, thanks for that feedback. So that’s there and you’ve got the METAR, as well. And then in the upper area, there, the bar, you can search, you can type and it it’ll bring up a list of things that match. And you can actually click on the stuff on the map too. So it’s super useful. It’s extra nice. I’ve been using it a lot when I want to get weather METAR reports from my destination airport. I just open up the VFR Map and click stuff. It’s been a lot of fun. So yeah, that’s what we’ve got coming in Sim Update 10. We’re super excited!
Garmin G1000 Nxi Feature Discovery Video - Timestamp
Jayne - That’s awesome. Thanks, Matt! And can you talk a little bit about what’s coming later on today? The video we’ve made?
Matt - Oh, yeah, that goes into more detail. Obviously, you could talk about the Nxi features forever. We’re very, very close to one-to-one. There are certainly features that we don’t have, yet. But as far as stuff that pilots use every day, it’s got everything. So yeah, we’ve got a feature discovery video coming, later today. That’s, got eight or nine minutes of me blabbing about all the cool stuff you’ll find in it. So yeah, it’s cool. And we hope you guys, you know, have a lot of fun flying it. We’re excited.
Marketplace G1000 Nxi Version - Timestamp
Jayne - Awesome. I did see one question in chat, earlier, that was asking, “Once this is default, will they need to uninstall the Marketplace version they have? Or can they just keep that? Is it going to clash at all?”
Matt - Ahh, yes. So, this has been a little bit of a point of confusion, so I’ll try and explain it as clearly as I can. There will be one final Marketplace version, which we’ve already released. And that Marketplace version will enable you to use the Nxi in third-party planes that don’t have it in there by default, yet. So, as those third parties move their planes over to the Nxi, then that won’t really be needed, anymore. But there’s no need to uninstall the Marketplace [version]: Just get the latest update. And that will make sure that you have it on both the default planes in the sim and the ones that are third-party planes. And if you don’t want it on the third-party planes, you can always, you know, pull that package off.
Jayne - Perfect, yes. That explains it perfectly. Thank you so much, Matt. We’re looking forward to seeing that feature discovery video come out later today. And super glad you could join us for this Q&A. Everybody in chat is very stoked to see you. But, we’ll catch you later. And we appreciate you.
Matt - Awesome. Thanks, guys!
Community Forum Questions
Q&A Session 2 - Timestamp
Jayne - Thank you! Alright, we will move on to our Q&A Session 2. Also questions we’ve pulled from the forums. Some really good questions, here.
Xbox WASM [Web assembly] - Timestamp
Jayne - Number one, all about Xbox WASM. We’re wondering about implementation of WASM. How that’s going, when we can expect to see it in the sim.
Jorg - Yeah, so I can speak to that. It’s going great. Just for those – I think you know what it is, but basically, it allows us to run code that is very unusual for a closed ecosystem, like Xbox via a sandbox. And the good news is, it’s all working. And, I would say there was a healthy debate, if we should put this in Sim Update 10 because it does work. But then we looked at the consumer experience of it, and it’s clunky. And we didn’t want to do that. Basically, you get a DLC [downloadable content], you don’t even know what for, and then if you’re in a certain state, you have to delete it. So it was like, “Oh my, what are we doing to the poor people?” And so, we made the decision to move it to Sim Update 11. But that all being said, all the tech behind it works great. And we’re super proud of it. For those of you don’t know, this is a revolution for consoles. It has never been possible, before, on any console to do something like this. And this is a super smart way by the team. But it’s clunky. And just sort of like the decision with Sim Update 10: Move it by a few weeks. We said, “Let’s work with the platform team. There’s some stuff we need to do, some stuff they need to do to make this a smooth experience.” Because you don’t want to get this every time. Because we update this file frequently. You don’t want to get this all the time. But, that’s where we are. We’re basically mostly done with the functionality. We are there. And then with the flow for the consumer, it’s probably going to take one more sim update.
Initial Loading Time Improvements - Timestamp
Jayne - Perfect. Thank you for the update. Yep, that’s great to know that it’s all working. The next question we have is, “How did you manage to greatly reduce the initial loading times?” So, it’s been stated enough [in the] beta forums that they noticed a great reduction in those loading times and some of the beta updates. So we’d love to know how you did that.
Martial - Yeah, I’m super glad that people have noticed. And would like to thanks Cedric, for instance, for the great job he did, and Omar and the team for the packages, because there’s two things, there:
- The one that I will call the pre-“press start” loading video. Part of the optimizations. And basically, this was by reducing, as much as possible, the size of the executable. And also to optimize the different calls we are getting to some other APIs [application programming interfaces], and sometimes, also to work with the one that does the API so we can have a better loading time.
