Microsoft Flight Simulator team’s periodic Q&A live streams are always helpful in learning what the team is working on, what is coming next, and generally where everything on the sim is going. The November stream did not disappoint with new information, a look ahead at the roadmap for 2024, and more.

Watch the whole thing

If you want to watch the whole live stream, the video is right above and you can hear all of the questions and answers straight from Jorg Neumann, Sebastian Wloch, and Martial Bossard. If you don’t have time for the whole thing, here is my summary on some of the highlights that I picked up on during the presentation.

ATR (and CRJ) update

Answering a question about aircraft updates, the ATR is definitely receiving further updates with Hans and his team working on more updates to the project. Something is tentatively set to go out in January. We don’t know if those updates are limited to just fixes or if something else is planned.

On a sidenote, Hans is also a key developer behind Aerosoft’s CRJ and after a little digging I did find out that Hans is still involved with that project and that an update is still in the works. Read his response from a few weeks ago on the Aerosoft forums.

A320neo v2

Those in the open beta for MSFS have probably had a chance to try out the new 2.0 version of the A320neo. This new version of the A320neo airliner is a completely new iteration of the aircraft sharing little or nothing with the original. Preview streams I’ve watched have indicated that people are generally pleased with the direction that the aircraft is going in, however, there are some issues with it too.

Jorg reported that the aircraft is coming out of the beta and won’t be part of the next sim update and instead is targeting sometime early next year. The reason is that the aircraft has a stability/application crash rate of 83% while they would prefer that to be closer to 98%. Crashes are particularly common on consoles.

No mention was made of the recent accusation by a FlyByWire dev that iniBuilds had copied code from that open source A320neo project. We don’t know if the accusation has any merit and it may well not be related but the timing is close. In either case, more polish will hopefuly benefit this airliner release.

Jorg did also confirm for anyone questioning it that the A320neo v2 is free for all MSFS owners. Great!

Sim Update 14 and beyond

Another subject area tackled is Sim Update 14. We learned a bit about some of the different things are going into the update.

Some of the work being done right now is around stability and performance improvements with efforts ongoing. There is currently a loss of stability on Xbox with work being done to address the issue. Snow coverage has been has been in improved in regions such as the Norwegian Fjords withmore work to do for Alaska, Chile, and New Zealand. Discussions ongoing with the data provider.

Aircraft fixes from the 40th Anniversary release are ongoing. Testing is already underway for Ryan NYP and Hughes H-4 with updates to A310-300, Bell 407, JN-4 Jenny, DC-3 and Grumma G-21 planned.

Over on the weather and lighting side of things, some big changes are coming. Fixes to live weather are coming in the next sim update with a bug relating to obsolete weather data being mistakenly injected in having been solved. Meanwhile, a community update that makes some fixes to atmospheric colouring effects has provided some inspiration behind the Asobo team to make some changes of their own with them bringing in some of the new atmospheric lighting systems from the in development 2024 back into 2020 – nice! Some side by side slides give us a bit of a taste for what has changed.

World Update 16: Caribbean and City Update 5

We’re going to the Caribbean for World Update 16 with this latest sim update coming packed with new imagery and elevation data across the Caribbean. There will also be 104 points of interest, 7 bespoke airports, 3 landing challenges, 3 bush trips (Cuba, Haiti and Dominican Republic) and 3 discovery flights.

Behind the scenes, the team is working on an automated water masking feature that they seem to indicate will debut with the update. An appropriate region to have really great looking water masking to pick up on those shallow water tropical blues and greens.

Several cities including Zagreb, Brussels and The Hague are planned for City Update 5. Jorg also mentioned that they are also working on Stockholm, however, its not in the update as they still have some work to do on the data that they have received.

Next Famous Flyer

Carenado is the developer behind the next Famous Flyer which has been revealed as the Cessna Stationair. Carenado have modeled a more classic version of the aircraft with a conventional six pack instrumentation.

The larger Cessna variant has been often labeled as “SUV of the sky” with space for five passengers or with modifications to support other kinds of surveillance or skydiver missions. It looks like Carenado have modeled a configuration that supports the later configuration so that sounds interesting.

Roadmap for this year and next

One last major set of items I wanted to tackle was their roadmap for 2023 wrap-up and then the roadmap for 2024. Jorg has taken to presenting this grid display to give us the major beats for what is coming up next.

The the next Famous Flyer has been revealed but that leaves us with one more unrevealed as well as another Local Legend. I don’t think we know what these are yet but feel free to correct me in the comments.

The Dune movie tie-in has been delayed alongside the movie (the licensing deal means that the content/promo piece ships alongside the movie) but Jorg reports that it is quite fun to fly. I’m looking forward to seeing what that experience is like.

Then we have a look at the grid for next year which features the Dune update plus two Sim Updates and MSFS 2024. We did learn that the team intend to ship a major Sim Update before the 2024 release with some indication that the update would be partly intended as some sort of bridge for the two sims. Meanwhile, Famous Flyers, World Updates, and Local Legends appear to be unaffected by the move to 2024 and indeed it seems like both sims will, as has been said previously, continue to benefit from these additional content releases.

And they left us with one tease of what the Grand Canyon will look like in the new sim. MSFS have been tight lipped on how some of the new machine learning technology will work and how much of the world will benefit from it but it does look like this is one area that most definitely will with none of the texture stretching that we’ve seen on steep slopes in the current iteration of the sim. Should be very interesting to see!