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Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024: WebAssembly SDK

by breve on 7/26/25, 4:44 PM with 115 comments

• by shizcakes on 7/29/25, 7:07 PM

  I have about 1000 hours into MSFS2024 and am a mod for a streamer that has streamed many hours more.

  The gamer perception of this implementation is NOT positive. It crashes all the time, has massive performance issues, and generally is super negatively received.

• by affenape on 7/29/25, 7:52 PM

  For something having 2024 in its name I expected a more consistent error handling, but guess what:

  * some functions like fsRenderCreate return 0 or 1 depending on the operation result;

  * some like fsMapViewCreate say that a value less than 0 is returned on error;

  * fsIOOpen says you should also consult with the fsIOGetLastError function on failure.

  Hope somebody considers adding the errno.

• by two_handfuls on 7/29/25, 5:59 PM

  This is great news for WASM, and looks like the Microsoft team really put in a lot of effort!

  > In order to [move the addons API to WASM] without requiring a full rewrite of existing add-ons, a new platform toolset was designed for Visual Studio (...)

• by Stevvo on 7/30/25, 3:58 AM

  This is what it uses behind the scenes: https://github.com/innative-sdk/innative

• by boffinAudio on 7/29/25, 8:24 PM

  I dunno, I think I would've preferred Lua bytecode as a deliverable executable target, rather than WebAssembly. The tooling would be simpler, more efficient, and would allow a far wider ranger of interoperability with other engines.

• by whatever1 on 7/29/25, 6:42 PM

  I am not sure I am following. The game runs on windows, why not compile the add-in code directly for the single target?

  Is it for future proofing it in case MS wants to release the game in a different platform that is not windows ?

• by diego_moita on 7/29/25, 6:05 PM

  This is one of those ideas that makes so much sense that you'd ask why didn't it catch on before: WASM as a modules for all sorts of platforms

  It could become a competitor for a lot of existing technologies. Some examples:

  * embedded script languages (e.g.: Python in Blender and Gimp, Lua in games, VBScript in MS applications).

  * add-on modules (e.g. COM on Microsoft platforms or COM-like for non-MS)

  * finally, a run-anywhere platform? (what the JVM and .Net always wanted to be)

• by CSMastermind on 7/30/25, 4:23 AM

  I was recently thinking about the most influential games of all time.

  I think there's a good argument for Flight Simulator to be in the top 100.

• by thescriptkiddie on 7/29/25, 7:50 PM

  ah shit, nobody told them that that one blog post about a future in which javascript is a universal ABI was satire

  edit: i might be thinking of this talk? https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...

• by reactordev on 7/30/25, 11:54 AM

  the career mode kid play is what killed the franchise for me

• by avazhi on 7/30/25, 6:05 AM

  Graphics are good but as a flight simulator it’s awful, in particular its (non) simulation of fluid dynamics. X-Plane has the opposite problem.

  At any rate with their budget Asobo are underperforming with this thing. 2024 in particular is enshittification 101.

• by ingen0s on 7/30/25, 10:45 AM

  Well now, thats progress.

• by naikrovek on 7/29/25, 6:41 PM

  I feel like everyone is trying to do things in the most inefficient way possible and it is starting to make me a little bit batty.

  WASM is awesome, but if I'm reading this right, they're choosing not to write DLLs so that they can create WASM modules which are recompiled into DLLs prior to runtime.

  I think our entire industry has taken banned-by-the-Geneva-Conventions, weapons-grade Stupid Pills.

  The only reason I can think of to do this, is so that you can't have arbitrarily malevolent code running in the DLLs that mod authors write. But we can't run the whole game in a sandbox such as a VM because of Nvidia GPU licensing disallowing virtual GPUs in consumer grade GPUs.

  If that's why this work is being done, some serious muscle needs to be used to twist Nvidias arm so that they stop being knobheads and start being part of the solution to security issues, instead of part of the problem.

  If I pay for that GPU, I should be able to issue work to it however I please. I should be able to split it up among VMs all day long without concern for anything Nvidia wants.