I’d like to chime in again here, as someone that long ago developed an aircraft specifically for FSX’s shared cockpit.
Developing a shared compatible plane back then was no joke, and full of weird issues and pitfalls, but that was really just incredibly easy compared to what Asobo and Working Title are up against now.
This is one of those things that kind of has to be perfectly planned and executed the first time, and has to be open and extensible enough to handle some really weird edge cases and unforeseen future needs, yet still be rigid enough to not collapse under its own weight.
I don’t think this will be a system that can easily evolve over time like some others in the sim, which is why it may be taking a long time to get its foundation right.
Then they have to consider how to handle all the existing aircraft, many of which will contain some code that is inherently unfriendly to a shared cockpit. Do they attempt to force compatibility by limiting variable and event spamming, which is sometimes essential to achieve some important result in the sim? Can that even be done without breaking certain aircraft? I can’t even imagine how to pull that off. If that isn’t possible, then do they lock them out of that mode until they can be updated? They face many hard decisions here.
As Jörg mentioned in a recent interview, the problem likely isn’t so much the purely steam gauged planes, they could probably do that now, it’s the glass cockpit avionics that will be keeping them up at night.
Back in FSX nobody really expected those to work perfectly, or even at all in shared cockpit, but these days that will be a requirement. Perfectly sharing a G1000 setup for instance will likely require an exponential jump in data that needs to be synchronized, without any bugs or mistakes, and without saturating connection bandwidth, something that can happen from just a single badly managed variable, and all without disrupting the already huge bandwidth requirements of the sim. Again, that is no easy thing to implement, nor debug.
An additional consideration may be the desire or need for more than two players to connect and operate a single aircraft this time around, which could turn even tiny, livable issues into showstoppers.
The opportunities Shared Cockpit can provide are immense though, and in my opinion well worth the effort in the long term. I met someone randomly in FSX multiplayer one night in 2007 who ended up becoming a lifelong friend. I taught him the basics of flying and navigation in Shared Cockpit over the following year, and he became so hooked on it that he then went on to get his PPL and eventually buy his own plane. Even went to his wedding a few years later.
So, suffice it to say nobody wants to see native Shared Cockpit working again more than me, it’s just a fantastic experience, but I have some idea of the challenge they’re facing and I don’t envy them. It will take a lot of time and patience. I’m looking forward to seeing what they come up with though, even if it’s simplified to start with.
Cheers.