AIRAC File

[JustinWheat]

My apologies for opening this topic of discussion and seeing it turn into a Navigraph-NavDataPro debate. I will sit back now and casually views the forums before deciding to open another inquiry.

[Litjan]

Hi everybody,

 

We totally understand where you are all coming from. I have been a navigraph user myself for many years, and never had a problem AS A CUSTOMER.

 

Right at this point - where we are crunching hard to get this plane out of the door - we are going to stick with what we have running, and what we are comfortable with. Navigraph fumbled that ball a few years ago, when we inquired into getting our own format on their site, just like Cameron said. Without going into details (we even wrote them in Swedish!), the response wasn´t courteous or professional, and we decided to look somewhere else.

 

That being said, a lot of years have gone by, and I think that we would very likely get a different response nowadays, both with the way navigraph evolved since then, AND with the impetus that our 737 will hopefully have.

 

We are going to ship with aerosoft AIRAC, and if you want to upgrade that dataset, it will set you back a few Euros. Alternatively you can run with the supplied dataset (it´s not like it becomes unusable when the next cycle gets published), or just wait with your purchase until we also support navigraph data (no promises to when that will be!)

 

As we have said repeatedly elsewhere   - we listen to our customers very much, but can´t cater to every wish instantly or always. We do put all wishes on our feature request list, though, so hopefully eventually...

 

Cheers, Jan

Edited November 19, 2015 by Litjan

[WagnerTenor]

Can you expand on why?

 

Well, to be honest, there was a time when one of my aircraft only used Navigraph, and Navigraph supported all of my others.  It was economics.  Now with the package deal (with charts), it is hard to beat.  Nothing really against Aerosoft, it would be nice not to have to purchase 2 versions of the same.  That's all.

 

Graham

[captain_alligator]

I too have a recent Navigraph data & charts subscription with over 320 days left to run, so I really hope you guys can come to some understanding with Navigraph.

After the 737 gets released I will watch what happens with Navigraph, and if need be, I will post something on their customer support forum.

[mtaxp]

Aerosoft was mentioned here , I hope that the 737 will get a profile in PFPX.

[mgeiss]

According to the changelog, PFPX already has a profile for the 737-300.

[captain_alligator]

According to the changelog, PFPX already has a profile for the 737-300.

 

Indeed it does! PFPX has a base aircraft type for 737-300, with 20K and 22K engine options. I guess there will be some small things to tweak like PAX capacity depending on the cabin configuration that IXEG go for, and equipment fitted (seems to default to X which means no DME and no transponder, which I don't think is right but then those codes are a bit of a mystery at the best of times...)

[DenQuixote]

This is my reason, why I prefer Navigraph (PDF). I want to get the most out of my "priority addons" and I won't subscribe to redundant services. That's why I will wait until the IXEG 733 is "fixed".

 

But that doesn't bother me very much, because I have a personal policy that I do not pay for addons that do not support all three platforms. So, my hope is that after some time you will have fixed both issues. (Business-Pro-Tip: Get the Linux users to do the annoying bits of work for you. This is not how you do it.)

Edit: first link is a PDF

Edited November 22, 2015 by DenQuixote

[Cameron]

Going out of our way to get a small market to do things we don't have to do for Mac and Windows is not worth the time. It is your thinking that's part of the Linux problem. It's more work for VERY little return.

As for your pdf it seems very irrelevant. It talks about some old format provided by Aerosoft that in NO way presents the same issues on the 737.

[DenQuixote]

It doesn't matter to me if you use a newer format for the 733. What matters to me is that "the one addon" that I use works best with the data provider that is incompatible with the 733. Also you continue to piss off customers without any necessity. I thought you want to listen. Apparently you do not.

[tkyler]

That's why I will wait until the IXEG 733 is "fixed".

 

 

The problem is with the navigraph inconsistent format.   The fix needs to come from them.   We began with navigraph...used several iterations of the data and its only recently that we are seeing this borked set.   We use a format that is common to existing products so there is NO reason you cannot use navigraph.  You just need to understand that some procedures may not show up in the CDU during procedure selection.   This is not our issue to "code around".   We are shipping with Aerosoft's data set because it is currently the most accurate and it is formatted correctly.  If you want to swap out to Navigraph, you certainly have that option.  We will try and get a dialog with them to get an IXEG published and will voice our concerns, but they have been slow to respond so there is no telling when it may happen.  Just know that we do want both sources available to customers.

 

-tkyler

Edited November 22, 2015 by tkyler

[Cameron]

Also you continue to piss off customers without any necessity.

 

Similar to your antics about Linux? Here you are talking up some MSFS product, meaning you use Windows for it. You jumping in here to talk about Linux nonsense is silliness. You obviously have the capability to run Windows given your favorite MSFS aircraft. Please, man. I'm not attempting to "piss off" anyone. There is a reality here. If I asked you to pump gas into a gas tank with a big hole in it and you had to pay for the gas, would you? From a sense AND business standpoint it's money down the drain. Someone has to FUND Linux development. I'm not going to do "charity" work for the sake of a handful of people to have fun. It has to make sense, and right now it does not.

[DenQuixote]

Thanks tkyler. Your way of handling this problem is perfectly understandable and well communicated. I just wanted to add another aspect why people may stick with some provider. Also, for one reason or another, some people will hold their investment. Like I said, I will be one of them. For this reason and also because I want to support addon vendors that add good to our community. Right now I am a bit confused about that aspect, but I hope this will be clarified over time as well.

[DenQuixote]

I'm not attempting to "piss off" anyone.

