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[09OCT22] Some pending updates on various PMDG related topics!
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rsrandazzo
rsrandazzo
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Join Date: Sep 2018 Posts: 2147
#1
[09OCT22] Some pending updates on various PMDG related topics!
Today, 08:40
Captains-

It has been a while since I updated you so there is lots of ground to cover. Grab your sunday coffee (monday for those on the west side of the date line) and dive in!

(TL;dr: End of summer downtime. 737-900 stuff. Tablet stuff. Some other stuff. Stuff about stuff. A 777 stuff. A picture stuff. Signature block.  )


As we enter into the final quarter of 2022, we have a few projects at high boil, and a few more that are rapidly approaching the boiling point.

The last gasp of summer is behind us and you probably noticed a stutter step in our updates and development speed as we got the PMDG 737-800 for MSFS released at the end of August. For those with kids of a certain age (which covers most of us at PMDG) it tends to be the time of year to return children to college and/or grab a vacation moment with family- and after a very long 3.5 years non-stop overlapping development cycles at PMDG I made a snap decision to start cycling the team through some extended rest periods.

We have a very relaxed working environment, but by nature of the fact that it is a 24/7 operation, we never really stop and take a break. With the transition from P3D/FSX to an MSFS dominant environment, the workload had been extremely high for some time and burnout was really beginning to show on the team beginning in June. I started ushering members of the team out the door strategically mid summer because I think mental health is incredibly important to the creative process- and all of us were beginning to see stress points that just shouldn't be present. I hadn't really planned on much down time myself but a few of the guys pointed out that my morale might benefit from a bit of down time (I suspect they mean team morale in my absence more than my personal morale- but that is a different discussion entirely!) so I took some time with family and friends and came back with a fully green battery for the first time in years.

Proving that no-good-deed-goes-unpunished, I then spent all of last week in bed due to some bacterial something or other in my lungs/throat/ear... Unpleasant. I don't recommend.

Most of the team is back now except for one fellow who is currently away- and one other fellow who steadfastly refuses to go until he hits a nice strategic gap in his workflow on the 777. All in all things are humming along quite nicely and at speed- which is probably a good argument for regular breaks from the grind and avoiding the kinds of binges we have found ourselves on the past few years!

So lets get into it:

The 737 series is coming upon a few milestones in the weeks ahead. These involve the release of the PMDG 737-900 for MSFS, continued addition of new functionality including further flight model improvements, inclusion of our new PMDG Flight Tablet, some improvements to system logic, various bug fixes and general improvements around the 737 product line.

PMDG 737 for MSFS: Update Coming:
We have been testing an update that covers the entire product line, and brings in another sweep of fixes, tuning and improvements. Some of these fixes are things that we were working on during the MSFS SU10 beta period in order to improve stability of of control-related functions such as pitch, yaw, roll and thrust. The MSFS environment is significantly more dynamic than the real world environment- and this creates some interesting engineering challenges in order to ensure that the airplane flies properly. Fortunately for PMDG, we have had an actual PhD scientist/mathematician on staff for 20+ years and the full force of his professional background is proving to be worth it's thrust/lift/drag/weight in gold. (See what I did there?)

We anticipate pushing this update out to you in a few days- with another to follow shortly after to bring greater stability to the thrust channel when operating under A/T. It is a challenge to make the system properly responsive in an unrealistically active environment but we are dialing it in nicely and will hand it to you as it is ready.

PMDG 737-900: Prepping for Beta Testing:
The PMDG 737-900 for MSFS is currently being prepped for beta testing and it is sloshing back and forth on the calendar a bit as we wrestle with a few issues behind the scenes. My best guess for this release is currently mid-november'ish if it takes as long as we think to sort out a few bits here and there. I am being intentionally vague because there are a number of factors at play (some of which have to do with MAX, for those who like to be clubbed over the head with subtle hints) that are causing us to slow this one a bit on approach.

PMDG Universal Flight Tablet:
Mixed into this developmental milieu is the PMDG Flight Tablet which will be included in the entire 737, 747 and 777 product line. The tablet will serve as a unified base station for a number of PMDG-centric applications, many of which we have previously included in our P3D EFBs going back to 2016, including performance computations, analysis, weight/balance, etc. To these functions we are adding more of an OS type environment that will carry tools for you to connect to simBrief, operate with Navigraph's wonderful functionality, manage your PMDG options/equipment/airplane services etc. As expected the tablet will mimic functionality of a popular, commercially available tablet and the various applications will launch within the limited, structured operating system we have created for it's use.

I have seen some of our newer PMDG customers wonder "why didn't PMDG think of having an EFB?" For the benefit of those folks: We have given you many of these features in a very comprehensive EFB simulation within our 747-8, 777s and the 737NGXu within P3D. Those simulations carried versions of Boeing's "standard EFB" which are clunky, sort of mid-90s tech that was popular briefly and then faded behind the dominance of iPad/Surface type devices. Late in the 737 for MSFS development we saw quite a bit of customer feedback hoping that we would "dump that old stuff" and replace it with a tablet based suite- so that is what we are doing here.

I don't think much here is ground-breaking in the tablet- but it does provide some fancier graphics and a more modern feel, it will "commonize" many of your interactions with the PMDG product lines and we will be rolling some other, new functionality into it as we go- so there is that. 

