Microsoft Flight Simulator PMDG Boeing 737 & Freeware C-17 Globemaster Get New Screenshots & Dev Updates; Gaya GSE Announced

Third-party developers have provided updates about upcoming add-ons coming for Microsoft Flight Simulator.

Delta Simulations showcased its upcoming C-17 Globemaster III. The group has acquired a brand new (and rather impressive) external model for the aircraft, which will be freeware. This means that they can now focus on the interior and systems.

You can find a couple of in-sim screenshots and a few renders below and you can follow development on Delta Simulations’ Discord server.

Next comes PMDG with a new look and an extensive development update for its Boeing 737.

The update comes with a poem describing the development progress and more notes from CEO Robert Randazzo himself.

There’s a lot to read (and it’s very interesting), so grab a cup and get yourself comfortable.

…But this would go seriously wrong.
Because we all know I can’t rhyme, or write out in song.
My post must be well crafted and worded with care.
Because some bloke from Australia will just tell me its already Christmas over there.

We’d much prefer to give you a preview, you see.
Of the work we’ve been doing on our new Seven Three.
Backlighting’s installed and more tweaking we’ve done.
The dimmers now work which just makes it more fun.

The flap handle moves and it clacks and it clatters.
The stick shaker shakes so you know something’s the matter.
The flaps you can set to your every whims
the trimwheel will rattle and grind while it spins.

Panel flood lighting floods and annunciators flash.
The TCAS ain’t yet working, so maintain visual on that Dash.
The non-reflective coating is on the screens with great care
So you won’t have problems reading the screens through a glare.

Autobrake works but is still subject to tweeking,
for proper acceleration gives you the brake distance you are seeking.
The FMC is running and draws a nice magenta line.
Follow the Flight Director and you should do just fine.

You’ll have options by the hundreds you can choose with a click,
Along with ground maintenance support In case a valve it should stick.
The Ground Ops is there, just like in P3D
with Lav Trucks and Cleaners, chocks, belt loaders, or even AC.

EGPWS is griping about flaps, gear and terrain,
Nav display shows it like a green, yellow and red stain.
The same screen will give you a nice VSD.
STARs are easier to plan when the profile you can see.

So things are progressing, in spite of knee knockers.
Performance is fast, even if you aren’t an over-clocker.
Each week I think “Ah! I shall shoot something for YouTube!”
Then my schedule explodes which makes for a bad mood.

We still have components to wire into place.
But we are sure when see, this will put a smile on your face.
We are taking a few days off, but soon this bird shall take flight.
For now Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good DC-6 flight.

Okay, okay okay… If that doesn’t get an award for the most horrible butchering of a pithy poem, I don’t know what would.

On a more serious note, I wanted to drop a few images for you to kick off this Christmas weekend. BIG BOLD REMINDER THAT THESE ARE IN-DEVELOPMENT IMAGES and the images are about a week out of phase with the latest build, but it has taken me a few days to cleave out some free time to get them posted for you.

The last two weeks have been busy. Much of the focus is on stuff you can’t see, but Vin and Henning have been hard at work on lighting related functionality. One of the things I particularly love is that we have gotten the non-reflective coating in place on the displays and you can see from the image above that the main panel flood lighting gets gauzy as it plays off the lower display unit and the CDUs from this angle. I have had the misfortune of sitting on the jumpseat in the 737 on more occasions than I care to recall (you don’t sit IN the 737 jumpseat, you sit ON it…) and the lighting quality and mood conveyed in this image is exactly as I recall it. Fortunately, I don’t have to do that any more- as one’s backside can only take so much 737 jumpseat- and you REALLY haven’t lived until you have sat on the second jumpseat, but that is a story for a different day.

The backlighting is being tweaked and most of the flood lighting is now working properly. We are doing a bit of research on the specifications for a few of the different lighting elements and bulbs used in some key places, as getting their emissive qualities just right takes a bit of technical data. As we dial them in, things really start to look convincing, especially at night when surveying the flight deck while at high altitude with the ground lighting well below the airplane. It is a really impressive look, especially if you have VR to work with.

Next up in the lighting department are some of the point lights and purpose lighting, such as the environmental lighting, etc. I have lost track of whether Jason has finished tweaking all of the lighting options for the exterior model, but we have variations with standard lighting and others with LED, along with their various property differences and emmisive qualities.

We are currently working to finish implementing the various load-states that are customary to MSFS. These are the “pre-configured” states in which you might load the airplane from the flight menu in MSFS and include configurations such as parked on the ramp, taxiing onto the runway, climbout, cruise, descent, approach, etc. These have to be knit tightly to the sim’s expectations and norms so that when you load the airplane and choose, say, a spot where the airplane would be expected to be in a specific configuration- it should match that expectation immediately upon load. We have been working through these and while some of them are quite straight forward, others are not when you have thousands of realistic system inter-dependencies modeled within the airplane, so we are slowly working through stamping out the problems.

For those who like them, we will also ship the product to you with a number of scenarios from Cold/Dark to various stages of preparation so that you can load those as starting points just like you can do in the Prepar3D version. Our main goal here is to avoid capability loss so that you have as much of the functionality you are used to as we can possibly deliver.

Some other good news is that we have eliminated the much maligned 20 second timer that we introduced back in 2008 with our MD-11… This was a necessary evil in Prepar3D but we have managed to remove it finally in MSFS- and this will mean that you will have the airplane running normally the moment you enter the sim, which is a nice thing.

This week we finished implementing the terrain awareness capability on the NAV display. I will try to remember to include that in our next round of cockpit visual updates so that you can see how nice it looks in MSFS. The good news is that the display logic for the terrain is the same display logic that gets used to apply a weather radar layer, so once the community convinces Asobo to give developers access to the weather layer, it will be a quick thing to tap into it in order to draw the radar returns as appropriate. We haven’t heard much other than innuendo on this topic- but I am sure it will come around eventually.

The plan for 737 is still to release her on both PC and for Xbox. She will be made available both on our site and via MS Marketplace. Those who qualified for promotional pricing on the new 737 by purchasing the PMDG 737NGXu for P3D back when it released two years ago will obviously need to make the purchase from us directly in order to have the promotional pricing applied at checkout. We will have more information for those qualifying customers as we announce an actual release plan for the PMDG 737 for MSFS.

On the topic of releases: We are still awaiting confirmation from Microsoft to tell us when the update required on the Xbox platform will allow PMDG DC-6 for MSFS to get turned back on for sale on the Xbox platform. We are hoping it won’t be long and we shall keep you posted with any information we learn.

Many folks have asked if we will be doing videos to preview the 737 and also if we will have a video tutorial series. The answer on both counts is yes.

When? That is a bit harder to nail down. I am pretty task focused on areas of the 737 development that are my responsibility and forward progress is miserably, painfully complex at the moment so it is taking longer than I think any of us like. Once I have my areas of responsibility secured I will transition to production- and you’ll know that has happened when you see things start trickling into the youtube channel. I always think “it might be next week” and every week, I prove myself right.

Last, but not least, we get news from Gaya Simulations, which announced Gaya Ground Support Equipment. This isn’t a stand-alone ground services add-on, but the fact that the acclaimed developer will add “custom, authentic, unique, and functional” ground service vehicles to all of its airports for free without touching other airports.

Below you can see a video showing off Florence Airport. Incidentally, we also learn that Gaya is testing a solution to let us remove static aircraft, which is always welcome.