Roadmap Update - Timestamp
Antonov AN-2 - Timestamp
Jorg - The Antonov we talked about before: The plane is essentially done. We were a day or two days away from finishing the license with Antonov. Antonov is located in Kyiv [, Ukraine,] and we cannot reach our colleagues that we have worked with. So we are sitting here with a finished plane, and we are waiting for Antonov to reemerge after the chaos has subsided.
ATR 42-600 / 72-600 - Timestamp
Hans [Hartmann] is working directly with Asobo on the ATR 42- and 72-600. Making great progress. I think we will have him here maybe next time. I think it would be good to get an update. It’s our expert-level plane. It’s going to take a while to get it done to get it done, but progress is really good.
Q&A Session 3 - Timestamp
Forum question - Would we ever have the possibility of a demo area in the Marketplace for addons that people want to buy?
Jorg - That’s interesting. As I’ve said a few times, we’ve been pretty overwhelmed by the amount of addons that third parties have generated. It’s over a thousand. We know there’s thousand pretty much already done. So we’re in the thousands of things. Our team is now eight dedicated people. We have to ingest all the content. When you sometimes say, “Where’s all the stuff?” We have to ingest it. We talked to the Minecraft team, which is the closest equivalent we have, and they have really good tools to automate this. Their goal is to have 0 humans touching the actual ingestion. So I’m completely up for doing a demo area. But what I think you really want is us to ingest it so you can go play it via the Marketplace, not via some Community folder. If we would do it right now, it actually would delay all other publications, and I don’t think that’s the right thing. I think that third parties would be happy with us if we would do this. But I want to. It might take us until next year. It will take a while. We are writing tools. We’ve hired some programmers to write tools. It’s just going to take time. We were much more successful than we thought we would be with the Marketplace. It’s a great thing for everybody that so much stuff is coming, but there are pipeline things we need to sort out.
Chat question - There’s been some issues with bush trips since Sim Update 5. Do we have a plan to address those bush trip issues? - Timestamp
Martial - We have scheduled some bush trip improvements for Sim Update 10, the one that will be published in late July. It includes some improvements in the experience, itself, but also on the UI side. We have problems on both sides.
With [planes like the Dornier] coming out, Are there going to be improvements to water physics? Can you start the Dornier in the water cold and dark? - Timestamp
Seb - There are already a few water planes in the sim. So, nothing planned for the Dornier release. It’s going to have the same water plane physics as every other water plane. Are we going to improve water physics in the future? Maybe looking in the backlog and seeing how high it is in the priorities?
Could there be a sharpening option in the menu if you want to un-sharpen or sharpen your graphics? 1080p monitors, they say, have an over-sharpened look. Timestamp
Seb - We have a sharpening postprocessing filter linked with TAA [temporal anti-aliasing]. I don’t think there’s an option right now. It’s definitely feasible to add a sharpening slider. We should add that to the list and see when we can do it. I think it was in the options file at some point. (Maybe or maybe not; maybe I’m wrong.) I’ve definitely seen it in our code options. We can add that to our list of things to do: Sharpening or un-sharpening. People may want to have it both ways.
Is the new CFD system usable on water physics? - Timestamp
Seb - CFDs can do air. But is it usable right now [on water]? Not yet. It is something we would need to change. So in the future at some point, probably. But right now, not yet.
Would it be possible to get a more complex crash report if the sim has a CTD [crash to desktop] so users can better identify third-party issues or conflicts? - Timestamp
Martial - We are working on that.
Jorg - I think stability has been a focus. We see pretty significant stability improvements in Sim Update 8. Sim Update 9 is also looking at this, including tooling that you were just asking about. I think it’s rolling out with Sim Update 9. (Martial, I think so?)
Martial - I don’t know if we had the time to include everything we wanted to bring.
Chat question - How is the glider development going? - Timestamp
Jorg - Good. [Martial - Fine.] We built the first few gliders.
Seb - I can already say what is in Sim Update 10. We fixed negative flaps. There is one plane that already has this out there: The Flight Design CTSL. It has a flap position that is default at 0 but it can go to -10, which is something a lot of gliders also have. It is almost like a spoiler flap position. That did not work correctly so that has been fixed in Sim Update 10. What I just showed at the end of my video series, the whole draft simulation, is also being worked on because it’s important for any plane because it’s nice to have bumps and everything, but it’s even important for gliders because you want to have updrafts to glide on and go get thermals and go up. So that’s the thing that’s been moving forward for that specific need, and maybe other people can comment on other features.