- And then on the other hand, we’ve got also some of the optimizations on packages. When you’re loading the packages, there’s a bunch of things that are happening to check the dates, and so we’ve got some different kinds of calls to PlayFab. And this has completely been rewritten, the way we were doing these calls and the way all the packages were installed.
Martial - So basically, now it’s much more optimized. And it’s getting better and better. This is not finished, yet. We have noticed, also, that some people are complaining sometimes that there’s a degradation in performance while we’re loading. So we’re still investigating that. To be honest, we haven’t found anything and we have no reproduction. So same as usual, if you’ve got some reproduction steps, guys, if you’ve got some information about some potential degradation performance on the loading time, please give us some feedback.
Explain Experimental Scenery Reorder Tool - Timestamp
Jayne - Great, thank you, Martial. Next question, here we have: “There’s a new experimental scenery reorder tool in Sim Update 10.” The question is, “Could you explain how it works?” Now, I think this question would be a great answer from the SDK team whom we don’t have on, today. But do you have anything you want to add to that, Martial?
Martial - Yeah, I think I’m not very familiar with this experimental tool. I know that some people are asking to be able to change the way the packages are loaded, so they can change the priority of each. So this is what the tool is doing. I don’t exactly know how it does, and…
Jorg - I think we should do we should do an SDK stream again.
Martial - It would be super, super, super dedicated to that.
Jayne - Yeah. Perfect we’ll [Martial - Sorry, guys] plan on that. We’ll have that soon, or whether it’s a post or video or something, we’ll make sure we can get a good explanation for those trying to learn how to work the tool. But thank you for that question.
How is Weather Injected and Drawn - Timestamp
Jayne - Another question we had from the forums, they said, “It would be awesome to chat about how weather is injected and drawn and from what sources it’s fed.”
Seb - I can talk a little bit about it. Even though I don’t know exactly how the entire system works, but, so there’s a few different data sources. And they are blended together. So for example, we’re getting, I think, humidity, pressure, wind, etc., from Meteoblue in columns, which have, I think, 60 or something in that area, layers vertically. And clouds, I think are coming from another data source, which is more like a voxel or something, which has like a 3D data source. So basically, there’s a whole bunch of data sources coming from Meteoblue. And then there is METAR data, which is pulled quite regularly for all the airports around you. And then, this is blended together. And the blend code is pretty long, because it’s blended differently depending on the data source. And I think, also, Martial, you can confirm, I think, at the source level, I think Meteoblue is also blending some METAR data into the clouds, yes. [Martial - Yes.] So Meteoblue is using METAR data to inject it into their data…
Martial - Into their model, so they can re-compute it from…
Seb - They have a model, which actually, you know, sort of simulates an atmosphere and makes predictions. And we, then, in real time, in the sim, get the METAR data, and we reinject it. And that’s mostly important so we don’t, for example, reinject METAR data into the clouds. The clouds are just the clouds coming from Meteoblue, with the METAR data injected. But I think we use the METAR data to fix the wind on the runway. But that’s faded out. So it sort of only occurs when you’re on the runway, I think at, for example at 1000 feet, you will be only on Meteoblue. And the same thing at a few kilometers away from the airport, you would be back to Meteoblue. Same for temperature, pressure, etc. So, which means that if you have a METAR and an airport with a METAR, and you’re sitting on the runway, you should see the METAR data. If you’re in the air, or if you’re in an airport, which has no METAR – For example, in our area, there is only one METAR, which is Bordeaux airport. Every other airport in the area just doesn’t have any, or copies the data from Bordeaux – If you’re far away, you just have the Meteoblue data. And this has not really changed for quite a while. The only thing we did is maybe a few fixes here and there where the blending wasn’t correct. For pressure, maybe, or stuff like that. But, for example, the cloud system has not changed for a while. So I know, Sim Update 10 is that where the cloud has more vertical position. That’s the only change in the display, maybe, Martial, but the data source has not changed. So it’s a blend at runtime of data from different data sources.
Jayne - Awesome. Thank you for that explanation, Seb. I hope that helps…
Uprafts and Wind Modeling - Timestamp
Martial - Maybe you can also give some explanation about the how you get the drafts because…
Seb - Oh, that’s yeah, so that’s more for what we could call large-scale information. So that data is – I don’t know what resolution it is, maybe 100 meters or something [Martial - on the layer]. But so one thing that is important is that we get from, whether it’s METAR or Meteoblue, we only get horizontal wind: It’s always horizontal, it’s flat, it doesn’t do any vertical components. So all the vertical components of the wind are computed in real time in our, sort of, thermal updrafts, turbulence simulator, and that thing basically starts with whatever comes from the wind system METAR injected into Meteoblue. And it’s going to look at both the terrain. For example, is there a hill? Like, is it going uphill, downhill? Is there a mountain up front? It’s going to look at sunlight, actual sunlight coming, so depending on the sun position, if there’s clouds, which are hiding the sun, or if you’re on a slope, mountain slope, whatever the angle.
