There’s a ton of new features and functionality in Sim Update 2 for Microsoft Flight Simulator and among the highlights are VR support, real time snow data for live weather, and a long list of updates and changes across the board. Lets have a look at some highlights!

Just the highlights

The biggest news is of course that VR is now available in Microsoft Flight Simulator. Not originally planned for the sim, it became evident early on that not having VR support would be a big miss for what could be a headlining feature. Asobo Studios has worked hard to bring the feature to users and now it’s here. According to the announcement, the sim will support any OpenXR-compliant headset which includes Windows Mixed Reality headset support and the Occulus platform.

• VR – VR users, I don’t have a headset yet so I’m curious to hear how it is. What troubles you’ve had and if you’ve been able to set it up and enjoy the VR experience.
• Snow and Ice – Meteo Blue is now feeding in snow and ice coverage into the live weather system. The result should be accurate snow and ice showing up in appropriate areas. I’ll be testing this out over the next several days as I’m expecting to see a big snowfall in my area and I’ll be checking to see what areas are showing as snow covered.
• Training missions – New training missions for the Airbus A320Neo are available now covering take-off and landings. That might make getting into flying the airliners more likely for a wider variety of flyers.
• Liveries – New liveries have been added for the Pits Special S2S and the Marketplace apparently has a Test Pilot and Aviators Club liveries download that is free for all 30 planes.

Finally, while there are plenty of other features that have come out that are going to be of huge interest, one thing that airliner pilots will hopefully enjoy – the No Smoking/Seatbelt buttons now work and make the chime. Nice! I like those kinds of small touches.

Holiday themed landmarks

According to the update, 12 landmarks have been updated with festival holiday lights plus 3 more bonus landmarks depending on the updates that you have installed (I presume that to mean United States and Japan world updates).

I’m going to go looking for at least a few of these. If you find them, leave a note in the comments!

For all of this and more, visit the Microsoft Flight Simulator website and check out the notes for the latest update.