Fenix A320 – Dev Update 06AUG21
Posted August 6, 2021
Hi everyone,
Taking a little break from the usual feature-based deep dives, today I thought I’d give you all a little update on how we’re doing on the development side of things.
SU5 has come and gone, and a lot of buzz has been going around about the update and it’s impact on third party developers. From our perspective, the airplane survived the update relatively unscathed. Operationally, it worked immediately, with some tweaks required here and there for load balancing and performance optimizations – but it was perfectly serviceable. The visual side of things also needed a quick little tweak and is back to working fine. There are some oddities with the rendering of glass that we will be taking a look into a little later, but overall, we’re happy enough. This has been quite a nice demonstration of our external architecture affording us some reliability benefits.
From a performance perspective, we too have benefitted. Our A320 is now running better than the default/stock A320. There is yet some work to go, and in the interest of absolute transparency – we don’t know if and when this will change due to a future update, so don’t quite take this to the bank until the Fenix A320 is on your system.
The default A320 – rendered at 4k, displayed at 1440p, all settings to ULTRA, at KJFK’s RW31L.
The Fenix A320 – rendered at 4k, displayed at 1440p, all settings to ULTRA, at KJFK’s RW31L.
We’re happy enough with where the performance is, but we will continue to find and extract every frame we possibly can as we move through this alpha period.
On another note – here’s something a LOT of you have come into our Discord to ask about. CPDLC. Present and correct, as you’ll see. We only really started development of this last week, but we expect to have it complete and ready for testing very shortly. We’re looking into ways we can elevate the CPDLC experience beyond the basics for all our users, but more on that later. When looking at these, please remember it’s hugely WIP. Stuff will probably be incorrect, but I wanted to confirm that we are, indeed, implementing CPDLC!
With that, on to the second last item – some liveries. Today, I will show some older stuff from defunct airlines of an age gone by (and an old Airbus house livery!), but I think it’s still nice to see this gorgeous airplane wearing something a little different.
Desktop background worthy, in my opinion!
Where possible, all these liveries have correct exit signage, markings, decals, and warning symbols, often translated to the operator’s native language on non-English speaking based aircraft. More details on all this work in the exterior feature review, for another day.
I will wrap this post up by saying I know this has been a very, very brief update – but the team is hard at work for a very good reason. We expect the Fenix A320 to enter beta in a few short weeks. The push is on.
See you next week for an actual feature review!
Thanks,
Aamir