Today third-party developers offered new development updates and screenshots of upcoming aircraft and scenery for Microsoft Flight Simulator, released two airports, and announced another.
We start with PMDG, who provided a new look at its upcoming Boeing 737 in comparison to the old version for P3D. The Microsoft Flight Simulator version is on the left of the images.
PMDG boss Robert Randazzo talked at length about the current stage of the project, and the visual fidelity the new simulator allows the team to achieve. You can read the full post on PMDG’s own forum.
For the moment, no new release window was provided, but the previous update mentioned that the hope was to launch before the end of the year. Fingers crossed.
Next is DC Design, which offered a development update on its upcoming Concorde, alongside plenty of new screenshots.
We also hear that the predicted release window is early February 2022.
“This week has been spent entirely on the engineer’s station, which is a huge job to undertake and has understandably been all-consuming for some time now. I have been able to complete most of the modelling and am now texturing everything in full PBR, which really does bring the aircraft flight deck to life in MSFS.
From an animation perspective, every single dial, button, switch and knob is alive in this version of Concorde, meaning that there will be a huge amount of work involved in both deciding how much of that will have a function in the simulator, and then tying them all together in a cohesive way. As I mentioned last week, while this rendition of Concorde isn’t intended to be “study level”, the sheer volume of instrumentation and functionality present in the flight deck means that it will be significantly more complex than any of my other aircraft to date, including the original Concorde I built for FSX and Prepar3D. I’m spending quite a lot of time making notes about how Concorde’s different systems worked, in order to try to figure out how much to make operational and what effect might occur if the user should fail to operate those systems correctly. The last thing I want to do is spoil a user’s flight halfway across the Atlantic because they forgot to operate a switch, but at the same time having all this detail just be cosmetic seems like an awful waste of polygons to me.
For those of you hankering for accurate release dates, it’s now looking likely that Concorde will first launch with Just Flight in early February, 2022. The MSFS Marketplace is currently suffering appalling waiting times, as much as four months, so there really is no way for me to pin a date on the Marketplace and Xbox version at this time. I’m hoping that the waiting times come down soon, as the MS team are working hard and have hired new help to try to bring the backlog down. While I’m on the subject, updates of all my aircraft are on hold until at least after Sim Update 7, as there is little point in sending them only for new sim updates to break them before they’re even released.
For now, enjoy the WIP images of Concorde and her flight deck. There will be more of them over the coming weeks, but there is of course a huge amount still to do so much of the work will involve coding and animation rather than new details to share on the visuals. I hope next week to have a more up-to-date spec sheet for the aircraft.
On a final note, a very small number of observers have decried the inclusion of a modern FMC in the cockpit. This has been done because to custom-code Concorde’s original INS system would take many, many further months of development time, would result in a much higher product cost, and yet would only be used by the tiny number of people who are insisting upon it. A modern FMC, modelled and textured to emulate the original INS, that will be more familiar to most users and is already part of the simulator’s core code, is a sensible compromise in what will already be a very complex airplane.”