Microsoft Flight Simulator September 17th Development Update

The latest update on Microsoft Flight Simulator was published yesterday, and with it came a new Partnership Series video, a new Development Roadmap, and a fair bit more.

Patch 1.8.3.0 was made available two days ago which addressed a large range of issues and made significant improvements in all areas of the simulator.

More information about that patch is available to read in this article.

Starting with the top voted issues from forum feedback, wind data appears to be the largest complaint amongst users with weather also erroneous enough to warrant the top five issues on their list.

Autopilot issues, engine bugs, and “dreadful performance” were other issues on the list, which is given below.

Microsoft opted to showcase video three in their Around the World video series which centres on the continent of Africa, showing numerous views of one of the world’s largest landmasses.

Continuing with videos, a new Partnership Series video made its debut in the development update.

It focuses on Textron Aviation and features key staff members that talk about the simulator and how Textron Aviation played a part in introducing their products to MSFS.

A quick update on the SDK followed, with the following changes made:

  • Scenery Editor: Projected mesh normal rotation issues have been addressed and it is now possible to replace single models for scenery objects.
  • Aircraft Editor: Several stability fixes and improvements have been made thanks to the input from the community.
  • Particle Effects System: A new node-based particles effects system is in development and features more tunable parameters. The node graph editor got some usability improvements and support for generating ribbons has been added.
  • WebAssembly: Addressed some usability issues (e.g. allowing single file recompilation) and are mostly concentrating on reducing developer iteration time and improving the debugging experience. Also enhanced the way file I/O requests from WASM modules work, improved WASM modules caching and fixed issues upon WASM module shutdown.

And on the topic of third party developers, Microsoft issued a message about how quickly they have worked their products into the simulator.

“It’s only been one short month since we launched the new Microsoft Flight Simulator and we have already received over 900 applications to our Marketplace Partner Program.

“That’s amazing and we are so excited to see the third party creator community embracing the new platform with such enthusiasm.

“Last week alone, we launched 10 all-new products and updates to 8 existing ones.

“Our team has been quite impressed by the quality of the work from the airport teams at Aerosoft, Big Tire, Carenado, FLYT, Fly Tampa, FS Dream Team, Gaya, Latin VR and ORBX and it’s awesome to see new aircraft, airports and other add-ons being announced almost daily.

“We always knew that the energy and creativity from third parties is critical for a vibrant ecosystem, but the degree of adoption and sheer speed and volume of releases has far exceeded our expectations.”

The latest version of the Development Roadmap was the final item in this update.

It reveals the next update to the simulator is expected in late October, with more updates on Partnership Series, Feature Discovery Series, and SDK updates to be available throughout.

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