Lets talk about Friday...

[rsrandazzo 6,353]

Captains-My plan for tonight's update had been a really nice video- but some events during the past two days have conspired to prevent it... I'll shoot for tomorrow night for the video- (not a promise... I have a few things on my plate Saturday, but as soon as I wrap those up I've got some fun stuff to show you in video...) So instead of a visual update, here is one for your brain.A bunch of folks have asked us to describe what we are working on... You would be amazed just how dull things are around here at the moment, and today has been a pretty typical day of wrap-up work with highs and lows...Lets start with the highs!One of the normal tasks that we undertake approaching release is optimization. While the entire NGX has been written from the ground up to provide the best performance possible, there are always areas that can be optimized once the final project starts taking shape. Vin and Michael were heavily involved in this during the past few days, and late tonight when they finished we had an NGX that is getting fully 20% more FPS in most scenarios than it was prior to their update. 20% might not seem like much, but all of us who have flown the airplane post-update are in agreement that the 20% provided a significant boost in fluidity even in extremely complex scenery.My default load/test location is KRNT RW34 (33 in FSX, but you know how it is..) and I am seeing exceptionally good FPS performance at this location using the OrbX scenery, Ultimate Traffic, autogen and road vehicle traffic all set at reasonable levels. We'll start giving you some actual performance benchmarks once the wide beta team is in action... Other Highs: Matt is putting the finishing touches on the livery manager and we think this will really please you all. In the past we have containerized each livery into a unique EXE file, which creates a significant amount of work on our end, and makes rapid reinstall of liveries a bit of a hassle for you. The new livery manager will use a much simpler system that is basically hands-free, but gives you the flexibility to quickly add and remove liveries without any fear of corrupting your aircraft.cfg, license key, etc. If you can drag/drop, double click and look at pretty pictures of airplanes- you can run this livery manager like a pro. Okay- lets take a look at some lows: These are the kinds of frustrations that you run into on the code-side of any complex project, and we had our fill of them today:Dr. Vaos (you know: the Dr. Vaos who hates it when I call him Dr. Vaos in the forum? Yeah... That Dr. Vaos! :( ) spent the better part of the past two days researching obscure reversion behaviors that you may or may not ever see in the FMS. I don't want to go into great detail about them, because he isn't entirely finished, but suffice it so say that over the past two days he has spent about 27hrs on fewer than a half dozen line items that most of you will never run across. What he would have liked to have been working on instead- is the final performance data collection so that the predictive capabilities of the FMS will exactly match the airplane. This is a tedious, time consuming and very precise process that can only be done by developers and pilots who understand what the airplane is doing and WHY it is doing it...With some luck he'll wrap that process up by Tuesday... but that depends on how Saturday goes.On my end- I spent about 13.5 hours chasing down the reason why our airplane's standby electrical system would reconfigure incorrectly when being cycled through various standby power scenarios. This debugging process should have taken all of ten minutes, except that it was hampered by the fact that three different technical resources gave three different explanations of what should happen to one specific bus when the airplane winds up on battery power.To solve the issue required comparing behaviors from the airplane, then matching them to the simulator to see where the simulation was going awry... This of course uncovered a few flaws in the electrical bus assignments to a few of the lights on the overhead panel- which lead to a top-down review of all those lights to make sure they were indeed wired to the correct power sources.You notice I said "sources?" How many of you knew that nearly every annunciator light on this airplane actually has TWO sources of power? We have them all (correctly now, I hope!) modeled so that when you start throwing switches and moving knobs in the NGX cockpit, things will match the airplane PRECISELY.We have never gone to this depth in any of our simulations and while it makes for a really fantastic simulation for you- it can sometimes be rather complicated when you have strange "one off" issues that defy ready explanation.Needless to say, at around 1:30am the standby power system was sorted out, the light bulbs were all verified, and another day came to a close...See? Wasn't that terribly boring?As of right now, I still hope we will push her out to the wide beta team during the course of the weekend, but we'll see how tomorrow's build comes together in terms of "error free-ness"™... We are strong believers that there is no point rushing something when an extra day or three or five will give you less headaches in the testing process.In closing, I leave you with this thought: We've read some constructive (and some not so constructive) criticism regarding the fact that we are taking our time prepping the airplane for release. One fellow was even critical of us because we "don't update our products as frequently as our competitors." To that I say: "Thank you for noticing!" You see- the ONLY reason we are still hammering away at the NGX a full 6 months after we would have preferred to release her is that we would rather give you a full, complete, thoroughly debugged and strong performing product 6 months late- especially if the option is to deliver something to you that is buggy, incomplete, inaccurate, poor performing or simply shoddy...So yes, we are well aware of the eagerness here in the forum- we thank you for trusting us to "Get it right the first time" so you can hop in and head off to your PMDG 737NGX flight simming adventures without worrying that your new airplane is going to do something wonky...Alright- now let me go work on that movie....

