G’day pilots!
Just a quick update from me (conscious that my updates are normally super long) with a few updates on new features, achievements, and what I’m currently working on…
New achievements released in celebration of World Update 9!
Firstly, as Microsoft Flight Simulator World Update 9 was released today we have, as we have for other recent World update releases, released a handful of new achievements for you to explore and obtain (if that’s your thing) whilst exploring the improvements to the area, these achievements will see you visit a couple of airports Rome (and this one), Pisa and Florence.
In addition to adding achievements in and around Italy and Malta we’ve also added a few more in other parts of the world too including “The Big Apple” (New York), another achievement in New Zealand, an exploration of Japan and several more.
You can browse all the additional achievements on your pilot’s achievements page.
We’re now in BETA testing for the new VA Portal (features) updates
These new features enable virtual airlines to publish their own custom VA achievements (like the ones above) in addition to adding pilot ranks, carry-over hours and advanced airline management permissions (RBAC) – enabling airline CEO’s to give granular management permissions to other pilots within their virtual airline allowing the CEO to share the load of approving/rejecting pilot applications, managing ranks, roles, custom achievements and much, much more.
BETA testing will continue through this week and once I’m happy that everything is working “as it should” I will slowly roll these new features out to more and more airlines – these features, as with others before are entirely optional and can be used at the discretion of the Airline CEO.
I will post screenshots and go into further details in my next update but suffice to say, this has been the biggest area of improvement the last few weeks and should provide many of the advanced airline features that have been requested in recent months!
For more information on these new features (that have been planned for a while now), please refer back to my earlier blog post where I detail the new features in a little more detail.
New “Advanced pilot stats” page
Whilst still in BETA and many more charts and other useful stats will be coming to this page over the coming weeks, I decided to roll this page out sooner rather than later in order to get feedback and allow pilots’ to take a quick look at some of the already existing stats.
Pilots can get to this page from their main dashboard page but by clicking on this link…
Various other updates and improvements
There are also many other updates and improvements that have been rolled out “in the background” over the last month that many of you may have already noticed but if not, these include:
- Airline flight filters.
- Airline page style improvements (we now display the VA logo on all associated airline pages).
- The ability to one-click copy a flight route from an existing flight report.
- Major search engine results display improvements – VA logos, achievement badges, user avatars now displayed in results.
- Achievements now included in the search results.
- Search results can be filtered by type (eg. airlines, achievements, airports, virtual airlines etc)
- A pilot’s logbook filter can now filter on achievement type too.
- Optional 2FA account protection – You can now further secure your FsHub by using a mobile authenticator app (such as Google Authenticator or Microsoft Authenticator) when logging into FsHub – You can enable this from the Settings > Security section.
- Flight report “flags” – easily see what characteristics a flight report had both through the web-based flight reports and via the REST API.
- Airport info pages now display “related” achievements – Unless you have disabled these from being displayed in your FsHub account settings (also a new feature ;))
- …and probably more that have simply slipped my mind!
In addition to the above FsHub improvements, in May and the latter part of April, I released several new versions of the LRM client which fixes a few minor bugs, adds experimental support for helicopters, and a hotkey to maximise and minimise the LRM client window (CTRL+SHIFT+ALT+L), super useful if you’re flying MSFS in full-screen mode and several other improvements and other minor features.
What’s next on the agenda….
Whilst I’m still very much improving virtual airline features that are provided by the new Virtual Airline Portal and fixing up any issues that *may* arise from the current BETA, I will also be adding more improvements to the new “Advanced pilot stats” page, and then be overhauling the virtual airline radar page and bringing it in line with the current style and functionality of the main global radar page (instant load of aircraft, aircraft colours by altitude etc.)
Right, keeping it short and sweet for this update, that’s all from me, I will post a more detailed update with screenshots as soon as the new virtual airline portal (and advance VA features) are fully released later this month!
Stay safe people!