Aerofly FS Global for iOS/Android

Dear Aerofly FS Global users,

now that our new Aerofly FS Global is out for Apple iOS and Android we would like to comment on some of the new features in it compared to previous versions of Aerofly FS.

Aerofly FS Global can now display cultivation data world wide for example houses, lights and other data like power plants or wind turbines. This data is available in a small region in our base scenery around San Francisco and is available world wide if you opt into our global scenery service. The amount of data is quite large and increases the amount of memory considerably compared to previous versions. Right now we have close to 1 TB of data available with aerial image quality of up to 2 meters per pixel in selected regions like USA and Europe. We now offer a total of over 7000 airports world wide. Many airports feature unique buildings and terminals but we will add many more highly detailed airports in the future. For example Australia just received a major update with Syndney ( YSSY ) featuring unique terminals and the city itself offers unique buildings as well. Again, this is an ongoing process so expect to see better airports in the upcoming months.

If flying in a high/ultra quality setting over densely populated areas Aerofly FS might now use around 3.5 GB of RAM in total.

On Android the users have the choice to set the graphics quality by themselves on Apple iOS this is currently set automatically depending on the device in use. On Android the devices usually have more memory available compared to iOS so it's safe to offer those quality options. Aerofly FS might not run well if the users chooses a too high quality settings, but it usually doesn't result in program crashes due to out of memory conditions. On Apple iOS we usually have a lot less memory available and if we offer these options the user will quickly get app crashes over densely populated areas, that's why we don't offer this settings for now. In general we recommend the user chooses a settings so that the FPS ( frames per second ) are at least 20 FPS or more.

Cultivation buildings are available on Android once you choose a high ur ultra graphics quality setting. Below that only night lighting is available. On iOS so far only very powerful devices like the IPhone 14 Pro and 15 Pro and the new iPad devices set the high or ultra quality settings internally.

Besides that Aerofly FS Global now features basically the same aircraft visual quality that our PC version offers, meaning that the texture resolution as well as the shader features are the same. You should immediately see that inside the cockpit where you now have shadows and the overall clarity of the cockpit texture resolution is also much higher.

We will update this posting from time to time with more information.

We have just send in another update for Aerofly FS for Apple iOS that will reduce the memory consumption while using the global scenery streaming service and that will also reduce memory consumption on selected devices. We hope this fixes the crashes on some devices with less RAM memory.

Please keep in mind that we cannot display the same amount of graphics details on all devices. Especially on 'slower' iOS devices we can't display any cultivation buildings as these devices do not offer enough RAM memory.

We would also like to explain why the graphic quality options are available on Android and are not shown on iOS.

As many of you have unfortunately noticed, since the release of the iOS Version, we experience crashes of Aerofly FS Global on selected devices. Unfortunately this is due to low memory on those devices, even though the CPU itself is very fast. It's like a Porsche engine with some really bad tires.

On Android we do have a lot more hardware variations but at the same time almost all devices we support have enough RAM compared to iOS. So we give the user the option to choose the quality setting as it usually won't result in a program crash even if the device is too slow. On iOS on the other hand, the quality options would almost certainly result in a crash on non suitable devices with low RAM. So that's why we have hard coded the quality setting in the iOS version.

We intend to optimize the memory usage in successive updates, but as a rough summary, we cannot display the same amount on detail on many iOS devices due to limited RAM.

We are going to roll out another update for Aerofly FS Global on iOS and Android.

- We have fixed a small issue that the app could crash when using the pushback truck

- Reduced RAM usage on many devices and when using the streaming feature

- On iOS devices where we can reliably detect more than 4GB of RAM, we added a quality slider.

The updates should be live within the next 1-2 days.