Seb - It’s also gonna compute atmosphere thickness, so it’s going to compute the actual watts of sunlight reaching the ground. So if you’re at the top of Mont Blanc, clear sky, it’s gonna be, I think, 1300 watts or something. And the more you go down, the more there’s clouds, or at night, it goes down to zero. Then it takes the ground type, if there’s forest, trees, grass, the color, albedo, what type of terrain it is, if it’s water, and then it sort of starts with the ground air temperature, which we get from METAR or Meteoblue, and it computes the ground surface temperature, which has been heated up or not. And that then sort of, if the ground is extremely hot, compared to the air, I don’t know, let’s say it’s 15° outside air, but the ground is at 60° because it’s in the sun, we will generate more updrafts. So that’s the thermal updrafts.
Seb - And then there is obviously, also, if the wind hits the building, then it gets diverted and does turbulence behind the building. If it hits the range of trees, it’s going to create a bump. So there’s all sorts of systems that basically take the topology shape of the terrain, temperature of the terrain, and compute the terms. And that’s not coming from any data source because this is one foot resolution. It’s super small, because a bump created by a house on final can be very, very small. And no weather system reads this data. And this system creates heat bumps, pressure bumps, because when air is pushing away, it changes pressure a little bit. And I think it changes air temperature so you can get into a bubble of hot air and get an updraft. And that can change the engine performance if it’s 5° out. It’s gonna have all sorts of consequences. And so that’s simulated in real time. It’s not coming from any data source.
Seb - And I showed an example, also, I think earlier already on one Q&A, there is something coming that will allow users to visualize the vertical wind component in the world. So like, assistance, like all the ribbons or all that stuff, there’s going to be an assistance where you can see the vertical wind, so that’s really cool. If you want to use that to go up when a glider or whatever, even if you want to glide on a Cessna, you can do that if there’s not updraft or if you want to just understand why it’s very turbulent. Because if you understand all this, you can understand why more people complain about turbulence in the summer. It’s just there’s more sunlight in our areas and why in winter, it’s very hard to get to any turbulence because the sun is just so low and it doesn’t create many updrafts.
Martial - Just one final word, maybe: I’ve seen in the forums, somebody’s saying it could make no sense to ingest METAR data into Meteoblue’s data. And then on top of that Earth, using the same data to do the kind of bubble things. Everything is a matter of frequency. When Meteoblue is collecting, so METAR data as an input for the systems, after that, they’ve got to launch a bunch of calculations. They’re using supercomputers for doing that. And so we are getting a weather model every six hours. And in between, it’s just interpolation. So if we want to be a bit more precise of our METAR, on top of that, we are collecting METAR data, which most of the times are updated every half an hour, and we are using this new updated METAR to inject that into the game. That’s why there’s kind of two different systems that could be first seen as something we shouldn’t do. But because of this frequency, it’s something that brings more precision into the system.
Jayne - Thank you, Seb and Martial. Yes, amazing explanation. Really appreciate you taking the time to talk about that.
Encryption Removal / Improvement Integration - Timestamp
Jayne - The next question we have here is also from the forums. The question is: “Now you’ve removed the encryption on the default aircraft, skilled devs will start noodling them to perfection. Are you planning to use valuable tweaks to optimize the default planes, yourself, too? If so, what would be the best way to inform you about these enhancements?”
Jorg - Yeah, I can speak to that a little bit. Just because I saw something in the chat, I just want to say [something] about weather. I mean, weather is constantly looked at as something that’s critically important. And there are all the systems just described. And there’s other data that we’re looking at, for the future. So I think this is going to be a long, fruitful story for us to discuss to get the weather really perfect.
Jorg - On the second thing, here, the encryption: Yeah, so we did what you guys asked, which was remove the restriction. Now that we have it, I’ve always been super interested in what freeware people are doing, like I remember, FlyByWire’s work on the A320. Amazing. I remember talking to Salty’s about their 747. Also really cool. I think where we stumbled a little was with something as boring as licenses for open source. And some people want to have the GPL 3 [GNU Public License version 3] license, some people are fine with the MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] license. We’re fine with the MIT license. We can’t do GPL 3, 4. Don’t ask me exactly what the legal reasons are, I guess I’m thankfully not a lawyer. But that was the issue. So I think there is a there’s a healthy discussion internally about like, we talked about doing a freeware section in the Marketplace for a long time. I’m totally committed to it. And I can see a world where we just take plane adjustments. For example, “Hey, Salty 747, we should talk again, and just put it into the sim,” right? I think the thing that’s a little bit quirky is it needs to be updated. Otherwise, it sort of dies. But, in general, we are completely open, now. But frankly, what’s surprising is we haven’t been contacted by anybody since we did the encryption thing. But let’s chat! That was the whole point. Let’s make these planes as good as they can be.
