We don’t hear too often from Flying Iron Simulations so its always news when they provide a status update. Fortunately we have an overview of how the team is doing and what they are working on thanks to a new update on the developer’s Discord server. Let’s catch up!

In development

Flying Iron Simulations have been busy working on projects for both Microsoft Flight Simulator as well as DCS World. Their most recent release for MSFS, the Fw190A-8, is a very well realized warbird for that sim (see the Stormbirds review here). Meanwhile, DCS World fans are a little more anxiously awaiting news on the DCS: A-7 Corsair II project. We learn a little more about their plans for both sims thanks to the update.

Here it is in full for folks who don’t have Discord:

Hey guys!
I apologize for the lack of updates, I know everyone’s been really eager to hear some news and we’ve had my head in the sand a little bit. Sorry about that! The module is still very much in active development; we have just been quiet as far as news and updates to try and reduce our workload a little bit, but we can see that’s getting abit frustrating and we need to do better with our communication.

Right now our time is split roughly 50/50 between DCS & MSFS; as you might have guessed already we rely on our MSFS work to continue funding development of the A7 and so it does require us to split our time between the 2 sims, at least at this stage. After our upcoming release for MSFS 2024, we will then be pivoting to place the full team back onto the A7 to significantly speed up the development process.

Currently I am continuing to put alot of hours into the A-7 codebase & have begun collaborating with ED to work on the Terrain Following & Terrain Avoidance radar modes. The last few weeks have been spent doing some optimizations, refactoring & cleanup and improving the robustness of the code base. Not the most exciting thing, but essential for a smooth & bug-free module! More significantly I spent some time developing a new Lookup-Table system, which powers a vast amount of aircraft systems and flight model data underneath the hood. By breaking away from the traditional index-based iterative search methods (eg the CPU must search through all 50 data points in a 50-point table to find the correct value) we’ve been able to develop a mathematical index system that is able to calculate and find the correct data point in a single call. I’ll explain this in more detail in our first mini-update in a few weeks. TLDR: The heaviest parts of our codebase have been optimized to run significantly faster!

With all that said, I’ll be doing my best to post some sort of monthly mini-update here in our discord server to keep you all in the loop with how the module is progressing, and hopefully help ease some of the frustration of waiting. I’ll also be doing one of my detailed dev reports, but not for another few months when we have some breathing room.

I hope you can understand and as always thank you so much for continuing to support us! All of your messages, activity, requests for news and just general love for the A7 absolutely does not go unnoticed – it’s a constant reminder of just how passionate the DCS & A7 community is, and it gives us the motivation & reassurance to see this project through to the end, even when it seems difficult.

So thank you all, truly

Dan from the Flying Iron Simulations team on Discord

There you have it with all of the latest news from this group.

Obviously development work involves balancing finances and efforts to keep different projects going. The juggling act is undoubtedly a difficult one. Of course, DCS World modules take a considerably longer time to develop but I’m encouraged by the behind the scenes work on the Corsair II though obviously the road will be long.

The team are also working on a B-17 for MSFS with untextured shots of the project showing up back in June of last year. Surely it has progressed since then.

I look forward to more updates on it and other Flying Iron Simulations projects!