I have offered many constructive comments, but so far they haven’t constructed anything based on them.
Maybe if I was an activist with some sort of NGO, or political action committee that was pushing for sustainable flight simulator development or something I would care about the level of effort. But, as a consumer, the difficulty of the project is irrelevant to me. It would be really difficult to make an original, commercially-viable cheeseburger these days. The start-up that attempts it isn’t immune from criticism just because they went for it.
Lastly, a publisher just publishes the creative work of another. Yes, Microsoft may have given them a publisher’s advance, but the creative work is all on Asobo. It isn’t commonly understood for the Harry Potter book series to be by Bloomsbury (the publisher) is it? No, it is by the author… JK Rowling.
It is questionable how the errors are reported and what the members complain about! The fact is that some users have CTD’s and other problems and others don’t. That would tell me first that it could be partly due to the user or different hardware constellations. What Asobo does and what I would do, too, eliminate the errors that are obvious and affect all users. I am sure that Asobo will do everything possible to eliminate fundamental errors that affect all users. If one or the other has problems with the Sim but the majority do not, then these may be individual cases where the user is asked to check his system. In many cases, things may be as simple as drivers or software updates or incompatibilities between different programs, but Asobo cannot do anything about that. And I understand that testing the Asobo in all possible hardware and software combinations before each release of a new patch or update is impossible!
I suspect there is still a lot of Old Microsoft Authored Code base, still in MSFS – if not actual code, defiantly “design”.
The compiled & source we cannot see, but looking at the other parts, .cfg files, xml files, “AUTOPILOT PID variables” .. etc etc, a lot of it is still “Microsoft Authored”
Well just throwing code from 14 years ago at the newer game engine would certainly explain some of the issues. I would also argue that it somewhat diminishes the stunning, ground-breaking, state-of-the-art, cutting-edge achievement of the software.
But, you got my gears turning again, so another constructive comment:
Asobo can just open-source the entire project. Throw the whole thing up on github and let the community contribute. I’ve seen many posts in the forums from people who state that they are leading software engineers, architects, graphic artists, programmers, wealthy entrepreneurs, etc. Free labor for Asobo.
That’s not such a bad idea for specific “parts” of MSFS.
They have already sub-contracted out parts – weather, Bing scenery, etc.
One part that immediately comes to mind is AI ATC.
There are gifted programmers on GitHub that are certainly up for the job, as well as no shortage of Experience Pilots and ATC professional (current & Retired) that could contribute & guide the programmers.
Being a world-wide GitHub project , it would be far more likely to include detailed ATC procedures as they vary by country, rather than what it “seems” to be today, ATC based on the experience of a few VFR Cub pilots, flying in France.
I’d make sure I had some mature adults in the development team. People that understand the reliability that is necessary to develop resilient software, capable of running on various configurations. Right now, the content manager and installations seem to be created by children that have no understanding of what is required from production applications.
I’d make sure my testers understand the necessity of multiple test cases and scenarios around integration so dependencies could be tested an verified thoroughly (Will my deluxe premium installation EVER work?)
Overall, it’s software that shows lots of promise but just isn’t ready for sale - Even today.
In response to the OP, as a business person, I have to agree with the vast majority of your post. Removing the emotion from the picture and looking at it from a purely commercial point of view, you are spot on, particularly regarding the vagaries and literally millions of permutations of different hardware combinations of users. It makes little commercial sense to tackle individual complaints from this perspective and evidently, they are not doing so.
I think the voting system is a blunt but effective way of identifying the key areas to address. I also accept that Asobo are doing everything they are capable of to fix the bugs. I think the ZenDesk system of marking a recognised issue as “solved” hasn’t done them any favours. Such semantic points are easy enough to address if they spend a small amount of time considering them.
If Microsoft is putting pressure on them to release updates like Japan then of course it is what they will do and I’d be amazed if we saw a marked change in their modus operandi. This is a programme which is intended for both xbox and pc platforms and by definition it needs to look pretty to attract a large portion of its new users as well as cater for the die hard simmers.
The only thing I would alter is communications strategy. The live Q and As are good, but if i were Asobo, I would also release more regular news/information about their plans. This would not be interactive, they could just throw the updates “ to the lions” in the forums and let them agree, disagree, fight, digest, whatever they want with it. To me, there is a danger of appearing arrogant and losing reputation if they do not make more of a point of “going through these motions.” I accept that they are doing some of this already, just think they should put more out there. I stress this is not an emotional or a consumer point of view, it is what I would advise as a business person of 25 years career experience.
With my consumer hat on, I’ll continue to complain where I feel it is justified (and acknowledge the good). Having paid for this thing it is my right to do so.. whether Asobo read my comments or choose to take any notice is another matter. Individually, that makes no difference to me. I think as a collective we will drive improvement and I have confidence that ultimately, we will see a great product. It just annoys me that I was not more aware of the state of it when I made the purchase..
I don’t know anybody that thought the software was ready to launch (as a retail ready software package) and from an end-user perspective there was no pressure at all on Microsoft to release. Covid could easily have explained a release date of Q2 2021 even after the initial suggestions of 2020.
But of course they did release and here we are. Many of us would still have paid the full price for the software as is, but many wouldn’t and it is totally reasonable for them to have expected a far more complete sim.
So to answer the question, if I was Asobo I’d do nothing different (without hindsight). As far as I am aware it is Microsoft that made the decision to release when users (and probably Asobo themselves) told them it was too early. If you expected any different from MS then, well, what can I say.
The wrath that is being directed towards Asobo in many of these threads, IMHO, is misguided.
Start over with DirectX 12/Vulkan first philosophy.
Pivoting a game of this magnitude into the future on DirectX 11 brings inherent limitations and underutilizes every optimization possible by our current GPUs.
This fundamental decision, to not rewrite and optimize towards Vulkan/DX12 is the root of many issues, especially frame rate (even though DX12 wont directly improve FPS) and multithread bottlenecks. Legacy code can only go so far…
Too much legacy code. Very little optimisation for RTX cards.
