Precisely a week on from the last update regarding Asobo Studio & Microsoft's new simulator, another round of development news has been shared on the dedicated blog page.

Per the postponements promised as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, the team is working hard to push out updates in order to clear the backlog. Thus, more numerous updates can be expected - with a new partnership update on the cards for mid-April and a new "Feature Discovery" episode detailing IFR operations in the new simulator due toward the end of this month.

For testers of the new software, the team is anticipating an update to the alpha build in the next two or three days, building on the changes released last week in version 1.2.5.0. Find out more about the changes made then in a previous article.

Also bulleted in the list of updates regarding the alpha build, the developers have confirmed that the Airbus A320 previewed in numerous past videos and images will be released to alpha testers in this week's alpha built update.

Threshold will report the patch notes as soon as they are available.

Moving on, the next topic addressed concerned alpha invites. Asobo Studio's goals for the alpha were outlined in this post, and they are:

• Ensure that everyone that received an acceptance email has access to the Alpha.
• Assess Alpha participation options for adding more people as quickly as possible.
• Prioritize access for those that registered early for pre-release build testing.

Confirmation was also received that invitations would be sent out starting today.

On the developer side of things, we were provided with the following statement:

"We are excited to have over 150 third party companies using our SDK and working on many amazing updates for the new simulator. This week marks the initial release of WebAssembly support, enabling our partners to start porting their native code over to our platform."

As a start, we are focusing on panels and displays support, which are a critical part of high-quality airplane add-ons. We are also providing an initial release of the in-game aircraft editor and are continuously working on documentation, general usability improvements to the existing tools (in particular the scenery and script editors) and general bug fixing."

This affirms the developer's commitment to opening up the simulator for third party addons, with the unveiling of more specialised tools such as an "in-game aircraft editor", perhaps similar to Laminar Research's PlaneMaker software except available in simulator.

A new feedback snapshot was also provided, with the top issues regarding control mapping, grass effects, various details to do with the flight dynamics, weather and some environmental queries. Most of the have been addressed or fixed according to the infographic provided.

Much of the wishlist remains the same as previous weeks, in that the top requests are third party content, helicopters, AI traffic and Track IR/VR compatibility.

At the bottom of the post, new alpha screenshots were shared. These have been spread throughout the article, including a selection of FS2020 gifs.

See the source post for this article on the Microsoft Flight Simulator website.