Progress of Fixing FPS [Frames Per Second] Drops During Long Flights - Timestamp
Jayne - Great. Thank you, Jorg. Next question we have, here: “Could you elaborate on the progress made in fixing FPS dropping during a long flight?”
Martial - It’s a long process. It’s super hard to find. You know, when you’re doing some development, you’ll have to get an easy reproduction state and process. So you can check and make sure that everything that you’ve done is fixing the issue. Here, it’s a little bit more complicated because it’s super hard to reproduce. So we’ve got some different measurements on long flights on different machines because it’s not 100% free of hardware or systems. And so, what we’re doing, every time we’re doing some changes: We’re launching some long flights to check if the measurement has changed or not to try to detect any improvement or degradation of performance. For the moment, I won’t say that we found the magical recipe of not losing any FPS on every single machine in the world. So, I’m not feeling confident to say, “Yes, we’ve got great improvements and we are 100% sure that it won’t happen again,” but we are still working on that. I think we will never stop working. Since, well, as you may have seen, we’ve done a lot of changes during the last two years. And every time every time we do some changes, whatever it is, it can be the rendering system, collisions, weather, flying models, every time it can have some side effects. So that’s why we are always launching the sim on different PCs. We are also using the help of some performance company to give you some stats, just to monitor what’s going on with the sim. What are the consequences of the changes we’re doing? So, it’s a long, long-term problem. Sorry, I don’t know what to say in English. I’m sorry.
Black Avionics Screens - Timestamp
Jayne - That’s alright! Along that question, one of the ones that popped up both in the forums and in our chat today: The question is, “What are the results of that Xbox stability test beta that we did, recently? And did that help with the black avionics issue that they’re experiencing?”
Martial - It does, it does. As a matter of fact, it helps us to see and to check that now most of the issues we’re getting on Xbox are linked to memory. So, it can be seen as good news or not. The good news is, we don’t have that many crashes done by our systems. And now it’s only (only, heh!) mostly a matter of optimization of the memory. And also, we’ve got different systems that try to reduce the cost of the sim, if we are very close to the end of the memory: Reserve the memory pool that we’ve got. So, two things here:
- The first one is, we figured out that we are consuming more memory than what we intend to do. So we’ve got to work on the optimization of that.
- And the other thing we are working on is with the platform team. We have noticed that sometimes we are asking the platform how much memory we’ve got left, and sometimes the numbers are wrong. So it’s super bad for us because we can do some allocations that make the Xbox crash because we think that it [the memory] can fit and it doesn’t.
Martial - So there’s plenty of things here to try. And that’s also a reason why we postponed Sim Update 10, because we want to try to find some optimization on Xbox for the memory. [Jayne - Gotcha.] And well, the black screens: This is also a system [where] the screens are disconnected when we are super close to the end of the memory pool. Sometimes, [when] you get some black screens, it’s the best thing out there in order to not crash and to add them back once the memory has been retrieved. Well, so we’re working on this.
Why are Bugs Introduced by the Beta Not Prioritized - Timestamp
Jayne - Great. Thanks, Martial! The last question we have on this list here is, “Why are some regressions, bugs and problems that show up in a beta…why aren’t they a high priority when brought on for the next beta update?”
Jorg - Oh, they are. I think that’s a misperception. I mean, that’s exactly what we do. You guys write us feedback. There’s lots of people obsessing on the feedback, we triage it. And then we re-prioritize. As you see, like, we just moved Sim Update 10 for that exact, precise reason. Because some people have real performance issues. It’s not every machine, it’s just some. We have a pretty elaborate hardware lab where we actually test these things. And it showed some interesting results. And some of it has to do with Nvidia, as we talked about earlier. Some of it has to do with other things. But we are absolutely – I mean, why else do a beta? We’re not ignoring anything. And we’re doing our best to prioritize it. Now at some point, if you keep adding completely new things, new features, then you’re never going to get done. But I think we are – I’d love to hear more specifics where somebody thinks we didn’t do that.
Martial - Yeah. So, we even changed the way we used to work, at least, because we are gaming as a service. We know that we’ve got to collect the feedback. So there’s also a part of the QA, here, that is dedicated to collect the feedback that you’re giving us. So we make sure that we are not missing any information, there. Like Jorg, I would love to understand exactly why this has been written.
Roadmap - Timestamp
Jayne - Yep, alright, thank you so much for the questions. There are a few more questions I’ll ask toward the end of the stream. But for now, let’s move onto our roadmap. There you go, Jorg.
