World Update 17 and MSFS 2024 Questions Answered: Your Developer Stream Recap – FSElite

Jorg Neumann, Sebastian Wloch and Martial Bossard have taken to the airwaves again this evening for the latest Microsoft Flight Simulator development update, where a handful of exciting news items were reeled out as well as a handful of questions answered.

World Update 17: United Kingdom and Ireland

The main takeaway from the stream is that the next world update to hit the sim will be focussing on the United Kingdom and Ireland. The third world update for MSFS released back in 2021 also focussed on this region, however a number of highly-requested community wishlist items such as detailed photogrammetry coverage for London are now being added as the team revisit the British Isles.

As per usual with world updates, the free package will include several dozen POIs (approximately 70 by our count), some hand-crafted airports and photogrammetry towns/cities, and improved terrain data. Jorg kicked off the showcase of world update 17 by showing off the new DEM (digital elevation model) that the team are bringing into the sim.

By the looks of things, there are only minor improvements to England with the real leaps and gains being made in more remote regions of Scotland, Wales and Ireland. Commenting on the improvements, Jorg said that London and most of England is now up to about 50-100cm resolution, whereas the rest of the UK is at around 2 metres resolution depending on the coverage that the team could access.

Also par for the course with world updates at this point, the POIs have all been modelled by Gaya Simulations, one of Microsoft’s partner studios. Gaya have also presumably worked on some of the airports, although we know at least one of these was produced by iniBuilds.

Jorg admitted on stream that the last world update to cover Ireland left the area “severely under-served”, and showed off two new photogrammetry cities on the island (Cork and Dublin) as well as a number of the new POIs (images of those are included below).

Northern Ireland and the Isle of Man also get a handful of custom POIs. Jorg said on stream that the team had aspired to get good photogrammetry data for Belfast, but at present that wasn’t possible. However he did seemingly alude to the possibility that this city may come into the sim at a later date.

Elsewhere on the mainland of Great Britain, the cities of Glasgow, Edinburgh, Cardiff, London, Bristol, Leeds, Bradford, Sunderland, Liverpool, Newcastle and Brighton are all included for a grand total of 13 photogrammetry cities included in the update.

Simmers looking to fly into the new hand-crafted airports will have a selection between Cork (EICK), Sumburgh (EGPB), Cardiff (EGFF), London Stansted (EGSS) and Farnborough (EGLF). Jorg went on to say that the Farnborough scenery was being produced by iniBuilds ahead of the famous Farnborough air show taking place next week, and that the scenery is available in the airshow configuration (with guests and static aircraft dotted around the southern apron) if simmers scroll the time and date of their sim into the corresponding airshow days. This will seemingly work in a similar way to how the team implemented Paris Le-Bourget (LFPB) airport ahead of the Paris air show last year.

Finaly, Jorg confirmed that World Update 17 is coming out in 5 days, which would place a release on Monday July 22nd.

Local Legend 18

The next Local Legend is being made by iniBuilds. A slide to introduce the aircraft was shown on the stream, however Jorg agonisingly had to tell viewers that the local legend is not yet ready to be shown off. This is due to a hiccup in finalising the licensing contract details. Users should not be detered though, as Jorg says the aircraft is “done” and testers have “been having a lot of fun with it”. The manufacturer is also apparently very much on board with the virtual recreation of their flying machine being brought to market, with Jorg saying the hold up is solely down to “lawyers talking to each other”.

Other than these fairly scant details, Jorg did confirm that the next local legend is a helicopter. Given that the local legend aircraft tend to have a connection to the country in the corresponding world update, we would guess that this is a helicopter produced in the UK or Ireland. We are keen to hear what you think it might be in the comments section.

July Surprise

Featured in the roadmap snapshot was a mention of a surprise in the month of July. During the stream Jorg was questioned on this, and although seemingly hesitant to comment initially, did go on to confirm that an aircraft for MSFS 2020 was planned to come out alongside the upcoming Olympic Games in Paris. However, Jorg said this was “another aircraft we have to be careful with” (‘another’ alluding to the local legend situation) and that the aircraft “needed more baking time” before it would be fully ready. In summary, there is a surprise aircraft coming, but it will not be ready in time for a release in July.

World Hub

The developers briefly touched upon the status of the World Hub, with a snapshot overview of how things are going so far with the program. For those unfamiliar with what World Hub is or how it works, check out our article here covering the first batch of airport releases back in February.

Jorg said on stream that around 1,200 people had signed up with just under 700 having logged in. 82 users have made at least one submission, with a total of 675 submissions made and 497 of these being approved. Just shy of 400 unique airports have been updated into the sim now.

Jorg mentioned that during Flight Sim Expo in Las Vegas, he had met a world hub contributor who had raised concerns about the new aerial imagery data coming to MSFS 2024 potentially making work done in the World Hub right now redundant. Jorg says that although the new aerials represent an improvement, in some cases they might shift details like buildings and foliage several meters. For this reason, the World Hub is shortly going to be closed (it was suggested that the closure will coincide with the release of WU17) and re-opened again only after the release of MSFS 2024 plus a few extra months, to prevent anybody from wasting their time.

