Steam Edition Patch Released- Offline and Multiplayer Working

From the Steam announcement today:

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We are pleased to confirm today the release of a new patch for Microsoft Flight Simulator X: Steam Edition, following a period of public beta testing and addressing a number of key features for players, including multiplayer fixes, user interface updates and stability updates.

The update will download and install automatically through Steam. You may need to restart Steam if the process does not start automatically. The full changelog for the update can be found below.

Offline Mode:

•Flight Simulator X: Steam Edition can now be used in Steam’s Offline Mode. Note that multiplayer features cannot be accessed whilst in this mode.

Multiplayer Fixes:

•VoIP communication is now using the correct device identified in “Settings”.

•During mission-based Multiplayer flights, if the host has activated the “Anti-Cheat” flag, users who have modified their aircraft are immediately disconnected without affecting other users.

•The Steam “Invite to Game” feature will now work by buffering the request until the user enters the Multiplayer menu.

•Players are prompted to use the Steam Client to invite a user from the Multiplayer menu to become a friend on Steam.

•On the Multiplayer Session and lobby screens, the text in the “Weather” section is now aligned correctly.

User Interface Updates:

•If “Show Saved Flights” is enabled, the time stamps on the saved flight data will now show the correct time the flight was saved.

•The HTML content in displayed in some windows (e.g. tutorials, mission help, etc) now uses Internet Explorer in IE9 compatibility mode, rather than IE8.

•On the Multiplayer Session screen, the host’s user name is now shown.

•On the Multiplayer Session screen, “In Briefing Room” is now shown prior to the session starting .

•The fallback mission image has been updated for FSX:SE. This is only displayed if a mission does not provide it’s own image.

•New Community page added. One of the things that you’ll notice after the update is that every time you start FSX: Steam Edition, it will display the community news page. We’re doing this to keep you up to date with all the latest news, patches, developments and offers for FSX: Steam Edition. We want to keep you informed of the great things we are doing

Stability Updates:

•Potential causes of the terrain.dll crashes experienced by some users has been corrected. A theoretical deadlock where a game may hang for several minutes before either crashing or being terminated by Windows has been corrected. This is a potential cause of the terrain.dll crashes experienced by some users.

•Some compatibility issues encountered by third party add-ons that use SimConnect have been resolved

•Fixed crash in G3D.dll caused by certain add-ons

•Fixed crashes in UI.dll

•Kneeboards & Checklists now display correctly

•The configuration file AFFINITYMASK value is now correctly calculated for all Core i3, i5 and i7 generation Intel CPUs.

Support for problem analysis

•We now include some additional debugging info that can be captured by the DebugView tool to help with Host Disconnection errors. If a player experiences the “Host has lost connection to the host” problem, they can download and install the DebugView tool, then start DebugView before running FSX:SE. If a “Host has lost connection” message is received the log output from DebugView can then be sent for analysis.

•Added support for Mini-Dumps. If you are now unfortunate enough to experience a game crash, the system will now attempt to save a mini-dump to disk. These mini-dumps are automatically uploaded to Steam and allow us to obtain debug information about the crash that has occurred. No private or user information is contained within a mini-dump. Using mini-dumps, we can understand what has gone wrong and this greatly speeds up our ability to provide fixes and improvements.

Support for Xpack version of SimConnect:

•Xpack, the version of SimConnect that was supplied with the FSX Acceleration Pack, has always been delivered as part of FSX:SE, we are just now installing this by default rather than making it an optional install. This is to provide additional compatibility with some third party add-ons.

Known issues:

•During our extensive community beta testing we discovered one problem which we still need to fix. However, rather than delay the release of the patch, there is a work-around for you to use until an additional fix is released.

•Problem description: If the host of a multiplayer session sends an invite to a friend to participate in a private game, the invitation request will fail.

•As a work-a-round, players are advised to do one of the following:

•(a) Create a public game with a password. When sending the player the invitation, follow it up with a direct message that provides the password for them to use.

•(b) Create a private game. Send your friend a direct message with your public IP address that your friend can use in the Direct Connect screen to connect to your server.