Jorg - Roadmap, okay. Yeah, well, it has been three months. So basically, I looked at the slide deck. So I always put these things together. And this was where we were last time we met. And then if you go to the next thing, so there are lots of little black boxes, and we actually have done a lot since. So, in June, right after we talked, we shipped World Update 10. And alongside the wonderful Beechcraft Model 18 from Carenado, lovely plane. And obviously, we surprised people with the Pelican and all that stuff. And then some of the other things that we had said: gliders, for example, at the bottom. The surprise was actually the Airbus, and helicopters. They’re all now in the 40th Anniversary Edition. And, today, so this is where we are right at this moment. And today, we’re actually showing you a couple of other things.
World Update XI Announcement - Timestamp
Jorg - We’ve talked about this on the next slide, which is…the next world update! Yay! So it’s coming September 27th. And I read all kinds of things in the chat, and it is – next slide, tada – it’s Canada! Yes! Not Africa; I’m working on Africa. But it’s Canada. (Africa will take us a little bit more time to actually get – it’s a big continent. It has 66 countries on it. You know, there’s a lot of data you need to find.) But anyways, it’s Canada. And I know, lots of people have written about Canada. So we have good data. So what we have: new DEM and aerials. So always, we are making five airports (you’re gonna get to see pictures here today), 89 POIs [points of interest], 12 photogrammetry cities (makes me super happy). I think we pretty much now have covered almost all large cities in Canada with the base SKU [stock keeping unit] in this edition now. And then as always, we do three landing challenges, three bush trips, and discovery flights. Put some pictures in. Don’t have a trailer, yet. So this is the first airport. (We can just cruise through these. [Jayne - Okay.]) We always pick these things to take you around the entirety of the country that we’re looking at. So here’s Dawson [CYDA], Deer Lake [CYDF]. (Next one.) Yep. Iqaluit [CYFB], I think. (I always get that wrong when I pronounce it.) And then a couple of some screenshots of POIs. (Makes me feel cold!) I said, “Yeah, it’s hot!” And I’m putting this because I’m like, “Man, this looks cold, already. How is this even possible?!” But I think it’s gonna be a really nice update. And it’s coming in a little bit over a month. Oh, yeah! And just to be controversial, we did put this [POI] in here: the highly-controversial center of Canada. Where is it, really? Well, you know, I love it.
Jayne - I love that. Awesome. We are looking forward to a Canada update at the end of September. Thanks, Jorg!
Famous Flyer III Announcement - Timestamp
Jayne - And of course, today you may have seen it already on our socials or perhaps even in the Marketplace, but our Famous Flyer 3 has just come out. So we’re going to play the trailer real quick for you talk about it a little bit. So, enjoy:
Jayne - Gorgeous plane. We are really excited to talk about this. I’m personally really excited about this plane. Has a lot of meaning to me. But we have on with us, today, Fernando Herrera. Hey, Fernando, how are you? Welcome! Welcome to the stream. [Fernando - Hi, everyone!] Glad to have you. [Fernando - Thank you!] So, can you tell us a little bit about this plane, how long you’ve been working on it, a little bit of the development, and how you feel about it, now that it’s out?
Fernando - Well, first of all, I would like to congratulate [you] for the second anniversary of Microsoft Flight Simulator. I remember two years ago, when one of our aircraft was the first one and only in the Marketplace. Looks like it was centuries ago! Well, thank you for letting me present this plane. This one is one of our favorite vintage aircraft. Lovely and beautiful one. It’s very well-known and easy to identify for its particular V shape. One particular thing about it is the control surfaces in the back of these aircraft are called “ruddervators” and perform at the same time as a mix of a rudder and an elevator. Because of this V-tail shape, we put a lot of attention in flight dynamics. This aircraft oscillates in flight and has a particular behavior, especially when you are approaching the runway. And all of this is in our aircraft. The model we selected to recreate is a model from the early '80s when Beechcraft stopped producing this aircraft. So our V35 has around 40 years. And that’s why we gave it a weathered look, an old look. In this picture that you are showing, you can see that we put special attention in many aspects of the cockpit to make people feel [that they are] inside the real Bonanza V35. It is equipped with the default Bonanza instruments of that time. And, you can see one cool feature of, for example, is the panel: We try we try to recreate the original panel made of wood, as they were in that time. You can see in that picture. Or the leather of the seat, for example. You can feel [what it] would be like to sit in those leather seats. You can see the weathered leather and its scratches. It’s a very, very – you see the seats and you want to sit in there! [Jayne - Absolutely!] I highly recommend getting inside this one in Microsoft Flight Simulator. You will feel like you were there.
