I just want to say the monthly Twitch Q&As are awesome and a good chance for Microsoft/Asobo to take questions from the community so they know what our latest concerns are. I’m not aware that the competition to MSFS is doing monthly live streamed Q&As, and I believe one of the competitors (ie. LM) doesn’t even respond at all to their home market customers (possibly because P3D was not intended to be a home market product).
By far, the Twitch Q&As from Microsoft/Asobo is one of the best ways that MSFS has improved over the last 1.5 years. And of course the Twitch SDK Q&A is great for the 3rd party devs. We hope Microsoft/Asobo will keep up the Twitch Q&As! Oh yeah, on an unrelated note, the public opt-in betas are going great so far, please keep it up for every Sim Update!
They are awesome and above and beyond anything in the flight sim world for sure. I really appreciate that they take the time and for me those are really something that I look forward to!
A write-up will be posted to News and Announcements in the coming days, but it’s not going to be a TL;DR. Is there a particular question you want to know about?
Ahh, okay. Well, I will give a little summary on some of the questions:
With Xbox Cloud Streaming, you can now play MSFS on a phone or a really old laptop or Xbox One. Keyboard and mouse support will hopefully come in a few months, but this is out of the MSFS team’s hands: It’s the platform team at Microsoft that handles this, so he could not give an ETA. Someone in the comments said, “Focus on the core sim.” Jörg pointed out that there are 230 people working on MSFS. This took one developer and half of a UI person. Most of the work was done by the xCloud team, not MSFS.
On more cloud types, Seb said that in order to add more cloud types, they need to decrease the size of the boxes that they use to parcel out clouds. But this requires processing more details, and it gets harder as it gets smaller. Based on what Seb said, I am not clear if they have all of the cloud details at this time from Meteoblue and they’re choosing not to process it for performance reasons, or if they don’t have all the detail at this time.
Seb also said that clouds do not take a lot of processing time on your local machine, but if they add more resolution, they may introduce a slider for this.
A question was asked about making METAR-based weather optional. Martial responded that they would prefer to focus their energy on improving the data that they have rather than supporting two streams of data.
Regarding wind gusts, they don’t have that data from Meteoblue. There is limited data from METARs, but those only cover a small area. In the past, they basically made up the wind gusts based on some limited parameters, and they thought that it was a bit overdone, so they reduced it. Their plan is to better interpret the data and generate wind gusts from that data. Jörg pointed out that they are working on getting more weather data sources besides just Meteoblue.
Regarding aerosols, pollutants, etc, Jörg said that they want to focus on what they have right now before introducing more stuff. Jörg said that he really wants sandstorms at some point.
The Dornier and ATR aircraft are well underway. The Antonov AN-2 is stalled because they have lost contact with Antonov, which is based in Kyiv. They didn’t have any special guests this time, but hope to have someone talk next time about some of the aircraft in development.
Regarding performance degradation over time, they have tried and tried to reproduce this issue but so far have not been able to. They can see the telemetry data that shows that this is a problem, though only affecting a small percentage of people. Unfortunately, the telemetry data they have is not granular enough, so they want to split it out into smaller systems so they can better understand this issue. This will help with other bugs, too. Same goes for screenshots that show the framerate.
AI traffic: Kai from AIG wrote a big list of issues that need to get fixed. They have the list, they know they have to go through it, and they hope to meet with Kai at some point to talk about it.
Shimmering in VR was introduced when they extended the distance that you can see objects on rooftops. It sounds like they need to smooth this out in some way. (They were toying with DLSS, but I don’t know if we should take that as an indication that DLSS is coming anytime soon. Martial also said that he would follow up on some FSR information for the next Q&A.)
Long time to start MSFS when the number of add-ons increases: Apparently this is an issue carried over from FSX. They pull in everything at the start. This requires a deep architectural change that is going to take a while. But they all agree that this needs to change.
Ground physics: There is currently no friction when you turn your tire because currently, the contact with the ground is modeled as a 3-point tripod rather than as three surfaces making contact with the ground. This is a legacy of FSX, and it needs to change. They have introduced some piecemeal changes to fix things like aircraft rolling, but they need to rewrite the whole thing to have a comprehensive solution, rather than a bunch of patches.
The forums will be undergoing a change in the next few weeks. It will be split into a Community Help section and a bugs section. The idea is that the bugs section will be really for the purpose of helping the developers reproduce issues. There are a lot of bugs that have just blown up in scope because the conversations snake all over the place. The Community team is working to pull some of that out into different bugs to make the bug reports more narrowly-focused.
Vegetation distance slider: Seb says that there already is one in the sim, so he is not sure why people are saying that there isn’t one. Unfortunately, he doesn’t know what the name of the slider is in English. (I have personally looked and don’t see it, either.)
