TWITCH - SDK Q&A [06162021]
Jayne: Xbox date and top gun announced on Sunday 20th but another stream will be dedicated to that.
Alyzée: We are going to focus on the scenery editor today. But first I’d like to mention the new plateform for Q&A (AnswerHub).
A tutorial video has been made to explain the MSFS answerHub - Timestamp
Sylvain AKA “FlyingRaccoon” Is introduced to the community. Sylvain is going to spend a significant amount of time on the AnswerHub and will help on investigating some issues and answer questions.
Sylvain – Intro – I’m a flight simulation enthusiast, I started with the first Combat Flight Simulator when I was young and never stopped playing simulators ever since. My first job was for the French Airforce and some of the knowledge I got made its way to FSX back when I was coding in with the SDK. I worked for 8 years in the professional Flight simulation industry.
2 tasks:
- SDK testing
- Main contact for the SDK plateform
Sylvain took the opportunity to thanks platform’s users and remind that the help given is really helpful.
Alyzée – Visual effect editor: The Beta version is live and more updates can be expected. Also, some tutorial videos should help you with the basic effects such as smoke effect.
Quick note from Eric – Effects seen in the E3 video are all made using the SDK, a coming update will give users access to the same version used for that trailer!
Alyzée – We have a new recruit working on Web assembly (Maxime). Maxime already started working on the optimization of compilation time.
Eric – Some of the most ambitious modules we have can take several minutes to compile and it can be a little tricky for any Devs. The process can be quite heavy. We are going to add a fast compilation mode (8x faster). However, there is a drawback, you’ll get likely less performance.
Chat question for Eric: Will compilation use all physical cores of cpu?
Eric – As you know, the game is already multithreading. For now, the compilation is done on only one core as the other are already used. Unfortunately, we cannot start the compilation on one core and then distribute it on others, we can look for some solutions in the long term maybe.
Scenery editor:
Alyzée – 2 months ago, we mentioned that we wanted to get started with it. We collected data internally as our artist are also using the same tool. They have their own wishlist. We want to have this Q&A today in order to get your feedback and wishes and help you be more efficient while creating your sceneries.
Mockup of the scenery editor – Timestamp
Alyzée – It’s a way to give you an idea of what we want to do. The interface/display will be used for other tools.
Eric – We will start with one View port and later extent to several. We like to have all tools distributed around the same windows for more efficiency.
Alyzée – Shares a list of what the team plan to do:
- Improve UX/UI: more icons/Tags/More efficient tools
- More versatile exclusion polygon
- Render the game as a window inside the editor
- Improve Jetways
- Add a shortcut to center the camera on a selected object
- Create a “Validate Airport” tool to help locate errors on an airport before building it
- Tool for creating fences
We plan to do more and keep you posted on this.
Eric – The focus will be on the scenery editor, but the FX editor will probably get upgrades throughout the year and WASM will get some attention. New APIs should be developed for people using Web assembly. Alyzée – We will have some bug fixing in the aircraft tool and mission editor also!
Can we get the ability to create lights that are visible from a larger distance?
Alyzée – It depends on the types of lights you are talking about, but the ones that you import through 3DS max, they have to be duplicated on all LODs, if you haven’t, they will disappear. You can check the documentation and if you are enabled to do what you want, we encourage you asking on the dev support platform.
The author of this first question for lights distances clarified by saying that Spotlights (runway lights) was the subject in the question and should be visible on a 10-20km distance.
Eric takes the feedback into account – It’s possible to let dev adjust the light distance, but this would require some fine tuning as it’s not only related to the SDK.
It would be perfect to use ground texture with high resolution without compression, can you comment on that?
Eric – I agree, it would be good to have high resolution textures everywhere, but we have to scale it down so it can fit graphics cards. More details on the question would be needed. If the intent is to have 4k textures everywhere, it will not be possible. Other than that, please give us more feedback on what you are trying to do on the AnswerHub.