Jayne - That’s awesome. Yes, this is out now on the Marketplace. I think it came two or three hours ago. So, go check it out if you’re interested! Beautiful model, Fernando. [Fernando - Thank you!] I’m really impressed with the photos, here. And with the trailer.
Fernando - We really enjoyed developing it. It’s one of our favorite aircraft. Very different, very easy to spot in every aircraft around the world. We really like to develop these kinds of aircraft.
Jayne - Were there any interesting challenges you faced as you developed it, or anything that surprised you while you made this plane?
Fernando - Yes. One is, the simulator was not prepared for these kinds of tails. We had to emulate the one with regular control surfaces. That was a challenge.
Jayne - Certainly. Yeah, chat’s saying, “Great job!” Someone wants to know, “How fast does it go?” Do you know what the general cruise speed of this plane is?
Fernando - I guess it’s like around 200 miles per hour. [Jayne - Okay.] 200, 203. [Jayne - Nice. Fantastic.] That’s very quick. It’s an excellent way to know the new Canada scenery. You can go faster! I highly recommend getting into one of these in Flight Simulator.
Jayne - I can’t wait to try it out. It was my first discovery flight in this plane and I can’t wait to fly it. So thank you, Fernando, for joining us, today. We really appreciate it. [Fernando - Bye bye!] Say bye, chat! Thank you, Fernando.
Fernando - We have to say “bye” with two fingers instead of five because of the V!
Jayne - Nice. I like it. Peace! [Fernando - Bye bye. Thank you!] Thank you. Alright, so with that in mind, we’ll go take a look at our roadmap, here. It should have our update, now, with our Famous Flyer on there.
Gamescom - Timestamp
Jorg - Yeah, exactly! So it’s filling up. So, you see that, there? Somebody actually asked, What’s up with the stuff in August? Well, guess what! We’re going to Gamescom! And we’re holding something back, there. It’s locally relevant. So you know, we’ll see it next week. Hopefully, I’ll see – oh, Seb and I are going. I don’t know if you know this, but, Flight Sim was pretty prominent there in the old Xbox show. So if you want to tune in, we’re talking about some interesting stuff. Seb is gonna give you a sneak peek, here, in a minute about helicopters. We’ll talk more about that at Gamescom. And also about, what the hell is “CU I”? And what is the what is the Local Legend in August? That’s coming. Maybe just one word about that, because some of you might have noticed this: Typically, we do Local Legends directly related to the region we’re updating. The Beechcraft V35 is a wonderful plane. It’s not exactly Canadian. The reason for that is because we had planned the [De Havilland] Beaver to be the plane for the Canada update, which makes a ton of sense, right, from De Havilland. But ultimately, decided it should be in the 40th Anniversary Edition. So that’s why the swap. But yeah, overall, I think it’s filling out. Just a sneak peek. I was working on the roadmap for 2023 in the last few weeks. I had a great old time. So I can’t wait to share that with you. Soon.
Helicopter Update - Timestamp
Jayne - Fantastic! So, speaking of helicopters, Seb, there’s a little video here you can talk over if you’d like, to show a little tease about what we’ll talk about at Gamescom.
Seb - Yep, so we’ve made a lot of progress on helicopters. The team actually went – I think it was end of June – we took our first helicopter lessons. We had instructors, who are specialized on this helicopter, fly the helicopter in the sim, and they were impressed. Gave us feedback. And yeah, this is the very first sneak peek at helicopters in the sim, the Guimbal Cabri G2. So, I flew this one. Great helicopter. And, so you will see starting the engine, cockpit view (it has all the instruments just like the one we flew, actually), adding more power, lifting off. You’re gonna lift off in two steps. Just finding how much power you need to lift off. You see it goes to the side as it should, everything is very realistic. All the other secondary effects are there. It has a very advanced assistance, which I’m using there right now. (Just to film, it was easier.) If you turn off the assistance, it’s really like a real one: Very demanding in terms of number of inputs. And there’s a new user-facing thing you can turn on which shows the airflow on the helicopter, which has been optimized and is available on our platforms, which allows [you] to show what’s really going on. And yeah, we will show a lot more of this next week. But here, you can already see the helicopter taking off, going back down, what the air does, basically, around the helicopter. There was a little bit of vortex ring effect, and going back to the ground and into ground effect. So everything is simulated accurately, all the performance values are accurate. So in the real world, when we flew, we had over 100° and we were heavy. So we couldn’t even take off vertically: It was beyond our power limit. We could barely hover at 1-foot altitude. The sim is exactly the same. We had to move forward to actually go up. The ground effect provides about the same power gain. The climb rate is the same. It’s really very, very close to reality in terms of all these, not just the raw performance and speed, but also how much the impact of ground effect is. What’s the impact of transverse lift, how much it drifts to the side, etc.
