Microsoft Flight Simulator September 24th Development Update

Today, we were happy and proud to announce “World Update I: Japanâ€at the Tokyo Game Show 2020. As always, it took a village to producethis update done and we had the help of many teams inside and outsideof Microsoft to make this happen.

The Bing Maps team delivered 6 incredible photogrammetry cities andan all-new digital elevation map that increases the detail of theentirety of Japan significantly. We also had help from GayaSimulations, an excellent scenery and airport developer. Gaya created3 of the airports RJFU – Nagasaki, RJTH – Hachijojima, and RJCK –Kushiro as well as all of the 20 new POIs. Blackshark.ai added a newtraditional Japanese building type. Of course, the team at Asobo putit all together and created three additional airports – ROKR – Kerama,RORS – Shimojisjima and RJX8 – Suwanosejima as well as the threelanding challenges and all the other elements needed to make the DLC agreat experience. We hope you will enjoy this update … Japan is anincredibly beautiful and diverse country.

As we’ve always said, our launch in August was just thebeginning. Our goal is to provide you with a meaningful update to thesim every month. In addition to increasing the visual detail of theplanet with future World Updates, we also plan to add SimulationUpdates every 2-3 months that will further enhance the overall simexperience. On top of that, we are developing some exciting paid DLCthat we plan to rollout over the coming months and years, and we willshare more information in the future. We are on an incredible journeytogether and we are committed to work with you, the community, tocontinue to improve and evolve Microsoft Flight Simulator for manyyears to come.

Development Update

Partnership Series Update: Partnership series announcement has beenmoved to next week. The announcement will feature GayaSimulations.

SDK Update

The SDK team has been expanded to improve and expand the SDKfunctionality more quickly and to provide more thoroughdocumentation. Recent work focused on:

• WebAssembly: Improvements to the GDI+ compatibility layer andimprovements to the ease of development and debugging capabilities isthe current focus. Visual Studio 2017 support has also beenadded.
• The glTF exporter now supports 3D Studio Max 2021.
• We fixed the SimConnect facilities API and plan on expanding it.
• On the Developer Mode side, we are working on improving overall usability: we enhanced the visualization for roads, terraforming shapes and exclusion rectangles. The editor now doesn’t allow for invalid ground merging parameters.

Third Party Developers

Applications to our Marketplace Partner Program have now passed1000, which is astonishing. Every day, we see new announcements of newairports, aircraft and other useful tools and add-ons being announcedand we are over to moon to see the level of creativity and qualitycoming to the platform. Last week, we launched 4 all-new products inthe in-sim marketplace – including Carenado's second plane on theplatform and new airports from Aerosoft, Orbx and Stairport! With over40 approved partners the next weeks will feature even more great newreleases.

Feedback Snapshot

Development Roadmap

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