Synaptic Simulations Posted 6 hours ago Posted 6 hours ago As we continue to shift things into ever-increasing gears here at the Synaptic development team, we’d like to share some of the exciting new progress made on the Synaptic A220 Airliner for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 and 2024. Some of you may have already seen some of the excitement from our developers and providers spill out into our public Discord channels and social media, and now is our chance to fill you in on what has us so pumped! Before we get into the gritty details, we’d like to take the chance to thank our dedicated team of pilots, engineers, and ground service workers, as well as iniBuilds for their continued support in getting this product closer to the finish line. From the very beginning of our partnership, this project has been about bringing together the best of both teams. We are working closely with iniBuilds to ensure that every element of the A220 exceeds the expectations of the community, both now and into the future. Whether it is fine-tuning performance characteristics with precision or creating a polished, immersive experience from the moment you load in, our shared goal is to deliver an aircraft that feels cohesive, high-quality, and, above all, truly enjoyable to fly. Over the past two years, the visuals team at Synaptic has worked meticulously to recreate every aspect of the A220 with a focus on delivering exceptional accuracy and attention to detail. Leveraging high-fidelity 3D scans, extensive reference data, and the latest development techniques, we’ve re-built the A220 model from the ground up—striving to capture the nuances of the real-world A220. The result? A gorgeous, true-to-life model that brings out every characteristic of the A220 while remaining performant. However, a great visual model is only half the story. To achieve full visual authenticity and ensure the aircraft comes to life within the simulator, exceptional texturing and asset integration are just as critical. The team at iniBuilds have brought their expertise to several key areas of development for this project, including 3D asset integration for both Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 and 2024, detailed texturing, flight modeling, sound design, and the creation of the electronic flight bag (EFB). The iniBuilds art team has been hard at work integrating the Synaptic 3D model into the simulator, meticulously UV mapping and texturing the aircraft inside and out, and refining essential visual elements such as lighting, materials, and special effects—all to ensure a truly immersive and high-fidelity experience. Diving deeper into the visuals, the A220 is an aircraft full of subtle nuances and unique design features. We dedicated significant development effort to capturing every detail, ensuring that each surface, panel, and major components are modeled with uncompromised precision and bring the aircraft to life. Rivets marked with their correct part numbers and position, decals showing appropriate wear across surfaces, or wiring that accurately follows the real-world contours of the aircraft—these are only part of the story of how the Synaptic A220 represents a true no-compromise approach to quality. With that said, words can only go so far. We’re excited to finally start letting our work speak for itself, we hope you enjoy the following selection of work-in-progress shots. The Synaptic A220 features extensively detailed and richly crafted exterior and interior models, including a fully modeled passenger cabin. A wide range of interactive components—such as openable engine cowlings, APU maintenance doors, avionics bays, and maintenance panels throughout the airframe—have also been carefully designed to bring a new level of immersion to the experience. We’ve spent plenty of time outside, now it’s time to step inside the flight deck and dive into work happening beneath the surface to meticulously replicate the complexity of the aircraft’s systems. This segment from the Synaptic programming team dives into some of our recent work, with the occasional flight deck shot sprinkled in for your enjoyment. Before we get an onslaught of messages pointing out incorrect numbers, missing elements, animation issues, or color mismatches—trust us, we’re on it already. Our team of providers holds us to the highest standards during testing and finalization, and they will not let anything slip through. As such, all work showcased remains firmly work-in-progress, and we are fully committed to delivering a polished, authentic experience. Emergent Behavior & Failures Every team has their own interesting ways of developing complex systems and modeling intricate behaviors or scenarios, and we’ve no shortage of that here. While we cannot speak to how unique this approach is, we still think it’s interesting enough to be mentioned. Our first step when starting any system, unsurprisingly, is to gather all of the reference material we already have, and try to understand the foundational structure of the system. With the keyword being try, we then bounce countless questions and ideas off our pilots, engineers, and ground service workers, going back and forth in highly technical discussions about the smallest of minutiae until we are confident that we have filled in gaps in our understanding of the system. What usually ends up happening next is that we mimic the physical structure of the system in code with as much detail as is practical. This entails modeling almost every computer, component, ARINC 429 bus, and discrete or analog signal that is documented in operational and technical training manuals. We find that this gives us the best chance