PMDG: Bring on the updates!

PMDG heeft ons een nieuwe status update gegeven met betrekking tot de huidige stand van zaken. Voornamelijk geeft men meer duidelijkheid over de verschillende updates die we op korte termijn kunnen verwachten. Je leest het volledige persbericht hieronder:

Captains,

A quick update for you to bring you what we hope will be exciting news.

Over the next couple of days, we are going to begin the process of updating the PMDG 747-400 Queen of the Skies II product line with updates chock full of changes, improvements and fixes.

This update process is going to be a bit different than what you are used to- since you will be getting these updates from us directly via the Operations Center!

The long awaited micro-update capability that we have been working toward for the past couple of years is finally about to arrive, and we think it is going to completely change your relationship with your PMDG products.

In the past, we have had to update our products by pushing out new installers with all of the changes packed inside.  This has required that every customer re-download the installer, soaking up as much as 1GB per update cycle, along with the associated cost of bandwidth and the inevitable risks of “oops… we need to update again because we goofed up on something minor…”  This meant long waits for updates, some inflexibility in our update methodology, and an inability to react quickly to fixes that might have been simple for us to effect on our end.

With our new update process however, you will be able to keep constantly up-to-date with changes we make, whether they be monthly, weekly, daily or heck- even hourly if the reason presented itself.  The update process will analyze your current product state and download the update right to your machine by targeting only the bits that change, thus avoiding long download periods for you or requiring complete reinstallation of the entire product package.

The updaters have been under testing with our teams throughout the latter half of the PMDG 747-400 Queen of the Skies II beta testing period, and we are pretty certain you will like this new methodology just as much as our beta testers have enjoyed it!

Even more exciting, we will soon be updating the 777 and the NGX to use the same methodology, thus allowing us to easily push out some updates and changes to those product lines that might otherwise not be feasible for a cost or capability standpoint.

We ran one last all-up test on this new capability on Monday night- and there is NO TRUTH to the fact that we put so much testing load on it that the US Northeast Region Amazon AWS cloud system crashed under the strain.  (Any relationship between the previous sentence and the truth is purely accidental…)

We hope to push the first update to you in the coming days- along with information specific to the update itself and what it contains.  (No need to ask “did X get changed?” because we will give you that information at a later time…)

Enjoy your thursday- we will be back with more news shortly!