SDK Q&A April 21st Overview

Presentation

Jorg – happy to see some developers in the stream. There a lot of awesome stuff created, and we can
only be grateful for this! We are making progress on Xbox and if you have any question for that, feel free to ask.

Alyzée – Thank you for attending this first SDK Q&A and we hope there will be more. Xbox is coming
this summer and we are here to help you and get your content ready for it.

The new documents website is available here: http://docs.flightsimulator.com It’s improving every day
and we’ve seen that some of you wanted documentation on specific topics, if we don’t talk about these
specific today, be sure that they will be added to this website.

We have a big announcement for you today. We currently have a private section of the forum but we
want to do better and want to replace it by a Q&A platform (Answerhub, used by Unreal for example).
We will have someone monitoring questions and answers. The platform will be open to everyone.
We have a new Xbox page on the documentation website!

The SDK is big but the team is not, we currently have 8 people (including 5 new people).
From now on, we will focus on the development of new features on sim updates. We wish to improve
the Beta program so that you can get builds earlier and help checking that your content is working
properly.

Jorg – Jorg agrees on the fact that some content have not been tested enough which resulted in having 3rd party being impacting from it. We will be more disciplined about it and there will be a more
significant testing period.

Alyzée - We plan to work on Visual Effects Editor that will come with a video tutorial
The Scenery Editor will be improved as well. Our new recruits will soon to be tasked on SimConnect and WebAssembly

Community Forum Questions

Q: knowing that the Xbox version will be running under DX12, what kind of issue should we be aware regarding resource usage?

Eric – You should not expect specific issue toward DX12. Everything resource related is rendered by
the engine, so we will hide the tricky part from you. It should not change anything of creator.
An important question is, how creator will fit their add-on into the Xbox as is it more limited on
console? > We are making sure that when a console cannot load more element (not enough ram for
instance) we will warn the creator preventing them to add more stuff.

Q: For product that will not fit the Xbox version (High detailed or two big), will they be available on the Marketplace and mentioned as Windows only?

Jorg - That’s the plan. The Marketplace is open.

Alyzée – It’s up to you to set your content to PC or Xbox. For Asobo creations, it will be always both.
This Xbox version is a great opportunity for creators. We know that many people cannot afford to buy
a powerful computer (or they just don’t want to) but console users will be very interested in any user
generated content such 3rd party content.

Eric – Maybe your content already fit the Xbox version, so you will not have to do anything. But Keep
in mind that if you need to adapt, we will try to create the tools for you to do so.

Q: Which Xbox version will be supported?

Jorg – We announced that we are going to launch on Xbox Serie X and S this summer. Some great
optimizations have been made on this. We will try to get on Xbox One generation. We are not 100%
sure yet.

Q: What support do you intent to give regarding supporting projects on Xbox?

Alyzée – We prepared samples / Guidelines / Document / Memory profiling tools

Jorg – additional note: Keyboard/Joystick will be supported also

Q: Will SimConnect feature be on Xbox?

Eric – I cannot say for now, a broader discussion on this needs to be done.

Q: Can Asobo provide something in the SDK where they can exclude the AI passenger vehicule from the airport or lights?

Alyzée – We have seen that a lot. That is something we also need to do for our artist as we are using
the same tools. It’s on the roadmap for this year. Feel free to ask on the new Q&A platform what
specifically you want us to let exclude so we won’t miss anything.

Eric – It will be done, but not ETA so far

Q: Are we planning on expanding the developer channel to work closely with devs before an update hit the market?

Jorg – Yes, we are going to focus on the SIM updates so we’ll have more time.

Q: What about supporting the blender exporter?

Eric – We are not using Blender in-house. Some of our artist asked for that internally! I don’t know if
we will provide our official Blender exporter, but we know that some of them already exist. Do we do
an official one or help completing the existing ones. It’s an open discussion.

Q: What is the best way to make suggestion or feature request for the SDK?

Alyzée – Until we have something better, the Q&A platform will be the main point of contact for that.
Right now, we receive suggestions and requests via the forum. The Q&A platform should be live earlier may.

Q: Are there any plans to enable multi-threading with Wasm

Alyzée – It’s on the roadmap

Eric – Web assembly does not have anything that allows you to create threads from within your
module, so we need to come up with our own solution on it. No ETA yet.

Jorg/Alyzée/Eric – They are all agree and remind players that optimizing a console version will greatly
benefit the PC version in addition to bring new people to the SIM hobby!

Q: Will there be profiling tools like Xplane that can help 3rd party creators to troubleshoot performances issues?

Eric – There are 2 answers to that: As mentioned before, there’s the memory profiling tools helping
creators to adapt their content to Xbox. That can also be used to see what’s taking memory on PC.
The other topics is WASM module, we have to work on it.

Q: All add-on bought on PC, are they going to show up on Xbox?

Jorg – We are giving entitlement when you buy something, and it wouldn’t be fair to charge people
twice. This must be double checked first, but if you own content on one platform it should appear as
owned on the other.

Alyzée – Once we have more information on that, it will be added to the documentation page.

Q: Will update run on Xbox and PC at the same or will they be running independently?

Eric – It’s the same code base but we can’t tell if they are going to be deployed simultaneously (It’s not
really an SDK question)

Q: Can we talk about DLL?

Eric – When you ship a DLL, you never know what it is going to do! It has access to personal informal
information and result in having security issues. Using WASM, we are sure that 3rd party content only
accesses designated files!

Q: Are there any plans to deliver more on the living world (animals)

Jorg – The intent is to add more but there are more important elements to go through first.

Q: Can talk about your plans to improve the dev mode

Alyzée – We talked a lot about the Xbox version, but we are going to have more people to work on the
dev mod. It takes time and the SDK is really big but we keep improving it. Today, we improved the
visual effect tool but next will be the scenery editor tool. There’s still a lot of room to improve the tool.
Make sure to check out the documentation that we regularly update!

Q: Xbox release date?

Jorg – No specific date yet. Make sure to stick to SDK questions. Also, it will be released when we think it’s great to hit the market!

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