at encapsulating the complexities and nuances involved in the aircraft’s systems. With performance and maintainability in mind, we then consider how we can simplify parts of the system without sacrificing the complexity we seek to model, such as coalescing identical, redundant computers into one code path. The end result of this process is something we like to refer to as emergent behavior. In essence, it grants us the ability to realistically model many non-normal states without having to explicitly account for them. These states emerge naturally due to failed or degraded components somewhere else in the chain, and from the logic of individual components. We can simply fail the primary flight control computers and watch the error cascade naturally through the components and data channels. This, of course, doesn’t account for every scenario, but it gives us a strong foundation for non-normal operations while also accounting for the core behavior of normal flight conditions. More Systems Overview Behind the scenes, the Synaptic A220 is powered by a highly detailed simulation of the aircraft’s internal architecture. A total of 646 components have been modeled so far, covering everything from electrical and data buses to major systems like avionics computers, generators, and more. Our systems architecture has been carefully optimized, with each simulation tick currently processing in under 1 ms, ensuring smooth performance. To further support ongoing development and future maintenance, we have also developed custom in-sim instrumentation and visualization tools, providing a superior debugging environment—a major asset for quickly resolving any issues discovered post-release. The electrical system is one of the most intricate and essential systems onboard the A220, tying together nearly every other subsystem onboard. This system has been fully overhauled to simulate real-world voltage and current flow across every connection, with 368 components and 995 connections currently represented in the simulation. Our model fully reflects the aircraft’s primary and secondary power distribution architectures, including proper communication between controllers across the appropriate buses. Every circuit breaker and solid-state power controller (SSPC) has been included - 256 circuit breakers and 636 SSPCs in total - with custom logic applied where appropriate to replicate dynamic behaviors. Avionics complexity has also been carefully captured. As mentioned above, the real-world A220 makes use of several communication protocols across its network, including ARINC-429, CAN, TTP, discrete and analog signals, and AFDX, a high-reliability Ethernet-based system. We have worked to simulate these data pathways faithfully while balancing overall performance. This includes modeling key systems like the Integrated Processing System (IPS), Data Concentration System (DCS), and a network of interconnected computers that coordinate critical data flow between system controllers, pilot inputs, and cockpit displays. Integration work has also extended to the aircraft’s fuel and hydraulic systems, which have been updated to align with the new electrical and avionics frameworks to ensure consistent, reliable system behavior throughout the aircraft. Additionally, the Auxiliary Power Unit (APU) has been substantially reworked, now featuring a separate controller and a dedicated engine model designed to match real-world operating behavior, including appropriate failure scenarios such as hung starts and shutdown irregularities. Custom Flight Control System Given the A220’s start as a Bombardier project, it should come as no surprise that the flight control laws are not what you’d typically find on an Airbus. The engineers don’t even call them laws, opting for the term modes instead. On one hand, you have the hard flight envelope limits that you’d expect from any other contemporary Airbus craft; on the other, you have speed-stable pitch control, additional soft envelope limits, and three different direct modes. We’ve been diving deep into the electronic flight control system and its associated modes, attempting to capture the nuanced augmentations that the system provides. We’ve learned, for example, that the elevators will pitch downward to provide extra downforce on the front landing gear during the takeoff roll, and that the ailerons will pitch upward to provide extra drag and lift reduction during landing. We are currently in the midst of implementing this system from scratch, with a focus on applying the principles of emergent behavior, in addition to well-established control theory paradigms, in order to provide a realistic experience when hand-flying the aircraft. As we fine-tune the various protections and augmentations with the help of pilot feedback, we hope to bring you more information to prepare you for your time in the cockpit. Navigational Data Throughout much of the development of the A220, we have been working with Navigraph’s navigational database for its ease of use and incredible depth. It has allowed us to implement many of the features found in the map and flight management applications without worrying about having the necessary data. This is, of course, wildly unsustainable for the more casual users who are satisfied with default navigational data. Part of our efforts have been in developing an interface that allows us to seamlessly switch between Navigraph’s and the simulator’s default navigational data. While in theory this can be done ad-hoc without any effect on the integrity of the flight plan, we intend to take a more realistic approach and have these options available on the ground through the built-in maintenance pages, just