Jorg said that on reflection, though, the World Hub concept had proven “super successful”, but that it would take some more time to get the new sim out to market and begin to capitalise on the full potential of the World Hub.

Top Gun Update Removal

The Top Gun DLC was MSFS was added to the sim last year to coincide with the theatrical release of Tom Cruise’s aerial action-packed movie. However, the license from the film studio to sell this was never permanent and was due to expire on May 22nd of this year. Following a push from the MSFS developers, though, this was extended until July 22nd. Jorg said on stream that he had gone back to Paramount and asked if the DLC could be kept in the store on a more permanent basis, and the film studio has agreed to this.

However the decision still has to be approved by the film makers (production company), and a decision from them is still pending. Jorg says he is hoping to hear from them imminently, but as things stand at the time of writing the Top Gun DLC will be removed from sale on July 22nd. Users who have purchased the DLC will still be able to use it and play the associated content, but those who have not purchased it will have missed their last chance to pick it up.

If the situation in relation to the Top Gun DLC changes in the next few days or over the weekend, this article will be amended.

MSFS 2024 New Info and Questions Answered

In wrapping up the stream, Jorg confirmed that the next development stream would contain more information relating to MSFS 2024. An aircraft / developer announcement will be made, which Jorg said would complete the lineup of all the aircraft contained in the “Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 Standard Edition”. Such phrasing all but confirms the new sim will ship with base and premium tier options, just like MSFS 2020 did. Jorg said this developer update/announcement will likely take place in the next 4 weeks and certainly before the announcement of World Update 18.

Jorg said that in addition to this next 2024 aircraft update, the community will begin to see “a lot more information about 2024 in the next 8 weeks”.

The community understandably has a lot of questions in relation to Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, and this was reflected on the development stream by the number of questions that related or at least alluded to the upcoming simulator. Among some of the major tid-bits of information was that support for multiple jetways is not expected to be coming to MSFS 2024 (at least not at launch day).

We will now reel off some of the questions asked during the Q&A sessions and summarise the answers given by the developers.

Q: Will support for multiple jetways be coming to MSFS 2020/2024?
A: This was in the roadmap, but at this stage it looks unlikely to be coming to MSFS2024 at launch. More details will be shared in later development updates that are more focussed toward the upcoming sim.

Q: Will MSFS 2024 have any world updates for Africa?
A: Yes. Asobo and Microsoft have already got some imaging planes into Africa and gathered the TIN data required for a handful of photogrametry cities.

Q: Will MSFS 2024 support up to 6 throttle axes for aircraft like the AN225?
A: Martial was unable to confirm on the stream but said he would have an answer for the next Q&A.

Q: When will you start to provide more in-depth information on MSFS 2024?
A: September.

Q: How is the long-planned Brazil World Update coming along?
A: The data has all now finally been gathered after the team were able to get their imaging aircraft into the country and gather TIN data for the cities. The update is now going into the pipeline, with Jorg saying the update will ship “pretty soon”. He seemed to suggest we would be looking at a wait of months, not weeks however to get our hands on a Brazil update.

Q: When can we expect the next bug fix release for the ATR?
A: ATR recently contacted Microsoft to ask if they would like to add the new STOL version of the ATR-42 to MSFS. Jorg naturally said yes to this, so this has been in development. Highline interiors are also in approximately 2 weeks. Hans Hartmann and his team have also been working on code fixes – these are now in testing and Jorg expects everything to be ready and pushed out as an update by around mid September.

Q: Following FSExpo, can we expect the Microsoft team to attend other events like FSWeekend?
A: Yes, the team will be at FSWeekend next year and are planning to attend the annual Oshkosh fly-in in 2025.

Q: Are there any plans to allow hardware developers to place their products in the MSFS Marketplace?
A: No. The team have no capacity to do fulfillment (no warehouse, basically) so they have no way to send orders out to people. There are no plans for this.

Q: Since it was announced that developers will have the option to sell upgraded versions of addons for a small fee, what happens if the addon was not purchased in 2020? Will it be the price of the original plus the upgrade fee, or a set price by the devs?
A: It will always be a set price for the developers. Microsoft will not charge a fee, and run an agency model in their marketplace meaning prices are set entirely by developers. Jorg has already had conversations with a number of developers who are not planning to charge any upgrade fee, along with some who might – but this is not in Microsoft’s control and is wholly up to the developers.

Q: Will you be able to fly in multiplayer mode with a friend on MSFS 2020 if you are flying in MSFS 2024? Will the servers be shared?
A: No. This was looked into but has been ruled out as a possibility.

Q: Will stock model matching be improved in MSFS 2020 for situations like group flights?
A: The limiting factor here is memory, and MSFS 2020 is already running basically at its memory limit at this point. So it is highly unlikely there is any more that can be done for MSFS 2020 in this regard. A revamped model matching system is coming into the new sim, though no details were shared on this.