Some very concerning information about developing for 2024 surfacing on the dev forum

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While pacing around the dev forums, I’ve stumbled upon some very, very concerning signals about the state of MSFS 2024 SDK and it’s influence on the developers in current fragile and uncertain socioeconomic reality.

DinoPeter is pointing out the development of native 24 projects has stalled, while Raul from FSReborn gives the reasons as to why this is the case, but Asobo’s duty damage control personnel are rebutting these claims with empty slogans. They’re clearly out of touch with the small developers and that is pointed out to them in that thread. Seeing Asobo’s approach to the issue, I think it might be likely that the 2024 development will make a lot of financial difficulties for the devs and in general contribute to the withering of the dev scene due to issues FSRb has pointed out. Especially given that current economic conditions in the world aren’t conducive to leisure and spending money or time on non essential things

I don’t expect Asobo to change it’s approach soon given that they’re forced by Microsoft to focus on the casual market and low fidelity addons. MS's target audience doesn’t buy hi-fi simulations of niche aircraft anyway.

All of this points to a very dim future for progress in fidelity and systems simulation and a possible strangling effect on the addon scene, even bankrupting some developers. Axonos has already likely suspended their Mi-2 development.

How do you think this is going to affect the developers and us as the simmers? Is it yet another nail to the coffin of the franchise or the whole hobby as we’ve known it since the 2020 release?

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Allow me to share some thoughts on this, I think 30 years of experience gives me some insights others might lack.

With every change to a new simulator, there will be companies that do not have the financial resources to bridge the six + months of low income. When Microsoft (or Lockheed before) announces a new version, your sales tank.

I do not really know what a ‘native’ FS2024 would be. A 3D model is a 3D model, a bitmap is a bitmap, a sound recording is a sound recording, and code to simulate fuel density is code to simulate fuel density. Those are the same for FS20 and FS24, and they are 90% of the work. When you have all those you decide on your simulator and tweak it to that platform. Doing the first one is really hard (ask us how we know…) but the second time it is a lot easier. FS2024 offers all FS2020 did. Sometimes in a different way, sometimes better, sometimes worse, almost always more complicated and the factual differences between the platforms are really not that great.

With the PMDG 777-200, we did not start with the FS2020 version but went back to the raw files and, using the SDK, we built a FS2024 version. Does that make it a native FS2024 version? Depends on your definition, I think. What I do know is that we ended up with modest improvements in system depth and many people comment that the aircraft is so light on resources in the new sim. This comment was just posted in this forum:

“The 777 is the best performing and also the most stable airliner as I have seen in MS2024. It is as I have bought a new GPU instead of my old 3080 10GB VRAM. Considering how expensive new GPUs are nowadays, I could by up to 20 PDMG aircraft before a new GPU would be a better deal. :rofl:”

So I do not agree that the platform prevents solid products with deep system simulation. I mean, check out the feature list. That’s no simple aircraft, right?

Sure, I work at PMDG, and I do marketing, so you would expect me to toot our horn, but the fact is that FS2024 does not block us from continuing the same progression we’ve been doing for over 20 years. Of course, there are many times we curse a decision made by Microsoft or Asobo, and yes, there is a lot to be done to make FS2024 the platform we want it to be. However, many people seem to have forgotten the rough start FS2020 had. From our point of view, that release was far more problematic than the FS2024 one. It took devs a year to catch up, and it took Microsoft two years to get the platform really stable.

Do we love FS2024? Mwahhh, let’s call it a hate/love relationship. When it works, it is gorgeous, smooth, fast, and full of promise. When we discover some change that is not well documented and lose a week experimenting, not so much. But it is the only future we have, and we are seriously happy with our first release. Always keep in mind, happy customers and happy devs play and work, unhappy customers and unhappy devs go to forums. That skews the view towards the negative.

Bottom line? There are bottlenecks, and we love to see those removed. But with a good strategy, they can be circumvented. When you do, there is a usable platform with a lot of new customers. It’s just very hard and expensive work.

Mathijs

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Is this really any different than the 2020 and before times? An enthusiast market segment in any activity is always a spending and outspoken group relative to its small size as a market segment. We are the enthusiasts! In any hobby or activity, the business will take a keen interest in the enthusiasts, however that market segment rarely powers profits; the mass market does. Today that may be the Xbox Everywhere effort?

Another perspective is informed by the flight sim hardware market, which seems to be brimming with new offerings. For example, I have 3 WinWing products on preorder and one or two more of interest, and that is just one example. Flight sim has always been a small hobby on the face of things hobby, but it has been around since the beginning of the PC and seems to be hanging in there, so I’m not worried.