Is there a 3rd party scenery mod that you think is particularly impressive and can showcase the SDK capabilities?
Eric – I’m thinking of one, the CRJ. Not everyone is convinced about using Web assembly but it shows that you can get complex aircraft.
Jorg – There are some airports that incredibly good. These contents are driving us to make better airports.
Can Asobo provide airports scenery developers something in the SDK where they can remove the AI passenger vehicles from the airport?
Alyzée – Yes, it’s planned!
Recently there’s been some confusion regarding which is the correct way to provide add-on mesh for the simulator. It would be great if the SDK team dives into this matter to define a clear definitive answer.
Sylvain – There’s no official support for adding elevation models or coastlines. At the moment, what we try to provide and improve is a way to have an influence on this data through the scenery editor.
You mentioned that you fixed the Wind-Socks with wrong orientation. For creators who changed the wind-sock orientation is there any actions needed if we they want to re-compile these airports.
Alyzée – Yes, adjusting the orientation will be needed once again as it’s been fixed.
When adjusting terrain height sometimes the result in the developer mode is different than what you get in-game?
Alyzée – We couldn’t find an answer for this question. Please provide more insight regarding this on the AnswerHub (add screenshot, feel free to contact us in private).
Sylvain – Please send us a sample or a project as well, this will be very helpful.
Will they be a visual docking guiding system any time soon?
Eric – Anytime soon, not. But it’s planned for the future.
Why does aircraft model first read the default ILS frequency instead of the ILS frequency we set?
Eric – We are already aware of the issue, and we hope to fix this quickly.
When will it be possible to exclude floating orbs (aka street lights) with the SDK?
Eric – We are focusing on the scenery mode and one of the priority is letting creators excluding elements from the base scenery.
Can you add .MP3 support for Mission Triggers? .WAV files seem so Windows 95
MP3 compressions give a less qualitative audio.
Can you add an option to apply a custom texture to the taxiway paths? Right now this can only be done with the painted lines which means the work has to be done twice.
Alyzée – We will see if we can do that or not but right now it is in our list.
Is there any chance for an official guide/tools on how to make liveries?
Eric – There should a sample on the SDK. Sylvain – It should be called “Simple Aircraft Liveries”.
Alyzée – If you feel the need for video tutorials, we can do something.
I’m working on Navi Mumbai Airport, do you plan on excluding power poles that can’t remove by myself?
Yes.
Will there be better SDK support for animation made available to 3rd party developers?
Alyzée – This is something we would love to work on. Currently we have one animator on the team and no bandwidth to work on animation. We’ll see what we can provide in the documentation, but we won’t be able to add animation specific feature anytime soon.
Will you be able to provide a way to edit auto-genetared ambiant traffic outside of airports?
Examples given by Jayne > Red buses in London / Yellow taxis in NYC
Eric – It can already be done but not locally. However, we’d love to do it.
Jorg – It’s not prioritized yet but we’ll get there.
It will be great if we can get a better tool to place fences
Alyzée – The intention is to get something better indeed, we agree.
Will there be an easier way to remove the service at the small airport we create?
Alyzée – There a documentation available explaining how to remove airport services. If it’s easy to understand, feel free to ask your questions on the AnswerHub.
Does the sim currently support remote activation of runway lighting at an unmanned airport?
Jorg – It does not. It was on the feedback snapshot a while ago.
Using the SDK without being able to unmount and mount the mod is very time consuming – any plan on changing this?
Sylvain – It’s indeed time consuming and can be painful. As soon as you modify something in the editor, packages can have different behavior – we need to unify everything so that we can expect all behaviors and reduce the time of this process.
Is there a way to see all the LVARS an addons is using?
Eric – We would need more precise use case and we’ll be able to answer
Is it possible to add a windsock (maybe as a sim object) that won’t require any orientation settings?
Sylvain – This question is asked regarding the animation part of the windsock that needs to consider the wind direction.
Eric – We have a similar issue with the FX editor discovered recently, it may be the same issue and need to investigate.