[PHXMD-11 86]

Good to hear. Now the world won't come to an end.

[SimonWard 0]

Sounds Good !!Do you have a plan in case the world ends ?? Its 10pm in Christchurch NZ and we are still here !Come to think of it havent felt an aftershock for a while either.Thanks for all your hard work PMDGRegardsSimon Ward

[b737800tuifly 0]

thanks for the update. i know how hard it is to even get a small programm in java running..keep goin, and finish that video(with WINGFLEXT!!!!)! lol greetsseriously i dreamd to night about the first flight on the ngx!.... no joke..

[John_Mc 8]

As a software engineer myself, I can empathise with your workload right now. Thanks very much for the update, as tempting as it is to buy a different NGX, I'm going to hold out for this one.It might be worthwhile making this post a sticky?John

[Airbus Commander 563]

Good to know...

[pao 55]

Thanks for this update Captain.. I guess the most frustrating is that every weekend we hope for a release and we get explanations on how hard and long it is to release a perfect product.. Now let's get crazy, if the beta team gets he NGX this weekend, would that be a possibility to see the product released next week end ?Greg

[badderjet 181]

You notice I said "sources?" How many of you knew that nearly every annunciator light on this airplane actually has TWO sources of power?

Interesting... Now what would those two sources be? Are they the same for all or most of the lights? Well in general it kinda makes sense in terms of redundancy, but I'm just wondering where to get info what sources these actually are. :(:(

[MorsAbAlto 19]

Mr. Randazzo,Thank you for posting this! It isn't half as boring as it might seem to you. I am sure a lot of people appreciate these insights into the development process.It boggles the mind how much effort your team is putting into this project and how huge such a project really is. No doubt, this airplane will be a wet dream for the rivet counters. The livery manager sounds terrific, just as the performance gain you mentioned.I'll be sharpening my Drag & Drop skills while waiting for your video...:(

[1981mvf 0]

I love these

boring

updates. reminds me of how much detail you provide for us lucky simmers.

So yes, we are well aware of the eagerness here in the forum- we thank you for trusting us to "Get it right the first time" so you can hop in and head off to your PMDG 737NGX flight simming adventures without worrying that your new airplane is going to do something wonky...

This is something I cannot stress enough. It is so nice to have developers actually want to release a procduct once and not need a ton of patches to fix things that could have been done correctly during development. Thank you.

Alright- now let me go work on that movie....

Thank you for the update RSR.

[fwerff 70]

Thank you for this elaborate update Robert!I think thanks to these kinds of updates, we (the end-users) are starting to understand just how extremely deep into detail you guys are going this time. In real life, I am an aircraft systems engineer at a major European NG operator, so I know the NG quite good and with this knowledge in mind, I'm getting new "impressement-records" with your NGX with every update.I am looking foward very, very much to the release, but I fully support your decision to "get it right the first time".Good luck in getting this bird finished and to get crazy by us (including me :( ) eager sim-fanatics :(

[captainklm 1]

Yes! Finally a nice update, someone said you will tell us something so I was sittin here all afternoon. Thanks RSR and good luck

[Brett Nicholls 0]

Thanks Robert for the update. Good things are worth waiting for. It sounds like the NGX is the most sophisicated sim aircraft ever produced. Undoubtedly what is learned from this endeavour will make the production of future sim aircraft a little if not a lot less time consuming. I am glad that you are taking the time to get all the systems right because at this stage if I flicked a switch and the wrong light come I would not know the difference. Looking forward to the release.

[Sekstifire 10]

Good to hear. Now the world won't come to an end.

I think you can be relaxed about it, as it appears that the fine pastor that predicted rapture might have been talking out of his rear end for whatever reason:"No one knows when that day or hour will come-not the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father," Matthew 24:36

[Benji 3]

There really is a nerdy level of detail going into this baby!LOVE IT!!!Great work Captain R