We have had discussions with a few operators and of course many of our technical advisors work with these tools daily in their line flying, and I use a range of tablet based applications in planning, dispatching, communicating, operational performance monitoring in my current flying. We have a roadmap of new tools that will grow over time and we are about to begin growing giving you access to the suite of tools that we think will give you a really good balance of realism and sim management without infringing on any real world IP concerns. We also have to be careful not to turn ourselves into a firm that makes a really nice tablet simulation that occasionally publishes updates for airplanes, too.

PMDG 737 for MSFS in MSFS Marketplace:
We have been sitting on our hands with respect to marketplace- due mostly to our desire to have the 737 "done and tidy" before handing it off to what is effectively the worlds largest market for simulation products. In the interest of being totally candid- I have been holding the reins in on this step mostly because I wanted to be sure the product line advanced through a few phases of our developmental support, as well as initial testing with the tablet before we handed it off to MSFS. Supporting all of you via micro-update is a simple thing for us to do. We don't yet have sufficient experience supporting a rapid development process via marketplace and we wanted to be sure things would go smoothly before going to MSFS Marketplace.

That process will start off here soonish. We are going to enter the water gently- as this has the potential to create a significant support uplift and we want to be sure that we can adequately manage all customers to a high quality degree. In the P3D market, PMDG was a "big" player and we could easily manage what came our way. In the MSFS market we are intensely small, and very cognizant of the associated risks... So we are playing this a bit more slowly than I anticipate we will with subsequent product lines.

Remember: We are learning MSFS on the fly, so to speak- and trying to get it as right as we can the first time. 

What is PMDG Doing with SU10's SDK Changes?:
This question has been asked in about 50 different forms since early summer. For the most part I am going to refrain from commenting too specifically about individual items as it risks becoming a scenario in which the realities of development and user expectations get to clash constantly even though there is no actual reason for them to do so.

Please know that we see and read the SDK notes as well as the update notes. For the most part, the changes and adaptations Asobo is making to the platform are good and welcome and definitely progressing in the direction we are excited to see them go. There are often many underlying complicating factors to each change- and it does take some time for us to dig in and evaluate individual features before we add them into our products. Sometimes new features immediate wins, and other times they require significant lifting on our part and take time, and in still other instances we find them insufficient to the needs of our products.

For the most part- I have asked our dev team to refrain from most public discussion of these points because it has a way of being interpreted as "PMDG is unhappy with Asobo" and this isn't the case. The poor folks at Asobo have likely come to dread seeing developers posting on all the things they feel are missing from the sim, and I very much want to avoid adding to that dread. They are doing a TON of stuff to keep improving and building this platform- and while there have been moments where I felt a bit of criticism was appropriate- I also feel it is important to know when to stand out of the way and let progress happen. You all have done this with us, as well- so I am pretty comfortable we wall know what I mean here.

You may see us answer questions related to items such as weather radar with non-specific answers, or you may see us simply not give attention to topics in certain spaces at all. Please know that we are as interested in adding new features to our products as anyone- and when we get new things we can add we will and we are. Some features such as weather radar are really incredibly complex- and once the data that we need to simulate wx radar is present in the sim, we shall give it to you. But also know that it is bloody difficult for Asobo to cleave off the kind of development manpower that would be required to do that properly and I don't personally expect we will see it right away. I have spent 25 years picking my way through lines of weather using radar and I know it's value probably better than anyone on the PMDG or Asobo teams... Some of the scariest moments I have had flying airplanes came about when nothing showed on radar at all... Buy me lunch and I might tell you a few of those stories.

Where are we with XBox?:
I read in some update snippets from Asobo/MS that they are still working on compatibility for C++/WASM projects on the XBox platform. Once that is sorted on their end, we will make the DC-6 live on that platform once again to ensure it goes smoothly- and then we'll work in concert with MS to ensure the 737s are also compatible. Right now this road is a twisty-turny one and we will navigate it in real time once the capability reaches reality.

We have seen some folks comment in places that "PMDG is leaving out functionality for Xbox compatibility." Please help stomp that out. We have not had a single discussion internally to development in which "well if we do X we can't put it on XBox" has been a deciding factor. There may be functions that cannot be used on Xbox in the 737 (tablet, for example- due to MS limitations) but we would never take a feature off the table for our PC users in order to maintain commonality with XBox...

PMDG 777 for MSFS:
This project is humming right along- in fact it made greater progress than expected while I was away on vacation. I suggested to the team that this was a good indication that perhaps I should remain on vacation, but there was not a general sense of agreement in this regard. 

The flight deck model for this project is absolutely spectacular and since we used a "well loved" flight deck as the basis for our build, it has more of the wear and maintenance abuse you'd expect to find in an in-service airplane. For those who have not seen me point this out: We used a brand new (not-yet-in-service) 737 for the 737 for MSFS, we used an average age 777 and we have a beat-to-death workhorse 747 serving as the basis for that product. It will give you a good breadth of age- and before anyone asks, no we really don't plan to let you choose the age of the cockpit. It is a HUGE amount of work for the 3D and texture models to match, since the techniques we use build many of the imperfections right down to the model level... but wait until you see it- it is spectacular!

Updates for P3D Users:
I don't have any current information to share on this topic, yet. We are planning a few merge-ins to bring some of the new control law behaviors backward into our P3D products- but we haven't yet found the right gap in the testing program to allow this to happen. More information will be made available once I have it.


I usually toss a pretty picture in for those that don't like to read- so here is one of a tablet in use on an actual flight. 

TabletInUse.jpg



Okay- so that is all for this weekend. You will be hearing from me a bit more regularly now. I hope you all are well and avoiding any of the various viral scourge running around public spaces.