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The issue is the premature release, few sdk documentation, and few deep think about some things. For example, encrypt default aircraft to learn or not give readable simconnect variables to get more info about aircraft (simple info as aircraft ICAO “icao_type_designator”).

But, just as happened with MSFS2020, all these problems should be solved over time.

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The very clear issue with FS24 is that they took major steps backwards on release, it should’ve at the very least been on par with FS20 at launch but instead it feels like FS22 both with the SDK and general release of the entire game. We should’nt have to wait a year or two for it to get better and improve, it was a mistake to release it full stop in the state it was and continues to be even in SU2 beta.

It’s no wonder Devs are struggling financially, the evidence is there for all to see.

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Hi there,

Just to express my gratitude for your concerns, is realy nice to see people taking 3rd party developers position and wanting us to succed.

Is important for me to say though, i have a great working relationship with Asobo and Microsoft. They have always helped me with any tickets i raise, and concerns i might have and have always been open to my suggestions and idea.

The exchange you see on that forum is just normal, me and Eric always have these types of discussions, open, honest and respectful, and we both always find a compromise and ways to improve things.

Eric has always been open to the things i explain, so from that point of view, you guys just have to understand, with any systems SDKs designed, is important for the people using it to pass the feedback (in a positive and constructive manner) so they can adapt their APIs and help us to be more productive.

Thats what i asked, because for those of US that were not 1st party developers behind the scenes, the learning curve is much more difficult, specially if you want to develop and aircraft FULLY 2024 NATIVE, without anything using 2020 code.

Which is of course my objective in order to fully give all my customers an unique experience.

Don’t get overly concerned by those posts, is just me working with Asobo to improve things for everyone, my projects are not stalled, but when i post on those forums like that exchange you saw, i am not speaking for myself, i am speaking thinking on the majority of the community, including, freeware and hobbyists developers that want to create content.

If we make it easy for those two, we ensure the community continues to grow, making our beautiful hobby better and better.

And that’s what I want.

All the best,
Raul
CEO FSReborn

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That’s not how software development works, Marc. In major parts the whole simulator engine is new so it will have all the problems of a new release. That does not explain the total lack of testing we saw and the rather silly issues that caused, but to expect that FS2024 would pick up where FS2020 stopped is not realistic.

FS2020 was a huge step back from the last version of Prepar3D initially. C++ code was impossible, so there were no serious aircraft, the first months. Basically nothing worked, it was just a nice game to fly the crummy default aircraft over your home town. But Microsoft made it into the FS2020 that we see now. Pretty mature software. It will be the same with FS2024.

But serious simulation is most certainly possible in FS2024, our 777-200 works exactly the same as it does in FS2020. Just with better FPS, lol. And that that the topic of this post.

Mathijs Kok
PMDG

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I respectively disagree, but thank you for your thoughts :slightly_smiling_face:

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So we are getting posts from the dev forums in the general consumer forums. And concern being shown for the future of developers. But I have to say, I am confused exactly what the OP is wanting US (the consumers and users) to do about it. The OPs tone is that the current SDK makes it impossible for small developers to stay in business, and makes it impossible for high fidelity addons to be created. But it also says that this is being posted out of concern for the developer community. We consumers, we don’t really have any say in the SDK. So this post in the general forums, painting such a bleak picture, isn’t that really going to cause people to freak out? Perhaps not buy the sim. Perhaps to abandon it if they did purchase and go back to 2020 or some other sim. How does that help the developer community? We have two developers here stating that things are not so bleak, that the posts have been taken out of context, and this is part of a natural negotiation on SDK contracts.

If you are a consumer reading this thread, I wouldn’t take this thread as anything other than the sim has some work ahead of it, and the SDK does to. Things are evolving over time. The SDK evolving over time with the sim shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone.

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Well, there ARE high fidelity addons. Not a lot right now, but it always takes 6-9 months after a new sim launches for them to appear.

Mathijs Kok
PMDG

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I have no idea what you think is happening but we get absolutely no preferred treatment what so ever at this moment. Zilch. We use exactly the same methods as you can use to get the attention of Microsoft.

Mathijs Kok
PMDG

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My two centavos:

Disclosure:
I am not an aircraft/scenery dev, nor do I play one on TV.

However, I have decades of experience with computers, programming, (especially bare-metal assembly), and I have worked on projects as diverse as high reliability civilian and military aircraft systems to banking and currency software that moves millions of dollars worldwide in the blink of an eye - safely and securely.

