- Development Update – August 16 - 16 August 2026
Visuals, Rendering & Atmospheric PipelineAtmospheric Lighting, Post-Processing & TonemappingWe have completely overhauled the tonemapping and color grading pipeline to eliminate washed-out highlights and deliver rich, accurate color reproduction across all lighting conditions. Post-processing has been fine-tuned for nighttime operations, alongside reworked airport lighting for enhanced visibility. Ambient light calculations have also been restructured to ensure natural, realistic shading transitions during critical periods such as sunrise and dusk. Additionally, atmospheric rendering and terrain reflectivity have received a comprehensive polish pass.Water Simulation & Gerstner Wave IntegrationWater rendering has taken a major step forward with a full rework incorporating Gerstner wave simulation and real-time underwater caustics. These improvements deliver dynamic, lifelike water surfac…
- Development Update – July 26 - 26 July 2026
Atmospheric & Environmental Overhaul Volumetric Clouds & Weather Systems The cloud rendering pipeline has been fundamentally reworked to accurately simulate real-world cloud typologies. By enhancing the rendering techniques, cloud formations now behave and look significantly more true-to-life. These upgrades are integrated tightly with overall weather improvements, refining the visual impact of lighting and autogen integration under varying atmospheric conditions. Foliage LOD ArchitectureBuilding upon last week's grass optimization, the tree system has been upgraded with a brand-new 3-tier Level of Detail framework. This dynamic system automatically scales the resolution of distant tree billboards, delivering a substantial boost to both visual fidelity and rendering performance during low-altitude flights and dense forest traversals. Procedural PBR Ground Texturing To enhance surface re…
- Development Update – July 19th - 19 July 2026
This past two-week development cycle has delivered significant improvements across visual fidelity, engine performance, and avionics architecture. Major milestones have been achieved in foliage rendering scalability, atmospheric lighting calculations, and deep subsystem optimization.Environmental & Foliage OverhaulNext-Generation Grass ArchitectureThe foliage rendering system has been completely rewritten to address long-range performance degradation. A new grass system has been developed from scratch, integrating a multi-tiered Level of Detail (LOD) framework. This allows dense foliage to be drawn significantly further into the horizon. Initial optimization passes on this new architecture have isolated up to a 2x performance improvement in pure grass rendering efficiency.Ground Texture & Collision RefactorThe core ground texture pipeline has undergone a comprehensive overhaul to improv…
- Development Update - July 7th - 5 July 2026
This week's development cycle has delivered significant improvements across visual fidelity, system performance, and core simulation stability, with major milestones achieved in rendering, hardware compatibility, and physics architecture.Visual & Atmospheric OverhaulNight Lighting EnhancementA comprehensive pass has been completed on the simulation's night-time appearance. A new "fake" night lighting system has been implemented that intelligently estimates building positions and applies realistic illumination to urban areas. This significantly improves the visual experience during night operations and creates a more immersive environment.Cloud System EvolutionThe legacy cloud system option has been officially retired following extensive testing and refinement. The veil cloud system is now fully production-ready and has been designated as the default cloud rendering solution. Further opt…
- Dev Update - June 28th - 28 June 2026
This week's development cycle has been dedicated to advancing visual fidelity, system performance, and overall simulation stability. Substantial progress across several core areas of the engine has been made, with a strong emphasis on atmospheric rendering and hardware optimisation.1. Cloud & Weather Rendering Enhancements The cloud system has undergone further refinement to improve its visual behaviour across a broader spectrum of weather scenarios. Shape generation and shading logic have been adjusted to produce more natural, organic formations that respond convincingly to changing atmospheric conditions. 2. Renderer Optimisation & Atmospheric Effects The rendering pipeline has received additional polish, with particular attention given to ambient effects. Haze integration has been enhanced to improve depth perception and atmospheric scattering, while shadow and lighting systems have…
- Dev Update - June 21st - 22 June 2026
