Phantom88
Charter Member
-
Dear All,
As we collectively head through the great release of 2.7 and beyond, it’s far past due to give you some proper, candid insight into Heatblur. Outside of the A-6 announcement, we’ve remained rather quiet, fairly reserved and the level of activity and development pace has been ostensibly low. While certainly not overtly visible, big things are happening in Heatblur, and more importantly: great things - that will evolve our company, how well and quickly we do things, and the quality that we can achieve across all stages of development. Hopefully this small update, while not offering much new in terms of technical development progress, will help explain.
We’ve now entered a growth and expansion phase unlike any previous, and it’s one that is long overdue to meet our continuing obligations in product development, maintenance and to fulfill our lofty dreams and ambitions. We’ve been consistent in noting that we are as committed as ever to consumer flight simulation, and even if cagey to commit to specifics, our nascent professional industry endeavors have not impeded these intentions. We’re aiming for a level of development and investment that is now far beyond any previous long term planning, and this level of growth will lay the very foundation of the next decade of our company, in skills, expertise and technology. By June, we expect to have doubled the size of our full time development team alone, and this is really just the beginning as we embark on a broad and ambitious roadmap, which includes three high fidelity DCS modules currently in development. We couldn’t be happier about the opportunities afforded to us as part of this community, and we are very excited about our vision for our future. This wouldn't be possible without all of your support!
To give better insight into what we’re working on and to hopefully better involve you into giving us input on what you’d like to see improved or changed, we are today publishing a roadmap that we will continually curate and update as we move forward. We believe this will be especially important once we start launching new modules and as DCS continues to evolve. The main caveat of this roadmap is that it’s not entirely exhaustive (we’ll probably miss plenty of stuff, especially smaller items!) - and it is also not really meant to list bugs or issues. Instead, it focuses on major additions, changes or corrections - and only those that are confirmed, public, and planned. That said; we hope it will offer you all a good high level overview of the present and future!
Click to view our public roadmap!
This evolution of Heatblur has ultimately and significantly impacted where we’ve focused our attention and resources through the entire first quarter. We have had to sacrifice many of our short term goals in order to position ourselves for future sustainability and most importantly: reliability. Planning, structure, financing, hiring and onboarding have occupied much of our time, and these don’t tend to yield an outwardly visible level of progress for some time. While these are just good things in the end, the short term impact is that our roadmap for the previous quarter suffered and narrowed in scope. We’re going to continue growing and finding our feet, training new additions to the team and gearing up for the challenges ahead through most of this quarter, but while constantly burning the midnight oil as best we can to keep up with our already delayed and previously announced roadmap.
The team’s main priorities right now are to bring the Viggen out of Early Access through another major update, and to launch the first Forrestal class carrier. We’ll continue to push hard to finally get some of these major items complete. The last remaining major feature/content parts for the F-14 will then be the early -A’s, the A-6 AI, and one more campaign. In parallel, we will be working on JESTER improvements (LANTIRN!), various other additions and some long overdue fixes (floating bombs, anyone?) and shipping these with a focus to clean our slate before we focus on the future roadmap.
There are some moments that have really stuck with us: from first starting work on the MiG-21, building the Viggen team, to conceptualizing and starting work on the F-14 - just to name a few. All of those were pivotal to Heatblur and to many of our lives today. I can see that these last few months will carry a similar kind of sentiment in the next decade of Heatblur as we build and head into a new and exciting future.
Thank you as always for your support and trust, and above all - your very kind patience: we promise that you won’t regret it.
Sincerely,
Team Heatblur
