X-Plane 12 Aircraft?

[SYSCD7000]

I understand that X-Plane 12 is in early access so it’s too early to bring out X-Plane 12 compatible aircraft but why have some developers already done this and your team has not?

 

just wondered……

 

 

Edited November 12, 2022 by SYSCD7000

[Pils]

57 minutes ago, SYSCD7000 said:

I understand that X-Plane 12 is in early access so it’s too early to bring out X-Plane 12 compatible aircraft but why have some developers already done this and your team has not?

 

just wondered……

 

 

Which development team are you addressing? You’ve posted on a general discussion forum.

[Ben Russell]

Wisdom. 

[SYSCD7000]

8 hours ago, Pils said:

Which development team are you addressing? You’ve posted on a general discussion forum.

Aerobask is a good example.  They have already bought out 4 aircraft.

Have a look at X-Plane org store for others.

 

[airfighter]

5 hours ago, SYSCD7000 said:

Aerobask is a good example.  They have already bought out 4 aircraft.

Have a look at X-Plane org store for others.

 

Every developer/store has its own policies, or just thinking about how to do stuff. We (the developers) know, since we are in daily contact with Laminar, that X-Plane 12 is in a phase that some things will change in the near future. If a developer choose to ship an aircraft now, and have to redo some stuff, when the changes will arrive, good for him/her. Though, in the meanwhile, something might not work right, until the developer patch it, and the user experience is not going to be great. 

Another developer might choose to postpone the release, until he/she has the confidence that the product will perform (almost) perfect as intended, and give the user a much better experience. In both cases, will be user that will complain for the one or the other. You can't  satisfy all.

But if you are 'anxious' that no one here cares about bringing our aircraft up to XP12 standards, you should not. Beyond that there are many new aircraft under development from all the teams having product in X-Aviation store, that have not hit the market yet, almost all existing ones, are actively being in the works for that. For example, a few days ago I announced the first LES aircraft getting ready for XP12. 

 

Edited November 13, 2022 by airfighter

[Ben Russell]

5 hours ago, SYSCD7000 said:

Aerobask is a good example.  They have already bought out 4 aircraft.

Have a look at X-Plane org store for others.

 

Xp12 will probably be around for the next five years. 

(The official release of X-Plane 11 was on March 30, 2017.) 

[daemotron]

On 11/12/2022 at 11:04 PM, SYSCD7000 said:

why have some developers already done this and your team has not?

Each development team will assess the risk involved releasing an aircraft for a not yet final release of X-Plane (as I see it, XP11 wasn't even close to stable before 11.10; a lot of aircraft had to be adapted after Austin had some fun with the free shaft turboprop engine model, setting them... uhm, well, on fire ). Depending on the complexity of the aircraft, the team's aspiration in terms of perfection, realism etc., the team's capacity to manage early-access issues, the (perceived) evaluation of XP12's stability and maturity, and probably many more factors, the development teams may come to different conclusions as to when is the right moment to update, upgrade or refurbish their products. Also bear in mind that some developers have already been involved in XP12 since the days of the first alpha builds, and others just started their familiarization journey with the public EA.

And that's perfectly ok - IMO each team should only release if they feel comfortable doing so. Anything else just leads to inappropriate expectations, misunderstandings, and disappointment on customer side, and/or burned-out and frustrated developers on the other side.

[VirtualGAaviator]

On 11/13/2022 at 2:47 AM, SYSCD7000 said:

Aerobask is a good example.  They have already bought out 4 aircraft.

I have 5 of Aerobask's aircraft and a ton of XP11 aircraft, so I know how you feel. I'd love to have them be supported on XP12 NOW. Conversely, I hate CTDs and having to chase down errant addons. I imagine devs hate having to constantly debug addons because the sim changed. I'm willing to wait for solid products.

Aerobask uses Skunkcraft's updater to push updates (I wish more devs would). I want to say that most of the GA aircraft Aerobask creates don't go too deep into systems depth, but I won't cause I am clueless how much work really goes into developing aircraft. I believe that the Aerobask Diamond FADEC systems simplifies some programming, but again I don't really know. What I can says, is that I'm super impressed with TOGA's MU-2 and Hot Start's CL650. These look pretty complex to me.

I also have a few aircraft by Thranda. Thranda, as well as most devs, has chosen to wait, for the most part.  I guess @Ben Russell summed it up in a word: Wisdom.  In the end, we'll get the awesome aircraft we crave.

To Laminar Research: chop chop.

[SYSCD7000]

Thanks for your comment and sympathy!

[VirtualGAaviator]

Danklaue, lead developer from Thranda, wrote a short blurb on why, in their case, releasing X-plane 12 updates has been a slow process. (I've copied and pasted the blurb for those of you who don't want to go off site).

His response was to a comment asking how much longer would it be before XP12 aircraft starts to appear

Quote

Posted Sunday at 03:43 PM

Honestly, we're not 100% sure. We just announced the 337, we're fully at work on about 2-3 new XP12-only planes simultaneously, and have a bunch of planes to update.  I'm long overdue for some holidays, and it is just yesterday that Laminar fixed an issue in XP12 that would address something we needed to have resolved before updating our planes to XP12.  And while it wouldn't be 100% fair of me to blame our lack of progress on that one thing, it IS this sense of XP12 not being FINAL final, which has caused us to shift our priorities to working towards being able to release new aircraft, as opposed to going back to already released planes.  

Having said that, I wouldn't say that a v12 update for the 208 is TOO far away... but it does depend on what you're expecting.  Before Christmas? Probably not. 

 

Just by way of explanation, Laminar just yesterday has fixed a night lighting issue that kept us from moving forward on night textures.  They still haven't given us back some of the datarefs we need in order to calculate added or reduced drag on the plane, due to wheel pants, cargo pods, etc., so we're still kinda waiting for that. I know it's not an excuse, but it does tend to put these update projects on the back burner, until we get the sense that Laminar has figured out how to move forward on issues that have to do with backward compatibility.  We can't be developing new methods (like night lighting, or drag calculation) only to find out that Laminar puts out an update that destroys our preliminary way of dealing with the situation.  

Now, for NEW planes, at least we know what we're getting ourselves into.  An annunciator panel, for instance, that opts in to XP12's new lighting model, we can easily wire it up so that we have plugin-based attenuators or other functionality that makes full use of XP12's more accurate lighting physics, but to retrofit something like that on an older plane is a real headache... you tend to open up cans of worms.  Or in the example of added or diminished drag... we would then simply use an alternate dataref, or an external force dataref to account for cargo pods or wheel pants... but that is not an ideal solution... and even if we DID have to implement it that way, we'd have to re-do the flight physics pretty much from the ground up, in order to account for this new way of doing things.  We'd rather wait and see if Laminar just honours our request to re-introduce the datarefs we need to make these systems "Just Work".  So far, though, it's been a frustrating test of our patience.

Edited December 9, 2022 by VirtualGAaviator