Chat question - Do you think we will have Working Title back on [the Developer Q&A] soon for what they are working on? Timestamp
Jorg - We want something to be fully integrated and done. We don’t want to show roadmaps all the time. It’s more important what’s in the software. We’re going to have Matt [Nischan] on once it’s in the sim. The team has grown, which is good. But let’s get one thing complete before we talk about more stuff.
Are there any improvements coming for the Boeing 787 Dreamliner or Premium Deluxe planes in general? - Timestamp
Jorg - Yes.
Jayne - If that’s the case, do we know when? Are they just going to be continuous or big updates?
Jorg - No. It’s probably going to be a specific moment in time. Probably later or late this year. It’s a variety of planes that are being touched.
Will snow be removed from runways of large international airports? In real life, runways are kept clear of snow. - Timestamp
Seb - Currently, snow is entirely procedural. Depending on the runway, if it is too thick, it even holds on runways. It is supposed to be like snow that has been rolled over/flattened. We have not tuned airport-by-airport: We did a global snow layer tuning and some airports have a lot more because it’s the way the runway looks. We simulated that dark surfaces receive more heat from the sun, and from the environment in general, so snow melts faster on dark surfaces. So airports with very bright runways (sometimes because it’s not tarmac but concrete) or just because the aerial is brighter, they will have more snow. So that’s something we need to rework to get runways completely without snow. I would say that’s only true on large airports. On our small airfield, when it snows, they don’t. They don’t immediately remove the snow, or even at all.
Can we expect any fixes for frozen oceans, especially in live weather, like Norway where it wouldn’t usually be frozen? - Timestamp
Martial - It’s a feature we haven’t included yet. [Seb - Yeah, there is something.] On lakes but not on oceans.
Seb - It has to be cold, and there is ice shelf data that is coming. I think there is a specific bug because I checked it a lot in Greenland. Because Norway, that person said, it doesn’t usually have a lot of ice. I didn’t check it in Norway. I checked it in Greenland. Now it’s probably over, anyway. But, if there’s a specific place, the issue with that is that it’s very time-dependent on the live weather data we get. We have to wait until January/February to actually see or test it. If people can report it before the summer comes, we can go have a look and see what’s going on. But last time I checked it in Greenland, all around the island, it was mostly okay.
Jayne - They’re saying the Norwegian fjords.
Martial - Not in deep seas?
Seb - If you go north in the winter, it’s frozen.
Chat question - Earlier, we mentioned improvements coming to the F/A-18. What types of improvements are coming to that plane? Timestamp
Seb - I can list quite a few. We are lucky to have feedback from actual pilots who have flown it. The roll rates are now correct: They are 220-something [degrees/second] below 550 kts and 150 [degrees/second] above. Whether you are on MIL thrust or on afterburner has been corrected. The speeds are correct. We have a speed chart per altitude per thrust setting. So now at sea level, you can get 1.02 Mach in afterburner and 0.95 on MIL. That is going to be correct 25,000 feet or 35,000 feet. So the thrust is going to be correct. There have been improvements on yaw damping. The effects have been improved. A ton of stuff.
Martial - This is for the plane dynamics. But we also have included some improvements on the HUDs [heads-up displays]. Airspeed. NWS [nosewheel steering], CRS indication. So, plenty of new things. We have also changed the layouts of the display from the feedback we’ve collected from the pilots Seb was talking about.
Jorg - Remember when this was supposed to come out with [Top Gun] Maverick, then the movie slipped twice? So I think what we shipped for Christmas, in the Game of the Year Edition, we just wanted people to just be able to start flying this. This is the version that was intended.
Could we give insight on how we work as a team being in different countries and places, and how we coordinate together? - Timestamp
Seb - Jorg gets up very early.
Martial - Yes. And sometimes we’ve got to stay very late at night.
Jorg - My day starts at 5:00 am, typically. Think about it this way: There are teams around the world. Obviously, Asobo is in France. The bulk of the development is there. Working Title is distributed, Gaya is distributed. All kinds of other kinds of people we work with are distributed. Maybe the methodology – we talk a lot on [Microsoft] Teams and Discord. Phone calls are more for things where maybe you have to coordinate with more people. But that’s typically how we run.
Chat question - Is there any more OSM [OpenStreetMap] data coming to the sim? - Timestamp
Jorg - Bing is doing an initiative to update the data in South America. We have not updated it, but we need to. So we need to make a decision when to do it. It’s a pretty big deal. We have to run the protection everywhere, which is a computationally interesting thing that we need to do. We know we’re going to do it. That’s the whole point of it – that’s the cool part about OSM. One step at a time. I certainly have hopes and dreams of direct integration into OSM. There’s a cool tool that I could see, but first things first: the scenery gateway for airports. That’s the most important thing. After that, we can do great things together with the OSM community.
