Captains,
I have had a few days to catch up on sleep and spend some time behind the scenes getting caught up managing the various back-end processes that keep PMDG running- but now that it is the weekend I thought it was a good idea to pop in and say hello and offer some insight into what we are doing in the back-room.
To Start: A NOTAM:
First, lets start with a bit of unpleasant news that qualifies as a temporary NOTAM: The service provider that manages part of the activation process for us in the background has notified me that at approximately 1930Z they started an unplanned maintenance cycle that will be completed at approximately 0030Z/15MAY. This will affect activation of most PMDG products during the NOTAM period for most customers. This is the second multi-hour failure they have experienced during the past week. I apologize for the outage and ask your forgiveness and patience on their behalf.
I have voiced my strongly our continued disappointment in their reliability and will be meeting with them on Tuesday to discuss the importance of reliability if they are to continue being our supporting vendor.
Next: Something Not 737 Related:
On Monday 17MAY22 we will be pushing a small update for the PMDG DC-6 for Microsoft Flight Simulator. This update includes a sweep up of some changes we have made since the previous update. We will post a list of those changes at the time the update is published, but you can get the update at no cost via the PMDG Operations Center.
Updates Pending for the PMDG 737-700 for MSFS:
Late next week (Thu/Fri) we will push the first of a series of update for the PMDG 737 for MSFS. This first update will be relatively small, focused on a few customer experience issues and some small/easy corrections to a few items that have been reported since product release on Monday. Overall, we are very happy with the product stability in user operation, but as we always do, our team has been monitoring various user groups and our own technical support intake and forum posts in order to cull through and identify areas that may need to be addressed now that the product is in widespread use.
We are happy that most of the issues we have identified are categorized as corrections/improvements and we are not seeing any universally disruptive concerns at this juncture. (Problems such as CTDs affecting large groups of users and that sort of thing, is what I mean...)
For those who are new to PMDG: We have a very aggressive method of collecting, categorizing, researching and tracking issues that get reported to us. You will find that once we get through the initial cloud of release week, we tend to push updates that will contain anywhere from 25-200 ranging from major corrections/changes to tiny, inconsequential obscuria that we noticed along the way. We expect to be pushing updates out for the 737-700 at a weekly pace initially so if you have run into something that is creating problems for you- there is a good chance it will get swept up into an update soon enough.
We have a couple of major research efforts underway that we want to tell you about also:
We have had a few oddball reports of folks doing things that we never considered possibilities, too. (Yes, one poor fellow flew the drone camera to his destination many miles away- and then discovered it created problems...
) All of the development team is aware that this is an entirely new simulator platform with entirely new capabilities, so there are things we never pondered being important that customers have pointed to as needing attention- and that process will be ongoing for many years, I suspect. As usual we will add many fun new features as time goes on here- the journey shall be fun for all of us!
There are a host of other items we are working on and toward- and it would be impossible for me to list them all. The bottom line is that we are really quite happy with the results of the airplane in wide customer use, but that doesn't mean we simply turn the lights off and go home. For us the development process for our products is more ongoing and we will continue to find and hunt down solutions to things as we work toward the 737-600/800/900 releases.
Look for our first update to the 737 coming to you via the PMDG Operations Center late this coming week. First one will be mostly small items, but then we'll get into some heavier items in subsequent updates. We'll post the change lists here once we have published the update so you can see what changes have been made.
Last Item: Thank you! Last item for tonight is a quick note to say thank you. To EACH of you. In twenty five years of creating airplane addons for simmers, we are always quietly amazed that people show such appreciation for our work. At times this kind of development really isn't that much fun, and there has been more than one occasion where each of us has pondered calling those head-hunters to get us back into the aviation industry where at least the hours and workload are predictable. Then we have weeks like this week- and see how much the results of our work means to all of you as simmers- and that makes the work fun again.
So thank you for that. We have really enjoyed watching you put the 737 to work this week.
We are just getting started. Vin promises me we will be able to start previewing the 777 "soon™"
I have had a few days to catch up on sleep and spend some time behind the scenes getting caught up managing the various back-end processes that keep PMDG running- but now that it is the weekend I thought it was a good idea to pop in and say hello and offer some insight into what we are doing in the back-room.
To Start: A NOTAM:
First, lets start with a bit of unpleasant news that qualifies as a temporary NOTAM: The service provider that manages part of the activation process for us in the background has notified me that at approximately 1930Z they started an unplanned maintenance cycle that will be completed at approximately 0030Z/15MAY. This will affect activation of most PMDG products during the NOTAM period for most customers. This is the second multi-hour failure they have experienced during the past week. I apologize for the outage and ask your forgiveness and patience on their behalf.
I have voiced my strongly our continued disappointment in their reliability and will be meeting with them on Tuesday to discuss the importance of reliability if they are to continue being our supporting vendor.
