The official Developer Q&A Live gives some interesting discussion about the state of the sim, ongoing bugs, upcoming features, and the future of MSFS. The one and half-hour long community questions interview is usually held at the end of every month with Jorg Neumann, the head of Microsoft Flight Simulator, along with Sebastian Wloch and Martial Bossard from Asobo Studio.
Here’s the fifth Developer Q&A Live stream in a nutshell. The link for the Twitch record of the latest stream is here, and the YouTube version is down below.
- Thermals are in the sim already, if the land is warm it produces updrafts, not over seas though because the sea is cold.
- Thermals made by shadows under cumulus clouds are still under development.
- More accurate rudder behavior during engine drag is added plane by plane.
- Wake turbulence simulation is not yet in the sim, but coming in the future.
- Custom button assignment profiles for every plane is coming.
- World Update 3: UK & Ireland is coming out next week, the exact date is still unknown.
- World Update 4 includes France, Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxembourg, coming in March 2021.
- Next Sim Update in February includes a lot of updates to Garmin G1000/3000 and more weather options in the custom toolbar.
- Contrails and touchdown smokes are included in the next Sim Update or the one after that. Effects for water and other surfaces are added after these.
- Visual icing will be adjustable for users later on with the upcoming Sim Updates.
- FlyByWire A32NX is coming to the build-in MSFS Marketplace for free. Also, other great freeware plane mods are added in the future.
- The replay function is under development, but no release date yet.
- Multiple screen function is in the backlog, coming in the future.
- DirectX 12 is coming to PC edition along with the MSFS Xbox edition release date. It improves the sim performance especially for the medium spec PC’s and enables ray tracing.
- The weather engine won’t be open for 3rd party weather app developers, weather engine base core is being fine-tuned all the time for better.
- VR has now its own feedback snapshot, updated every week.
- Trees in the sim area too wide. Trees will be optimized for more accurate size with added density.
- Real-world airline company liveries are coming in the future by default.
- The Live Weather bug not giving the live weather for the second flight is still under investigation. Developers are having a hard time reproducing this issue.
- Global terrain spikes are fixed within the next World Update.
- Force Feedback function for joysticks featuring it is coming later.
- Asobo is working closely with the upcoming Aerosoft CRJ, so it’s expected to be near to a real thing.