Jayne - Awesome. So, [to] learn more about that, tune into Gamescom, and we’ll have another helicopter update for you. There’s the dates of Gamescom [24 - 28 August 2022], if you’re curious.
Chat Questions
Open Q&A - Timestamp
Jayne - We have a little bit of time left. So I’ve gathered some questions that I’ve been seeing in chat throughout the stream, today. And I’m going to ask those. We’ll see if we can get some answers for you. The first question I have, here. It says:
Chat question - The formation flying community loves the fixed multiplayer animations and smoother netcode when flying formation at higher speeds and G loads in the Sim Update 10 beta. Are the netcode and animation fixes intentional fixes, or were they a byproduct of potentially other changes? Or is this just the result of lightly-loaded beta servers? Asking because we love this change, and we’re wondering if we’re gonna see this in the live version. - Timestamp
Martial - I can’t tell. I’m very sorry. I can’t tell. We are doing some optimizations on the netcode. I can’t remember exactly what the status of that is. I haven’t spend time on that matter this summer, so I’m sorry. Please put this question aside and I will try to give the information next time.
Jayne - Great. I will do that. Thank you, Martial. [Martial - I’m very sorry.] No need to apologize! This is a good question, here:
Chat question - Sim Update 10 introduces a new way of customizing how weather and terrain is rendered on a Bing Maps instance. Are there plans to expand this API to expose the data to developers? - Timestamp
Martial - I don’t know. Sorry.
Jayne - It’s a question mark. Okay, we’ll figure that one out, too. This next question, I don’t know if there’s enough context. The question is, “Is there any update on the…”
Martial - Just to talk about this… I’m not 100% sure, but every time we can, we try to expose the same kind of data that we’re getting. So, the whole goal is always to use the same tools and use the same API, the same access to data that everybody can. I mean, third-party. For some reasons, sometimes it’s not 100% possible. And on this particular matter, I can’t tell if it has been restricted to our usage or not.
Jayne - Okay, got it.
Chat question - Is there any update on weather radar? (I don’t have any more context to that.) So any update? Timestamp
Jayne - I don’t know if you might know.
Martial - Yes. This is about the weather API we want to expose. So, I don’t have the proper status, and [I don’t] have in mind the roadmap that we have, but it’s on the roadmap. Yeah. [Jayne - Okay, great, Martial.] I can’t commit to a date.
Jayne - This is a question around WASM for Xbox:
So, once WASM is out with hopefully Sim Update 11, all these complex planes that are on PC, they’re curious if it’ll be the same on Xbox or if there’ll be some kind of optimization. If there’s going to be any difference between the planes that’ll be added onto the Xbox platform. - Timestamp
Martial - So the goal, here, is to have the same code, exactly the same code that runs on both PC and Xbox. As always, not the issue, but the concern we’re getting on Xbox is the memory consumption. So, we encourage third parties to do some tests and to make sure that the plane they are doing is compliant with those constraints. But apart from that, technically speaking, it’s exactly the same code that runs on both platforms.
Jayne - Yeah. Okay. Good to know. Someone asked,
Chat question - Is there any news on the ATR partnership? - Timestamp
Jayne - Recall we had Hans [Hartmann] on earlier. So any update from the summer?
Jorg - Hans is working hard on it with a team at Asobo. It’s making good progress. This is one of those planes where we said, “It ships when it’s ready.” We want to call it “Expert Series”. So, I mean, to be perfectly honest about it, it was targeting to be done end of this year. But when I have conversations with Hans, I’m like, if it takes a little bit longer, it doesn’t really matter: It needs to be great. And I see lots of emails between Hans and ATR because ATR is helping us a lot! So I think it’s all going very well.
Jayne - Good to know. Okay, next question is,
Chat question - Earlier you mentioned memory optimizations. Was this VRAM [video random access memory] or RAM [random access memory] optimization? - Timestamp
Martial - Both. I was talking on VRAM allocation for DirectX 12. So we gained some VRAM on DirectX 12. There’s still a difference…I think there’s between 1 to 2 GB of difference. When we’re using DirectX 12, it costs a little bit more: 1 to 2 GB. And we’re also talking about optimizations on, especially on Xbox, on the RAM, itself, and the way we’re using systems. The way we’re doing some allocations. [Jayne - Awesome.] So it’s RAM everywhere.
Jayne - Yeah. Okay. Going back to the question – not sure if you’ll know this or not – but:
Chat question - Do you know if the netcode is software-side or server-side? - Timestamp
Seb - It’s software on client and server.
Martial - Yes, yes. It depends on the systems.
Jayne - Okay.
Seb - There’s always the client and server part.
