Last week, Microsoft Flight Simulator"s weekly update was kept brief, with the development team noting the sending out of further invitations for prospective Alpha participants, as well as the imminent release of Alpha 4. Today, the latter piece of news has been confirmed, with build 1.4.2.0 rolling out to Insiders right now. Further updates in the form of a Partnership Series announcements, more SDK information, and a Feedback Snapshot have been unveiled as well.
The highlights for Alpha 4 include new content in the form of flight model updates being applied across the board, with all available plane models getting improvements to various components such as weight and balance. With regards to acting upon community feedback, fixes have been pushed out in different departments, including controls and inputs, in-game airports, and more.
Plane-specific improvements this time around have addressed issues with the A320neo, the B747-8i, the Bonanza G36, the C152, and the TBM 930. The update also rolls out a bunch of bug fixes and QoL improvements which can be read in detail in the original post. There are also some known issues to look out for, such as users not being informed that they are in control of the plane when starting the lesson 3 training session. The latest release can be discussed in the forums here, while feedback on different aspects of Alpha 4 can be provided here.
With the rolling out of the latest build, Microsoft is also sending out Alpha participation invitations yet again, so keep a look out for those in your email inboxes.
Moving on to further news from this week, the first among some recently announced Partnership Series updates has finally been unveiled in detail today, with the firm Meteoblue being granted the spotlight. In the video above, the company"s Co-founder Mathias D. Muller explains how the weather forecast system in Flight Simulator has been created and actually works.
With regards to an improved SDK release, one can be expected next week featuring enhanced documentation and new samples. For those looking to understand more of the technical aspect, the following updates have been made:
Progress is being made on the WebAssembly front as well. Several WebAssembly extensions are being implemented, which should result in better performance. Static WebAssembly libraries can now be authored, and we are making progress on helper libraries designed to ease the transition of legacy C++ code to the new Flight Simulator architecture. SimConnect is getting more attention and we are fixing some bugs in it and started developing a test coverage framework to help identify regressions and make it more robust. HTML-based UI and aircraft instruments are now authored as separate packages, making it possible for third party developers to author their own HTML-based instruments. As real-world examples of SDK usage, we plan to share the source assets for both an official aircraft and a high quality airport as SDK samples.
And finally, the latest iteration of the Feedback Snapshot has been made available. Upon closer inspection, it looks as though the previous version has been posted again, which was first made generally available over a month ago. This seems to be an oversight on the team"s part, since the latest snapshot should have been v5.01, following on from its Insider release a couple of weeks back. However, it hasn"t been confirmed that this is the actual case as of yet.