as though you were an airline technician going in to update the database. Whilst this is all we have in terms of maintenance pages for now, we hope to break the industry trend of exclusively using the EFB to manage aircraft systems and offload as many of these tasks as possible to the maintenance application. Multifunction Keyboard Panel More recently, we’ve worked on recreating the Multifunction Keyboard Panel, abbreviated as MKP, which is the primary way for pilots to enter data into the various functions in the avionics suite. This marks the fourth custom font that we’ve had to design for this aircraft, and despite its simple look, it was hardly the easiest of the bunch. Since we also drew the subtle dot matrix behind the text, and even the wires that connect to each row and column, the font had to fit very exact dimensions to align with the background grid. The MKP ties in seamlessly with our existing input system and indicates what is currently in the scratchpad. Text can be entered by pressing the physical alphanumeric buttons on the panel, using your own keyboard with the keyboard input mode, or by clicking copy-able fields on the displays (such as the one seen bearing your Navigraph code in the preceding section). With text in the scratchpad, the cursor now becomes “loaded” and displays with a cyan box. Clicking into any input field will then enter the text and subject it to any relevant formatting rules, with improperly formatted text displaying an error message directly below the input field and on the MKP. Someone really needs to dust off these panels sometime. Crew Alerting: the CAS in EICAS From innocent greetings from developers to shameless rick rolls, our EICAS system has seen many iterations throughout the years, and we’ve finally landed on one that remains beautifully simple without sacrificing on realism. All CAS messages are processed by the aircraft’s data concentration system, just as they are in real life, and are triggered by discrete or ARINC 429 buses routed from the relevant systems in line with our principles of emergent behavior. We’re actively tracking the messages we’ve already hooked up to systems logic and the ones we have yet to tackle, and hope to implement as many as possible as we fill in the remaining systems. Plug n’ Play Checklists Our electronic checklists have been designed from the ground up to be easily creatable and modifiable by the user, which we hope will stimulate the community to share airline-specific procedures. We also foresee this being an innovative way for virtual airlines to provide a more custom experience for their pilots. Every part of the format is intended to be easy to use and understand, and it begins by using the well-known JSON format that many applications have adopted for configuration. The following items are supported by our format: Action Items provide the core “checklist” functionality, and can either be manually selected or automatically sensed by reading aircraft state. Conditional Items prompt the pilot to select between YES or NO, which then changes which items will be required to mark the checklist as complete. Multi-Select Items are an extension of conditionals, and allow the configuration to specify two or more options with custom labels. Free Text Items simply display cautionary or advisory messages between the other kinds of items. As an example, this is how we’ve encoded part of the before taxi checklist: export const beforeTaxi: Checklist = { name: "Before taxi", items: [ { conditional: { challenge: "Single engine taxi out:", paths: { YES: [ { freeText: "\nSingle engine taxi out:\n" }, { challenge: "PTU", response: "ON", sensed: { simvar: "L:A22X PTU", unit: "enum", value: 1 }, }, { challenge: "APU", response: "As required", }, { challenge: "ANTI-ICE, COWL", response: "AUTO or ON", }, /* snip */ Closing Thoughts Thank you to everyone who has read this far and remained invested in the future of this project. We recognize that we’ve been quieter than we would have liked, but we hope today’s brief showcase - a prelude to a much larger update coming in May has offered a glimpse of what’s to come. We want to reiterate that we are fully committed to delivering the definitive A220 experience for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 and 2024, and we sincerely hope you’ll continue this journey with us as we bring it to life. Finally, we would like to extend our thanks once again to iniBuilds for their outstanding partnership and collaboration. This update would not have been possible without the continued efforts of both teams working together toward a shared vision. So… when’s the release date As outlined in our original development plan, the Synaptic A220 is scheduled to release for both Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 and 2024, with no date announced as of yet. To reiterate the project's launch plans: the Synaptic A220 will be available on both the iniBuilds Store and Microsoft Marketplace from day one. The release will occur in two phases: first with the launch of the A220-300 base package, followed by the A220-100 as a free update alongside additional quality-of-life improvements. We will soon announce full details for the upcoming development stream in May, where we invite you to join us in the cockpit for a deeper look across all aspects of the aircraft’s development. We intend to provide a more detailed release timeline for you then. For now, we hope you’ve enjoyed this update, and we sincerely thank you for your continued support. As we wrap up with one final picture today, we look forward to welcoming you aboard the Synaptic A220. 24 6
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