Chat question - Are there more complex planes coming to Xbox? Timestamp
Jorg - Regarding third-party planes, at the beginning [of the stream], somebody was asking, “Is Concorde coming to Xbox?” The answer is, I don’t know. I can’t wait for that plane (from DC Designs). We don’t have the package, yet. So it comes down to what they have up and running. Once we see the package, we test it.
Martial - We’ve got to be honest here: Not having WASM working on Xbox doesn’t help, also.
Jorg - People who have legacy code – I think there are plenty of cool planes being made – The new ones don’t have legacy C++ code, and they are completely fine. It’s the people that have a few hundred thousand lines of code that they don’t want to rewrite, and I understand. But fundamentally, we are making some, and then third parties are all eager to bring it to Xbox because they know we have tons of people there. Ultimately, they would like to reach all the fans. Just be assured: Once this is resolved in WASM with Xbox, it’s nothing to do with performance: It’s really a security issue.
Is there any progress on the investigation about making it possible improve Premium and Premium Deluxe aircraft with mods? - Timestamp
Jorg - Yes. We talked about it. The SDK team has a solution and it is currently sitting with a few aircraft manufacturers. As you know, we license aircraft, and they need to be comfortable that we are making the aircraft moddable. We asked just about everybody we needed to ask, and there is one left. Once we have that, there is a way to do it.
Chat question - We spoke about Maverick briefly. Is there any content tease or any update for Maverick? - Timestamp
Jorg - The team is having fun? I’m sorry, it’s a movie thing. We can’t be working on the trailer. We’re not even allowed to put everything in the trailer that we’re making. So we are very limited in what we can say outside of, people are having fun internally, which is always a good sign.
Martial - The other good sign is that Seb was talking about the pilots we had in the studio, here, and I’ve seen them flying the content we were going to offer in Maverick, and it was super impressive. Super impressive to see what this guy was doing with the planes and the missions. It was super cool!
Jorg - Just to set expectations, I think I might’ve said it to you guys: This is a sim. We are not making a game, here. Just to be true to the our of core simulation.
Do you know the airports coming with the World Update 8 release tomorrow? - Timestamp
Jorg - Someone was asking a question [in chat] a few pages ago about Vaasa airport [EFVA] that was part of World Update 5. Gaya [Simulations] did the fix. We are currently testing it, so it’s coming. Just be assured, that we are always reading all the feedback. Sometimes, it’s not instantaneous or anything, but we are getting these things fixed. Basically the airports are Andorra [LESU], Pico [LPPI] and Faro [LPFR] in Portugal, and A Coruna [LECO] in Spain.
Weather - Timestamp
Martial - Still a work in progress. We are working on that. It will be a work in progress during the whole time we are going to do the sim. There are always new things, new data, new graphics improvements.
DirectX 12 - Timestamp
Seb - There are a lot of questions about DirectX 12, DLSS, raytracing. I’ve seen a great prototypes internally, and we’re working on it. It’s going to come at some point. It’s being worked on. It’s cool.
We’ve had the replay beta out for a while. How has feedback been on it, and do you already know what types of improvements you want to make to make it more user-friendly? - Timestamp
Jorg - There was very little feedback. Honestly, I would appreciate more feedback. Because we said, “Hey, there’s a beta. Let us know.” And people said, “Hey, it needs to work on Xbox.” Yeah, we know. But, even on PC, please let us know what you think. It’s super helpful. Ultimately, these tools, we’re making – yeah, it’s also for the video team, but it’s good to know for y’all.
Chat question - Will there be a Sim Update 9 beta and do we have an announcement on when that’s coming? - Timestamp
Jorg - Yes.
Martial - It should be soon. We’ve got to publish the world update first. So everything’s ready. I’m not going to go too deeply in the explanation, but we’ve got a trend, and we need the next wagon to leave the train station before we can put the other one.
Marketplace Charity Campaign - Timestamp
Jorg - I wanted to talk to you about Ukraine. Many of you have been saddened, outraged about what’s going on. We feel compelled to help those impacted, and we are running a charitable campaign from March 24 - 31, and we will donate $5.00 for every purchase within our in-sim Marketplace to the International Rescue Committee to help fund their response in the crisis. It’s a great organization. So starting tomorrow, if you buy anything in the sim, $5.00 goes to them. I’m very, very, very, very happy we can do this.
Closing remarks - Timestamp
Jorg - Thank you for everything. It’s on my heart: I know how many people came in who have never played a sim before. Help them out. There are people just entering our hobby. Be nice, answer questions if you can. I think it will help our hobby, long term. It’s what we always hoped for: That Flight Sim would grow and it would attract new people who would ultimately fall in love with aviation and stay, and I think we have that right now. There’s many, many, many that are coming.