The post Highlights From FlightSimExpo 2024 appeared first on FLYING Magazine.
]]>Over 2,000 simulator enthusiasts, a new attendance record, gathered in the comfort of the air conditioning inside the Rio Las Vegas Hotel & Convention Center while near-record heat scorched the city’s world-famous strip and surrounding desert.
Here are the news highlights from FlightSimExpo 2024:
Development teams from the two most popular flight simulator software titles provided updates on their current and future development schedules, outlining new features:
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 (MSFS2024): MSFS2024 will be a new, stand-alone, flight simulator—not an update to the current MSFS software, with a planned launch date of November 19. Jorg Neumann and Sebastian Wloch, who together head up the development of the MSFS software titles and represent a worldwide workforce of 800 employees, took the stage on Saturday afternoon and shared some key highlights about the upcoming 2024 release:
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 (MSFS2020): The team recapped a few highlights about MSFS 2020. In four years, the development team issued 48 updates, had over 15 million unique members, and over 1 billion total flight sessions—all since the August 2020 launch. Community developers and members have built over 5,000 add-ons, including aircraft, features, challenges/events, airports, and other scenery. These items have helped to enrich the experience and speak to the dedication and passion in the flight simulation community supporting MSFS. Calming the flight sim community’s concerns that MSFS 2020 would not be supported after the launch of MSFS 2024, Neumann confirmed that MSFS 2020 will continue to be updated monthly until 2028. Watch the full update video here.
X-Plane 12 (XP-12): Sim pilots of the popular flight sim title can expect performance updates as early as Q3/Q4 of 2024. These will be driven by structural updates to the software, allowing XP12 to utilize multicore CPU processing, providing better overall sim performance. The development team at X-Plane is also working on a user-tunable visual improvement to the light exposure in the cockpit, allowing a greater degree of detail in the cockpit in sunny conditions. The X-Plane store is being updated to be fully integrated into the XP12 software. It has always been a separate marketplace, found on the web, and will now offer the X-Plane developers greater control over the quality of third-party add-ons and will benefit developers with increased digital rights management controls.
AI was a main theme of the expo presenters, as software developers were keen on incorporating the technology’s advanced learning capabilities into new applications for use in flight simulation. Falling costs for premium AI services allowed some developers of AI-driven software products to lower their monthly subscription fees, drawing enthusiastic applause from the audience.
Development in the flight simulator industry occurs at an extremely rapid pace as evidenced by a new category of software add-ons providing AI-powered air traffic control services to flight sim pilots looking to replace the “stock” ATC that comes with popular flight simulation software titles.
Hardware updates were the second most popular category of announcements at FlightSimExpo 2024:
WinWing: It drew big applause from the crowd by announcing new and lower priced EFIS and CDU controls to be paired with popular A320 and 737 aircraft in both MSFS and X-Plane 11/12. The company also teased a full set of fighter jet controls, avionics, throttles, and switch panels in an impressive launch video. Check out the WinWing hardware on a new flight simulator chassis called Dogfight Dynamics—also new to Flight Sim Expo 2024 (see photo below).
FliteSim.com: The new entrant to the flight sim hardware market announced the successful completion of its recent Indiegogo campaign and the shipping dates for its first production run of a competitively priced force feedback yoke. Two models are available, offering different strengths of resistance.
The base CLS-60 comes with a yoke design modeled after the C172, with a 737 yoke available for purchase as a do-it-yourself upgrade. Also available is a stronger 120N motor that can also be replaced if the user wants more force feedback offered by the stock 60N unit.
The CLS-60 offers a maximum pitch force of 13.5 pounds, and the CLS-120 offers a maximum pitch force of 27 pounds, which company founder Fabian Lim, an accomplished real-world pilot, equated to “a real workout.”
Both the CLS-60 and 120 yokes offer tunable behavior for all envelopes of flight, so the user can dial in the realism for the aircraft they fly. Units are available to order now (see photo below).
No flight simulator expo would be complete without a quick update from flight sim development studios announcing new aircraft launching into MSFS and X-Plane.
Building airliner-sized aircraft can be a multiyear undertaking involving small teams dedicated to getting the flight model and all the complex systems right. Many developers work with real-world pilots of these aircraft to make sure they are authentic representations of the real-world machines. Thousands of hours of software development and thousands of photographs combine into models that are highly accurate.
The team here at FLYING will continue to bring you updates from the world of flight simulation, including news and flight sim hardware reviews.
The post Highlights From FlightSimExpo 2024 appeared first on FLYING Magazine.
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