Jayne - Right. Fantastic. One more question, here:
Chat question - There was a performance loss when popping out panels and instruments that was fixed in the first Sim Update 10 beta, but has regressed. Are we aware of this? And is the performance going to be restored in a future build for the popping out of panels? - Timestamp
Martial - So these are the kind of issues we are investigating and that’s why the sim update has been delayed a bit.
Jorg - This bug is, for example, when somebody said we’re ignoring bugs, no, this is actually, as far as I remember, a severity 1, priority 1 or something like that. So it’s at the top of the list.
Chat question - Will the memory restrictions from Xbox mean that the PC version will also be restricted on memory usage, as they are both running the same code? - Timestamp
Martial - So well, most of the time the code is not the part that costs the most memory. Speaking, we are talking here most often about the graphics assets. We have an LOD [level of detail] system that allows PC to use LOD that Xbox can’t, for instance. And it’s already the case on Xbox: If you do a comparison between the rendering you’re getting on [Xbox Series] S and X, it’s a little bit different and it’s using different levels of detail. So, you can see PCs as an “Xbox Plus”…well, most, not most – high-end PCs because this is obviously not the case for every PC on Earth. But it’s always a matter of getting the right asset with the right environment.
Jayne - Right. Okay. Thank you. Have an interesting feature request here:
Chat question - Can we get an in-sim benchmarking tool so players can test their performance using the same plane, location, weather etc.? - Timestamp
Martial - We already exposed some. Maybe on the forums, I don’t know exactly what kind of measure people want to do. But on PC, obviously, on the dev mode, you can get a lot of information already.
Jayne - Next question we have here is:
Chat question - Could we expect to see a more optimized replay tool in the future? - Timestamp
Martial - Oh, so actually…
Jorg - A question about Xbox. I think this… [Martial - Ahh, this is for Xbox?] I saw something about Xbox, as well. So I think it’s connected. We should talk about both.
Martial - So on Xbox, it’s difficult because users don’t have access to the data, so…and the replay system is costly. On PC, actually, when we did the tools, we were expecting a bunch of feedback to improve the tool. We did get some, but not much, I would say. And so I don’t know. It looks like the replay system that we’ve got is sufficient for most of you guys. So if you’ve got some requirements, here, please tell us in the forums.
Jayne - Thank you. Other question here is, what’s going on…
Martial - I’m sorry, Jayne. Just to make sure that – same here, I think that people were sending their congratulations to the one that does the video that has been shown during this Q&A, or all the other videos. The guys, here, Louis, Thibault, and the guys that do the trailers, here, they’re using the replay system that everybody has.
Jayne - Yep, they are. Alright, last question:
Chat question - Is there an update, or what happened to the freeware Marketplace we had in the sim? - Timestamp
Jorg - As far as I know, it’s there, because that’s where the world updates sit. But what is not there is what we said earlier: I was certainly expecting there to be more, for example, freeware airliners. I think there’s quite a few of them that are coming that I’m personally really looking forward to. And that is, again, I think the developer needs to contact us and say we would like this in there. And then we just need to talk about the license stuff again. Super fun GPL [license], you know. The open license versus the MIT. Which one are we doing?
Jayne - Right. Awesome. All right, Jorg, do you have anything you want to say or chat about before we close out the stream, today?
Closing Remarks - Timestamp
Jorg - It’s been too long, I think. I mean, I was very happy, actually, to read your feedback on our delay. We always – I mean, obviously, we feel bad, right? But we’re shooting for a date, we want to get the sim update out to you guys. And then, it’s not quite there, yet. And it’s very nice to see that you guys appreciate that we are trying to do the right thing and to have a stable piece of software. So that’s great. Great to see. And then there’s lots to be said about the 40th [anniversary edition]. I saw a bunch of questions. I think we’ll do this. I mean, it should be in November. So we have some time. But I hope you guys are looking forward to this. It’s a real nice box of chocolate that’s coming your way. There’s all kinds of things we haven’t even talked about, yet. So I’m super excited to talk about more of that. And obviously, there’s helicopters and gliders. (We haven’t even talked about gliders!) So there’s tons to be said.
Jayne - Yes, sure, the whole dedicated stream or something about it! Looking forward to that. Seb and Martial, anything you’d like to add before we close out?
Martial - Nothing specific. Thank you, everybody, for following this stream, for giving us feedback. And it’s super useful. Please continue.
Jayne - Awesome. Thank you to the three of you for coming on our stream today, and chatting with everyone in the community. We really appreciate it. We really feel connected and love the transparency between the two. So, thank you, again. We’ll be back on the stream Thursday. We’ll be back tomorrow for our community fly-in Friday, of course at 1900Z. So we will see you there. We’ll see you around Discord, forums, socials, everywhere. And we’ll get this posted on YouTube by tomorrow. So thank you all for coming out. And we’ll see you soon. Bye!