Following their weekly update tradition, the Microsoft Flight Simulator team has published its November 19th Development Update. This latest post introduces a new partnership, addresses bugs in the simulator and the community’s top wished features, previews the team’s future plans, and provides new statistics on third-party developers.

The update starts with the announcement of the partnership between MFS and The Experimental Aircraft Association (EAA), an organization with some  “240,000 members [among] 900 local chapters who enjoy the fun and camaraderie of sharing their passion for flying, building and restoring recreational aircraft.”

Additionally, a new development roadmap is released, with the developers sharing the top bugs and wishes they received from the community. They also teased that next week’s development update will bring a “rough schedule” for the release of Sim Updates from November to February.

Furthermore, the post outlines the improvements made to the SDK. A complete list of changes is as follows:

• The DevMode team has mostly been focusing on the last fixes before the release of the forthcoming update.
• On the Scenery Editor side, the team is implementing the possibility to add a heightmap on a rectangle and to sculpt it. Besides that, fixes and improvements have also been achieved on the object duplication feature.
• As a background task, the DevMode team is always working on improving the overall stability of the DevMode, giving special focus to the Project Editor, the Scenery Editor, and the Aircraft Editor.
• Community feedback continues to be very helpful to identify & fix bugs and therefore making the tools better.

• WebAssembly: We fixed the “trigger_key_event” function in the Panels API.
• WebAssembly: We implemented JIT compilation of WASM modules for specific use cases (decreases iteration times).

Finally, the developers provided some insights into the status of third-party developers. Since early this year, they have received some 1000 applications for the Marketplace Partner Program with some 400 products being released since August. Currently, more than 150 new products are expected to arrive in the next few weeks and another 250 currently are in development.

Next week’s update is expected to bring new contents to the road map and a more concrete plan for the simulator’s future.