1. Scenery Streaming & World CollisionsBuilding Collisions Enabled: The global environment is no longer just visual. We have integrated a structural collision mesh framework for all globally generated buildings, meaning aircraft will now accurately interact with city geometry and obstacles.Optimized Scenery Loading: Major adjustments were made to the core simulation streaming backend. We have overhauled the methodology of how high-density airports and detailed urban buildings are paged into memory, reducing structural stutter and data-loading bottlenecks during low-altitude flight.2. Next-Gen Vegetation Architecture (The Tree System)Intelligent Placement Backend: Our brand-new tree system has been successfully integrated. The engine now dynamically references geospatial classification layers to intelligently deduce exactly where specific foliage types should spawn.5x Performance Uplift:…
- Dev Update - June 10th - 14 June 2026
1. Rendering Pipeline & Engine ArchitectureSwitch to Deferred Rendering: The simulator has officially transitioned away from a Forward Rendering pipeline to a Deferred Rendering architecture. This structural change allows the engine to handle a significantly higher volume of dynamic light sources simultaneously without a massive performance penalty.LOD Rework: The Level of Detail (LOD) systems were completely reworked. By optimizing how and when lower-resolution models are swapped in, the engine drastically reduces the overall number of triangles drawn per frame, resulting in a more stable and elevated framerate.Simulation Stability: Significant under-the-hood work went into stabilizing the core simulation physics and state engine, providing a solid foundation for these heavy visual upgrades.2. Terrain, Runways, & Vegetation (GPU-Driven)GPU-Driven Grass Renderer: The vegetation system w…
- Dev Update — Week of May 26 - 31 May 2026
This week brought some more progress across rendering, aircraft systems, and scene quality. Grass System - GPU-Driven RendererThe vegetation system has been rebuilt around a fully GPU-driven pipeline that replaces the older geometry shader approach.Rather than the CPU deciding what grass to draw, a compute shader now runs first and does all the culling work on the GPU - checking each potential blade against the camera frustum, density settings, and road/runway exclusion zones before writing only the surviving instances into a buffer. A second pass then draws exactly what survived, with no data needing to be sent back to the CPU. This means the GPU is doing far less redundant work each frame, and draw calls are issued indirectly with instance counts determined entirely on the GPU side.Road and runway exclusion is handled by passing spine segment data from the terrain system directly to t…
- Dev Update – Week of May 19, 2026 - 25 May 2026
Hey everyone! A packed week with a lot of visual and technical progress to share. Cloud & Rendering Cloud parameters are now exposed, meaning modders can tweak clouds however they like. Rendering improvements this week also brought some general visual polish across the board.Airports & Lighting Airports received a lighting pass — runways and taxiways now have more lights, making night operations feel much more realistic. Speaking of night, the sim's overall nighttime appearance is getting attention: buildings now fade in smoothly instead of popping in suddenly.Visual Scripting for Aircraft Systems Aircraft developers will be happy with this one — you can now set up and simulate aircraft systems directly in the editor using a visual scripting system. No need to jump in-sim just to test your logic.Terrain & Vegetation Multiple grass types are in the works. Mesh support is already working,…
- Dev Update – Week of May 12 - 17 May 2026
Hey everyone, another week of solid progress to share!Shader Error Reporting Future Modders will be happy with this one — the engine now displays a proper error screen when something goes wrong with a shader, making it much easier to track down what broke and why.Cloud System Overhaul We've been reworking the cloud rendering system from scratch, moving toward the techniques used in AAA titles. Early results are looking great and we'll have more to show as this one develops.Menu Rework The main menu is getting a visual overhaul. Still in progress, but it's coming along nicely.That's it for this week — steady progress across the board. As always, thanks for following along and for all the feedback and support. See you next week
- Development Update – Week of May 5, 2026 - 10 May 2026
Hey everyone! Another week of solid progress to share, this time focused on performance and visual consistency.Buildings & Rural Coverage The building system has been reworked from the ground up. It now performs more consistently across all environments, and we've integrated a new API that brings better detail and improved coverage to rural areas that were previously lacking.Intel GPU Fix A bug causing clouds and terrain to not render correctly on Intel GPUs has been fixed. If you were affected by this in earlier builds, it should now be working as expected.Instancing Overhaul We've significantly improved how instancing is handled, meaning the sim can now render a much larger number of buildings at once without taking a performance hit. This is a big step forward for dense urban environments in particular.