Next: Something Not 737 Related:
On Monday 17MAY22 we will be pushing a small update for the PMDG DC-6 for Microsoft Flight Simulator. This update includes a sweep up of some changes we have made since the previous update. We will post a list of those changes at the time the update is published, but you can get the update at no cost via the PMDG Operations Center.
Updates Pending for the PMDG 737-700 for MSFS:
Late next week (Thu/Fri) we will push the first of a series of update for the PMDG 737 for MSFS. This first update will be relatively small, focused on a few customer experience issues and some small/easy corrections to a few items that have been reported since product release on Monday. Overall, we are very happy with the product stability in user operation, but as we always do, our team has been monitoring various user groups and our own technical support intake and forum posts in order to cull through and identify areas that may need to be addressed now that the product is in widespread use.
We are happy that most of the issues we have identified are categorized as corrections/improvements and we are not seeing any universally disruptive concerns at this juncture. (Problems such as CTDs affecting large groups of users and that sort of thing, is what I mean...)
For those who are new to PMDG: We have a very aggressive method of collecting, categorizing, researching and tracking issues that get reported to us. You will find that once we get through the initial cloud of release week, we tend to push updates that will contain anywhere from 25-200 ranging from major corrections/changes to tiny, inconsequential obscuria that we noticed along the way. We expect to be pushing updates out for the 737-700 at a weekly pace initially so if you have run into something that is creating problems for you- there is a good chance it will get swept up into an update soon enough.
We have a couple of major research efforts underway that we want to tell you about also:
- Customers seeing flickering artifacts on the displays: We have gotten a few reports at tech support, and in threads here in the forum that some users are seeing flickering artifacts on the displays. They are often reported as "when turning" but this is a distractor, because the turning causes a redraw mechanism that fails. We can reproduce this in house in the EFIS/MAP layout, which is why that layout is disabled in the initial release. We believe this to be related to a problem in the GDI+/NANO layer and brought it to the attention of Asobo in October, but I believe it was viewed as a lower priority item as we were able to code our way around it with some ingenuity. Unforunately, when SU9 landed, the problem returned to the EFIS/MAP layout and this resulted in us disabling that option and re-floating it to Asobo for their review. It has not been reviewed as of this juncture as the individual responsible was not in the office last week. We are hoping it will get some attention this week. We will keep you posted.
- "Low FPS Control Animation" is a phrase that took some time to sort out, since it is a mixed metaphor that doesn't really describe the issue well. Working with a few folks here in the PMDG forum we were able to get some examples of what users see when they report this issue. We have a few theories on what causes it and are hoping to have a chance to test some corrections with folks that we know to see it during the coming week. It is a curious item that may be caused by a particular combination of settings- but that usually means it is something we can code out of the product. We shall certainly try.
- Lack of steering input for GameController users: We have mentioned a few times that Asobo added a "nose wheel steering axis" to the sim with SU9 (Actually- it has been there but was inoperative until SU9) and this brought with it some changes in the behavior of the ground steering that proved to be incompatibly with the real-world functionality of the 737's tiller/rudder pedal steering interconnect. This caused us to make some changes to the steering input, but those appear to have been further aggravated problems for users trying to operate the airplane with game controllers. We have repeatedly requested additional documentation on these changes from Asobo, but thus far we haven't gotten anything useful. We remain hopeful that the pending SDK update might include some documentation of the changes that were made so that we can code around these issues and get everybody working with a viable solution for ground steering. Stay tuned.
We have had a few oddball reports of folks doing things that we never considered possibilities, too. (Yes, one poor fellow flew the drone camera to his destination many miles away- and then discovered it created problems...
) All of the development team is aware that this is an entirely new simulator platform with entirely new capabilities, so there are things we never pondered being important that customers have pointed to as needing attention- and that process will be ongoing for many years, I suspect. As usual we will add many fun new features as time goes on here- the journey shall be fun for all of us!There are a host of other items we are working on and toward- and it would be impossible for me to list them all. The bottom line is that we are really quite happy with the results of the airplane in wide customer use, but that doesn't mean we simply turn the lights off and go home. For us the development process for our products is more ongoing and we will continue to find and hunt down solutions to things as we work toward the 737-600/800/900 releases.
Look for our first update to the 737 coming to you via the PMDG Operations Center late this coming week. First one will be mostly small items, but then we'll get into some heavier items in subsequent updates. We'll post the change lists here once we have published the update so you can see what changes have been made.
Last Item: Thank you! Last item for tonight is a quick note to say thank you. To EACH of you. In twenty five years of creating airplane addons for simmers, we are always quietly amazed that people show such appreciation for our work. At times this kind of development really isn't that much fun, and there has been more than one occasion where each of us has pondered calling those head-hunters to get us back into the aviation industry where at least the hours and workload are predictable. Then we have weeks like this week- and see how much the results of our work means to all of you as simmers- and that makes the work fun again.
So thank you for that. We have really enjoyed watching you put the 737 to work this week.
We are just getting started. Vin promises me we will be able to start previewing the 777 "soon™"
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