In Sim Update 9, the Cessna 172 will support the new propeller system. That’s the only aircraft launching because most of Seb’s time has been spent helping third-party plane developers migrate to the new propeller system. They also can’t release all airplanes at once with the new system because they spend a lot of time testing each one.
They’re working on getting their Local Legends and Famous Flyers to support open doors. Once they do that, they will work on getting their base planes to support open doors.
There’s more, but I got tired of typing. I hope this helps.
Thanks for the feedback, we’re glad to hear that you’re enjoying the Dev Q&As! Let me reassure you that we currently have no plans to stop doing them.
Out of curiosity, what were your thoughts on the new format we used for the most recent Q&A stream? Anything you thought worked (or didn’t work) about it?
I thought the format was good and was happy that the questions with a high number of votes were addressed. Also appreciated the updates/corrections from the previous Q&A.
And as for Jorg’s question “Are the 1 line updates on the top wishes useful?” Definitely YES!
I would love to see these extended further than the top 10 and also to bugs.
I enjoyed this Q&A a lot, but for all the wrong reasons.
For me, personally, I care less about the special third-party guests that come on, because I’m more interested in the core sim. (I don’t know if everyone would share this view, but that’s just me.) This was a big Q&A session because there were no guests and no teaser/trailer videos that I can look up on my own time, so I appreciated the extra time for Q&A.
The format is less important to me because I will watch the whole thing from start to finish no matter what. So whatever order it gets presented takes a back seat to the content, itself.
Feedback:
Worked well: Jörg took the time to add some empathy regarding one of the questions about long load times when you happen to have a lot of add-ons (it happened to be my question). Communicating that the devs understand our problems goes a long way.
Worked well: Another thing I really like is the long and technical answers that Seb gives, like the ones about clouds and the one about friction. I know it’s a running joke that he can keep talking, but I think, if nothing else, it communicates how complicated some of these issues are. A lot of people get frustrated on how long things sometimes take (like helicopters). But seeing how much thought goes into it helps to underscore that these are not simple problems. I wouldn’t mind if Seb picked a topic once a month and wrote a blog entry about it.
Could improve: By contrast, Jörg may have truncated one of his answers too much: When asked about ambient traffic, he said, “Yes yes yes” but didn’t provide any concrete details about what he intends to fix. This was a forum question, so there was time to read the question in its entirety and prepare a more concrete answer. The original question gave many examples of things that the team could have spoken to, but none of them were addressed. This was not one of the questions that gets asked all the time, so I consider this a missed opportunity.
Could improve: One thing that I liked less is that some questions got asked twice in the stream. Seb said early in the stream that the Cessna 172 would be the only aircraft introduced in Sim Update 9 with the new propeller system, and then later on, someone asked, which aircraft will get upgraded in Sim Update 9 with the new propeller system? There was another chat question (I can’t remember which one) where Jörg basically said, “I answered this before.” Out of politeness, he answered it again.
Worked well: I really like that the team picked a forum question to answer that was not at the top of the list. (Actually, they picked a few chat questions that were also forum questions, too.) I would love to see one or two of these on every Q&A. There are certain niche issues that mean a lot to some people but they will never be the most glamorous or popular, and I think it’s nice to see them spotlighted.
Loved: I also really appreciate that Jörg extended the Q&A. I think he understands that the community is thirsty for this information. He didn’t have to extend it, but he did, and I loved that.
I’m not sure that he was really replying to a question the first time he mentioned the bug fixes on the Junkers and the Fokker, so he repeated his answer in context which - IMO - was very suitable.
I’m not a hard-core Q&A watcher but I think they did overtime last time as well. Thumbs up for that.
I like that most of the Twitch Q&A was devoted to answering questions this time. I feel that all Twitch Q&As should devote this amount of time to answering questions. If you bring on a special guest, or show a video, or talk about a new upcoming feature, I still think the same amount of time should be spent on answering questions as this Twitch Q&A.
Also, the public opt-in beta is working great. Going forward, I hope every Sim Update has a public opt-in beta.
The first time around, he was answering the question about open doors, and he went on a tangent and said that they did a whole bunch of bug fixes and almost squeezed them into SU8, but instead, it will ship with WU8.
The second time around, he said this (1:15:54):
If it helped some people, cool! But I didn’t personally hear any new information the second time around.
I’m glad if it’s becoming a regular thing! The more [information], the merrier!
I’m sorry! I’m sure it was not an intentional sleight. I’m sure Jörg’s mind is probably in 25 different places before lunch, so he probably answered the question at face value as Jayne read it, and forgot that there were some specific examples that he could have spoken to.
I agree about vehicular traffic, though. My “favorite” example is vehicles driving up and down the tower at KICT Wichita.
I was under the impression that Jayne asks the questions but the guys don’t actually read the forum posts beforehand. Some of the answers appeared to be lacking some context, but it’s understandable if they don’t read as many forum posts as we do.
I hope this helps.
