Some short service announcements for you all and general updates on the company as a whole.
I’ll start with the not-so-great news, progress on the IAEs (and by extension - the external engine model) has been slower than expected due to the conflict in Ukraine. The developer taking lead on the integration of the external engine model is, unfortunately, regularly without power and heating for days. The recent large scale missile strikes in the region have only served to worsen the situation, and we do not expect the circumstances to improve in the near future. With that being said, work does continue where possible, and last night we managed to clear an important prototype milestone - the implementation of fast lookup algorithms, making the engine model math more performant by nearly 1000x.
I have not shared many details about the engine model as yet, but we are being ambitious with our goals - and the set of data we’re using to build it is absolutely enormous. This fast lookup algorithm clears a large hurdle in making the implementation possible. We are inching closer to having a prototype flying, but as ever, we will not be providing a timescale for this given the variable circumstances around it.
Please take this as a subtle reminder that while we are all extremely committed to what we do here at Fenix, sometimes life takes a front seat instead, and the welfare, comfort, and safety of our developers will always come first.
In other areas of the company, we are approaching the 400 man-hour mark on the EFB rewrite. A reminder that this “update” will see no changes made to the front end, but instead, is a robust rewrite of the underlying architecture to support the performance, scalability, and maintainability of the EFB. This is the backbone of future features such as a more robust state-saving system.
Something else we've been hinting at is the major visual upgrade that continues along in the background. The art team have been very busy over the last several months almost entirely rebuilding the visual model of the aircraft. It wouldn't surprise me if we were the first to start active development of an airliner in MSFS back in 2019, before any art or development tools were available. We begun R&D as soon as alpha access was granted, finding ways to port across models, investigating systems, and get a good 'feel' for development possibilities. In doing so, we played it pretty safe on the visuals - keeping the polycount and texture utilisation very similar to existing simulator platforms. Now MSFS has mostly matured and stabilized, it's clear that we 'undershot' a little bit on this front, and left a lot on the table. Dubbed 'V2' internally for the near total-rebuild, this will be a substantial, and free, upgrade to our A320 product; hopefully making it the benchmark for visual quality and accuracy. We're not ready to share anything major on this yet.
Our new installer system with delta-update capabilities is also soon approaching a point where it will be deployed into testing. We are currently undertaking some API work with our licensing/activation servers, and here we must tread with some caution as we do not want to introduce loopholes and potential security vulnerabilities. We will keep the new installer in testing for an extended period of time to also ensure it’s reliable when placed in your hands. I’m sure most of you are excited about the prospect of no longer having to download an entire 2GB installer file (and manually installing it), much in the same way I am excited at no longer having to pay for the server costs associated with distributing a 2GB installer file everytime we deploy a new build. @everyone - second ping!
Also, we are expanding! We’re currently actively looking for developers with an interest in flight simulation to work on the A320 and SecretOtherStuffTM. I’ve put together a small snippet of the skillsets we’re looking for. If you feel like you’re a good fit, please shoot us an email at........ we’re looking for developers in a few different areas. Keep in mind this a guideline, not an absolute!
Requirements: C# .NET Framework Intermediate C++ knowledge Intermediate aircraft system understanding
Will be a plus but NOT required: Aviation engineering experience Flight Sim experience Multi-process and distributed systems Multi-threading experience Windows desktop: WPF and/or WinForms 2D Graphics: Direct2D or anything similar (skia, GDI+, HTML5 Canvas etc) Basic understanding of 3D graphics
CVs welcome!
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Finally, we're partnered with Navigraph on their community survey! We'd appreciate if you guys take a moment to fill this out, it serves as a useful reference point for us in the industry.
That will be all for now.
