Idea

Hello,

We decided to open the DevSupport platform for this reason: having a place where we can exchange with developers, share important information, connect with you and provide more details when the documentation isn't enough (and, of course, collect feedback to improve it).

Since the opening last year, we received +1400 questions from +825 users. While of course there are not 800 people as advanced as you can be on the process of publishing an asset on the Marketplace, it still represents a lot of people and we simply can't afford to have direct communication channels with each of them. That's why the platform is the best choice we could make: you can interact with the rest of the community and we do our best to provide answers to your technical questions. But it should be stated again that most of the time, investigating your issues takes minimum 2 hours per issue, and we can spend up to 3 days trying to repro sometimes... All that on a team of 2 people and it's not even their fulltime job.

So we won't be able to open more communication channels with you devs, and we're focusing our efforts & doing our very best here.

Best regards,

"We decided to open the DevSupport platform for this reason: having a place where we can exchange with developers, share important information, connect with you and provide more details when the documentation isn't enough (and, of course, collect feedback to improve it). "...

There are numerous forums and dedicated groups for that ! We do not need one more !

We need a communication channel between professionals developers and Asobo developers, in order to share feedback, bugs, missing or poorly implemented features so that developers can improve their products and help to improve the simulator in general!

There are completely aberrant things that we professional developers noticed right away and regularly notice, and it happens that asobo developers as good as they are are not even aware because a few months ago they did not had never asked themselves the question of the tools and features that developers like us need and the best way to use it...

That's it, it's only my opinion as a developer under FS for almost 20 years, I don't question the work you do, but it's not what we need the most now :-)

“All that on a team of 2 people and it's not even their fulltime job.”

I don’t think we need to dig much deeper. Is it a lack of budget or something MS doesn’t want you to do?

"There are numerous forums and dedicated groups for that ! We do not need one more !" -> may I ask which of these put you in direct contact with Asobo developers?

"We need a communication channel between professionals developers and Asobo developers" -> this is DevSupport. Even though the primary interface here is the SDK team, ideas/issues coming from third party developers that are not directly SDK-related are then discussed within the studio.

"There are completely aberrant things that we professional developers noticed right away " -> then please explain here what these issues are. As far as I know there won't be a more direct channel to us. Disclaimer: it doesn't mean either that we will stop all other developments straight away just to address your immediate concern.

"they did not had never asked themselves the question of the tools and features that developers like us need and the best way to use it " -> it is very possible that we never thought about the tools & features you need specifically - we have to find the right balance between development efforts and the number of developers who gain benefit from these. Once again, please feel free to describe here what tools & features are missing for your projects. (same disclaimer!)

"I don’t think we need to dig much deeper. Is it a lack of budget or something MS doesn’t want you to do?" -> There is budget and Microsoft is 100% supportive of DevSupport. Our main issue right now is finding the right person(s) to help, hence the "hiring" message we recently published through the DevMode alert system.

Best regards,

Eric / Asobo

Thank you... that's what we call in France "une réponse de Normand" :-)

We will therefore content ourselves with this forum, hoping that it will be enough to solve the maximum number of problems encountered!

This is just my personal opinion and I do not mean to cause controversy. I agree with the OP and wish there was a better channel of communication between the developers and Asobo/Microsoft. Especially when it comes to troubleshooting specific issues. For example, yesterday, a problem was reported to us via teams for one of our addons and I immediately started troubleshooting the issue. It was hard and inconvenient to share information over teams text. It is easier to describe the findings and results of my troubleshooting via voice or video call where I can share my screen, specially when the problem is related to the sim and not our addon. This is just an example, we have had problems reported and the SDK was the problem and sometimes we do not get a response right away which causes delays in products release.

@mattnischan

No matter how you sugar coat it, our market place application is still pending processing for 21 months in a row and what you're saying or doing doesn't seem to be translating in getting any new Reality XP product on the Marketplace for the XBox users because of this.

@SonantAlpaca, @EPellissier

> this is DevSupport. Even though the primary interface here is the SDK team, ideas/issues coming from third party developers that are not directly SDK-related are then discussed within the studio.

devsupport is a fantastic tool and we're glad (I believe we all are, not just me) you're spending so much time helping us out, even more so if this is not your main job description. This speaks for your dedication.

I also believe some of us have needs for which the prior forum* was more appropriate because it was governed by a legally binding mutual NDA between Microsoft and us, and it was well suited for discussions we can't publicly disclose nor expose on devsupport.

> Our main issue right now is finding the right person(s) to help, hence the "hiring" message we recently published through the DevMode alert system.

There are renown and experienced vendors, who understand what it is you're dealing with, and who are wanting to help you out on many different aspects of the simulation and the SDK (certains d'entre nous sont meme Français). I believe you can gain from this expertise should you also embrace us in a direct and mutually beneficial collaboration. Not only we know the trade, but we are willing to help...

* Prior devsupport, there was this forum (now closed) only for the members of the "Official Third Party Devs" group (mostly renown and experienced add-on vendors) in which we were exchanging with many Asobo employees directly. It was out of reach from the public and from search engines and perfectly suited to open discussions among us.