This evening, the team at FenixSim have released their 3rd development update of their much-awaited Airbus A320 for Microsoft Flight Simulator. This week’s update was short and brief but gave some very exciting information regarding the future of the product.
Aamir, the project lead, began by talking about the effects of Sim update 5 on the aircraft. Over a week after release, developers are beginning to make progress again on their addons, after fixing the various issues caused by SU5. Luckily for Fenix, using an external architecture, the impact was limited, with only minor visual and functionality issues, but ‘perfectly serviceable’ in Aamir’s words.
Sim Update 5 brought performance gains across the board for users, and this has, of course, benefited the team at Fenix, who have now managed to get their aircraft (Bottom) performing better than even the default A320 (Top). This is even without any real optimisation work, which will improve as the alpha and betas progress.
Onto arguably the most impressive part of the update, it has been confirmed that CPDLC will be coming to the FenixBus. This was one of the most requested features over on the discord server. Whilst this was only a minor glimpse of the system, it is still very work-in-progress, it should be moving to the testing team within a few days/weeks.
The team have since confirmed that it will be using hoppies, similar to the IniBuilds A310, and the FSLabs Airbus family, among others.
Finally, in today’s update, Fenix showed off a selection of liveries that will be available on launch for the product. Previously, Aamir has confirmed that over 200 different liveries will be available, from a variety of airlines, both new and old. Today, we got a glimpse of some of the retro paint schemes, including Monarch, British Caledonian and Leisure International. It is said that all of these paints will have correct decals, including foreign languages, markings and symbols where applicable.
Also very excitingly, the team have confirmed that the FenixSim A320 will be moving into the beta phase within a few weeks, indicating that it is very quickly approaching a good state for release.
For further updates, you can join the Fenix discord server or check the official website.