Third-party developers provided updates about their existing and upcoming add-ons for Microsoft Flight Simulator.
We start with PMDG, which teased the first previews of their upcoming Boeing 777 “Soon™”. You can take that “TM” as you wish.
On the other hand, the developer has mentioned its plan for updating the popular Boeing 737-700 that was released last week.
The aircraft should get the first update late this week with mostly small items, with bigger ones coming in subsequent updates.
For those who are new to PMDG: We have a very aggressive method of collecting, categorizing, researching and tracking issues that get reported to us. You will find that once we get through the initial cloud of release week, we tend to push updates that will contain anywhere from 25-200 ranging from major corrections/changes to tiny, inconsequential obscuria that we noticed along the way. We expect to be pushing updates out for the 737-700 at a weekly pace initially so if you have run into something that is creating problems for you- there is a good chance it will get swept up into an update soon enough.
We have a couple of major research efforts underway that we want to tell you about also:
- Customers seeing flickering artifacts on the displays: We have gotten a few reports at tech support, and in threads here in the forum that some users are seeing flickering artifacts on the displays. They are often reported as “when turning” but this is a distractor, because the turning causes a redraw mechanism that fails. We can reproduce this in house in the EFIS/MAP layout, which is why that layout is disabled in the initial release. We believe this to be related to a problem in the GDI+/NANO layer and brought it to the attention of Asobo in October, but I believe it was viewed as a lower priority item as we were able to code our way around it with some ingenuity. Unforunately, when SU9 landed, the problem returned to the EFIS/MAP layout and this resulted in us disabling that option and re-floating it to Asobo for their review. It has not been reviewed as of this juncture as the individual responsible was not in the office last week. We are hoping it will get some attention this week. We will keep you posted.
- “Low FPS Control Animation” is a phrase that took some time to sort out, since it is a mixed metaphor that doesn’t really describe the issue well. Working with a few folks here in the PMDG forum we were able to get some examples of what users see when they report this issue. We have a few theories on what causes it and are hoping to have a chance to test some corrections with folks that we know to see it during the coming week. It is a curious item that may be caused by a particular combination of settings- but that usually means it is something we can code out of the product. We shall certainly try.
- Lack of steering input for GameController users: We have mentioned a few times that Asobo added a “nose wheel steering axis” to the sim with SU9 (Actually- it has been there but was inoperative until SU9) and this brought with it some changes in the behavior of the ground steering that proved to be incompatibly with the real-world functionality of the 737’s tiller/rudder pedal steering interconnect. This caused us to make some changes to the steering input, but those appear to have been further aggravated problems for users trying to operate the airplane with game controllers. We have repeatedly requested additional documentation on these changes from Asobo, but thus far we haven’t gotten anything useful. We remain hopeful that the pending SDK update might include some documentation of the changes that were made so that we can code around these issues and get everybody working with a viable solution for ground steering. Stay tuned.
On top of this, the Douglas DC-6 will get an update tomorrow (May 17) including some small changes.
We also take a new look at the Cessna Citation Mustang by Cockspur, showing the flight deck with the avionics inactive and active.