Software dev isn’t for the faint of heart. It’s complex, annoying, frustrating, and sometimes the people who develop the systems and tools make changes that seem to make no sense.

New versions of a system always cause disruption. (Win XP to Vista is a classic example. Win-2000 to XP was also a paradigm shift, but not so extreme.)

I remember being part of an online banking advisory group, working to help develop then current standard on-line transaction processing software when the entire banking industry suddenly “changed the rules” out from under us to help mitigate sophisticated hacking techniques that had come to the surface after banks like Citibank, BOA, and Chase got hacked for millions of dollars.

This caused a total reset and we had to almost redesign from the ground up.

Stinks being us and that is an ever-present reality in the software industry. Like boxing, if you can’t handle being knocked down, you shouldn’t be a boxer.

This kind of a reset requires both the ability to innovate and adapt, as well as the willingness to engage with the rest of the team if you think a change is too extreme.

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It baffles me as to why 3rd party developers are getting such stick. I appreciate your honesty and the fact that you have bothered to actually “speak” to the customers - whether you chose to out of your own initiative or not. It is super, hen’s teeth rare that anyone from the other side of the fence, so to speak, actually bothers to communicate with us directly. I and many others see the responsible view PMDG are taking in listening to those who use your plane as it will serve as an example to others that if the SDK is followed, and products are updated ASAP, an excellent product can be achieved.

Please do not take to heart many of the barbed remarks, I think they have all been born out of 6 months of frustration with what seems to be a lack of progress. None of which is PMDG’s fault and folk honestly do need to be patient. Come on guys, simming is not a life and death event - this will get loads better so lets enjoy the development journey and watch it flourish.

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@TheFalconOne

Agreed.

I think part of the problem is that the very specific technical language used by specialized communities is not always understood by those outside the community.

Example:
My brother is a type-1 diabetic. Sometimes his blood-sugar goes bonkers and he ends up in the hospital.

On his last visit there were some renal, (kidney), issues and when listening to the medical jargon, it sounded like he was knocking on St. Peter’s door.

In actual fact, though he was in serious condition, he wasn’t in nearly as bad a state as someone might mistakenly think.

So it is here.

Reading the articles, especially taking them out of context, it may seem like the fertilizer is hitting the electric fan, when in fact it’s more like a technical discussion on implementation.

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So the fact that you can overcome the issues of the incomplete SDK and others associated with the 2024 can only be put down to the bigger resources and amount of manpower PMDG or Ini have in comparison to a tiny dev studio? Am I right

I’m sorry for my kind of rude implications that could’ve been understood as me implying PMDG is in some kind of dark cabalistic conspiracy with Microsoft . I’m not frustrated, I’m just worried my beloved hobby will be killed by corporate greed and the developers who are as much a part of community as we the consumers are will be killed along with it.

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If the “smaller developers” have the time and talant, they shouldn’t have any more problems than a larger studio.

BTW, for those of you who don’t know, PDMG isn’t a massive development house. They have relatively few employees who are extremely talented and are willing to put in the effort to learn and grow.

This is one of the reason they don’t have an entire stable of aircraft. It’s like fine furniture-grade carpentry: It takes skill, care, and time to finish a piece

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Where flight simulation is concerned, if this were possible/probable, it would have come to pass years ago now. Man’s (folks) yearning for flight is as timeless as greed itself. We will persevere (and spend)!

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:sweat_smile: :laughing: So true!

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No offense taken!
I am not worried about ‘corporate greed’. The number of companies making DLC for FS has exploded in the last three years, and that is just because Microsoft kept the sim an open platform and has an internal marketplace that is easy to use for just about anybody.

There are many reasons why companies find it hard to deal with MSFS2024, and it is not for me to list them. What clearly matters a lot is experience. As I wrote, I have been doing this for close to three decades, and in PMDG, there are several people with over two decades of experience. We are a small company that is not even in the same ballpark as Ini, Aerosoft, or many others. Only last year did we expand enough to have two product lines being worked on. That’s why we could to a professional version of the 737 for Boeing while still completing the 777.

I agree that there is no reason for a small team not to be able to make superb add-ons.

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I sadly need to leave a comment like this - go for X-Plane 12, or stay with FS2020. X-Plane 12 is advancing very nicely after the latest beta, and it’s an incredible platform for creating addons. With Map Enhancement app, scenery looks like in MSFS, and the lighting of the world looks more realistic in my eyes.

I would really love to see FS2024 succeed, but so far, it doesn’t look good.

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