Captains,
Happy Saturday to all of you.
Earlier this week we pushed a pretty significant update to the PMDG 737 for Microsoft Flight Simulator product line that was mostly focused on changes to the control law and adapting our engineered flight model so that it can better handle the mathematical instability of the simulated atmospheric model.
Since rolling it out to you- we have seen some users report back to us with scenarios in which the thrust channel will seem to stumble over it's own feet during descents, so quite a bit of our engineering time this week has been focused on creating replication cases to assist with chasing that down.
With highly complex, dynamic systems, it isn't uncommon to find scenarios in which the logic can get tripped up by unrealistic behavior from the sim environment- (this is true in every platform with which we have worked) so a bit more engineering time was required to teach the system to identify some of the potential failure modes it might see in the environment. With these changes, the thrust channel now has greater awareness of certain types of transient, spurious data that can cause it to choose an incorrect response to changes in the velocity of the airplane.
Dr. Vaos pinged me this morning and asked that I push a test build out to the betas with this new set of fixes in order that we can validate them and rapidly push an update to your installations so as to eliminate the issue in the global fleet. I am working on that as we speak. If we find these fixes are stable (they will be) we will udpate you during the week ahead. I am unable to give you an approximate update schedule at this juncture- but we will move it to you as quickly as we can.
Tablet Testing:
For those following this topic, the PMDG Universal Flight Tablet goes into testing today, officially. The version we are handing to our testing team gives them the tablet itself, with only the Navigraph & simbrief functionality enabled as we want them to focus their efforts on those two pieces initially. We are doing this in order to shine a brighter searchlight into specific technology areas so that we are more likely to see and resolve specific issues in specific areas.
Some users have asked if we would roll out the tablet in stages similarly. We are discussing this internally, but haven't decided.
PMDG 737-900 for MSFS:
We are still hoping to move this product to beta testing late this coming week. This is still a soft target, and I do anticipate a bit of slop in the 900 schedule still, as we are working on a number of features across three three airplane types and the piece that should have gotten off the the test circuit to clear the way for the 900 are still lingering a bit. I shall keep you informed, however!
We have some neat new features pending for the 737 line that we haven't been talking about- those will come out in the next couple of update cycles. Lots of goodies coming your way from the development team!
We hope you are all having a good week. Let us know where you are flying!
Happy Saturday to all of you.
Earlier this week we pushed a pretty significant update to the PMDG 737 for Microsoft Flight Simulator product line that was mostly focused on changes to the control law and adapting our engineered flight model so that it can better handle the mathematical instability of the simulated atmospheric model.
Since rolling it out to you- we have seen some users report back to us with scenarios in which the thrust channel will seem to stumble over it's own feet during descents, so quite a bit of our engineering time this week has been focused on creating replication cases to assist with chasing that down.
With highly complex, dynamic systems, it isn't uncommon to find scenarios in which the logic can get tripped up by unrealistic behavior from the sim environment- (this is true in every platform with which we have worked) so a bit more engineering time was required to teach the system to identify some of the potential failure modes it might see in the environment. With these changes, the thrust channel now has greater awareness of certain types of transient, spurious data that can cause it to choose an incorrect response to changes in the velocity of the airplane.
Dr. Vaos pinged me this morning and asked that I push a test build out to the betas with this new set of fixes in order that we can validate them and rapidly push an update to your installations so as to eliminate the issue in the global fleet. I am working on that as we speak. If we find these fixes are stable (they will be) we will udpate you during the week ahead. I am unable to give you an approximate update schedule at this juncture- but we will move it to you as quickly as we can.
Tablet Testing:
For those following this topic, the PMDG Universal Flight Tablet goes into testing today, officially. The version we are handing to our testing team gives them the tablet itself, with only the Navigraph & simbrief functionality enabled as we want them to focus their efforts on those two pieces initially. We are doing this in order to shine a brighter searchlight into specific technology areas so that we are more likely to see and resolve specific issues in specific areas.
Some users have asked if we would roll out the tablet in stages similarly. We are discussing this internally, but haven't decided.
PMDG 737-900 for MSFS:
We are still hoping to move this product to beta testing late this coming week. This is still a soft target, and I do anticipate a bit of slop in the 900 schedule still, as we are working on a number of features across three three airplane types and the piece that should have gotten off the the test circuit to clear the way for the 900 are still lingering a bit. I shall keep you informed, however!
We have some neat new features pending for the 737 line that we haven't been talking about- those will come out in the next couple of update cycles. Lots of goodies coming your way from the development team!
We hope you are all having a good week. Let us know where you are flying!
Rolando Olmo
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