 

Well, you do. You are not stopping to do so. Why are you reading my posts selectively and try to prove I am wrong or stupid or something? I thought IXEG was different. I am deeply disappointed about your communications and I just told you / will tell you that I will hold my investments until I get the impression that IXEG stands for quality products, for dedication to detail and simulation fidelity and shows some appreciation for customers who ask simple, benign questions. Until today I had no reason to doubt any of this.

 

Apparently this information is important to you: I am capable of running Windows NT 4+Vista+2008+7+8, OSX, Solaris 10+11, Plan9, FreeBSD, Linux. One of them is my preferred platform. But that's totally not the point.

 

(edit: grammar)

Edited November 22, 2015 by DenQuixote

[Cameron]

I read every post in this forum. I do not selectively seek you out.

I am not IXEG and my words are not theirs. I AM in part responsible for the lack of Linux compatibility as the one making such business decisions at X-Aviation.

[tkyler]

I'll try and shed a little light on the attitudes FWIW....need a 10 minute break from programming FMS anyhow...attitudes here defintiely have historical context and what I'm about to say is the way it is.   I initially programmed the MU2 in linux...was a big fan of it.  Loved that x-plane ran on it.....the rate of change of linux libraries drove me nuts though....it wasn't economically viable and my products/procedures had to be in order to make the business work.  I understood that about linux and accepted it.

 

Fast forward to now...and in the 7 years of so we've been in business, we've had this Linux debate a LOT with a whole lot of folks.   All these discussions most here were probably not privvy to and so cannot fully understand where the "jaded" attitude comes from.   Now I have a reasonably decent education...lots of math....did some economics, pressed some buttons on a calculator...and never was I able to justify the support of linux for my own add-ons using some well accepted business forecast techniques.  The numbers never added up.  Now as a for-profit business,  that's an easy call.  I go to bed at night, sleeping well knowing that I made the right call for my business and family. 

 

BUT....and here's where the rub started all those years ago....linux users have historically never asked for support, they generally demand it....or try and argue the merit of support when it clearly makes zero business sense given the fact that the goal of a business is to make money. ...and the few that did ask for support, when politely told 'no', mostly disrespected that polite no....and entered in on some kind of diatribe about our lack of customer concern or care.....when from our perspective it is equally arguable.... "and you don't care about my support of my family"?  Just simply trying to convince anyone that linux support is justified economically in this market can be construed as a form of insult to general business sense and that is where the jaded attitude comes from.   

 

As a previous linux user, my attitude has always been one of, "I know it makes no sense to support it financially...anybody can see that...but would you consider supporting it just the same?"    I can't say we've see that kind of attitude in years past from the linux crowd, we do tend to shoot first.....our apologies if you're swept up in our prejudices .

 

-tkyler

Edited November 22, 2015 by tkyler

[deetee]

As an alternative solution, could the 737 not read the X-Plane Custom Data folder, which is in a format provided by both Aerosoft and Navigraph? I believe FlightFactor planes do that now.

[Cameron]

As an alternative solution, could the 737 not read the X-Plane Custom Data folder, which is in a format provided by both Aerosoft and Navigraph? I believe FlightFactor planes do that now.

 

The format for this product has been chosen. Making such a change like that would NOT be a good decision at this point (and I don't think FF uses default data...seems they have their own dataset).

[sizziano]

The format for this product has been chosen. Making such a change like that would NOT be a good decision at this point (and I don't think FF uses default data...seems they have their own dataset).

 

They do read from the custom data folder.

[Cameron]

They do read from the custom data folder.

 

Curious to know why Aerosoft offers a FF format and a Laminar one then for XP.

 

Either way, this has no bearing on the original question by deetee. While the database may contain the same data, it is not in the same format.

[sizziano]

Curious to know why Aerosoft offers a FF format and a Laminar one then for XP.

 

Either way, this has no bearing on the original question by deetee. While the database may contain the same data, it is not in the same format.

 

I believe they have their own format but it's inthe custom data folder and not in the acf folder anymore? Philipp developed both 757 and 777 FMS as well as the 430 so that probably has something to do with it.

[BaBene]

Hi,

 

I've never looked into using the Aerosoft AIRAC and personally buy a monthly subscription from Navigraph now and then. Until now I never really had problems with Navigraphs AIRACS and the LIDO Charts are realy awesome. That being said, I'm perfectly fine of switchting to Aerosoft AIRAC Cycles. But as already mentioned I'm used to subscribe on a monthly basis to navigraph, It's far more expensive than a yearly subscribtion but also far more flexible

 

I really would appreciate Navigraph support in the future though

 

 

There is also another thing I wanted to talk about:

 

I'll try and shed a little light on the attitudes FWIW....need a 10 minute break from programming FMS anyhow...attitudes here defintiely have historical context and what I'm about to say is the way it is.   I initially programmed the MU2 in linux...was a big fan of it.  Loved that x-plane ran on it.....the rate of change of linux libraries drove me nuts though....it wasn't economically viable and my products/procedures had to be in order to make the business work.  I understood that about linux and accepted it.

 

Fast forward to now...and in the 7 years of so we've been in business, we've had this Linux debate a LOT with a whole lot of folks.   All these discussions most here were probably not privvy to and so cannot fully understand where the "jaded" attitude comes from.   Now I have a reasonably decent education...lots of math....did some economics, pressed some buttons on a calculator...and never was I able to justify the support of linux for my own add-ons using some well accepted business forecast techniques.  The numbers never added up.  Now as a for-profit business,  that's an easy call.  I go to bed at night, sleeping well knowing that I made the right call for my business and family. 

 

BUT....and here's where the rub started all those years ago....linux users have historically never asked for support, they generally demand it....or try and argue the merit of support when it clearly makes zero business sense given the fact that the goal of a business is to make money. ...and the few that did ask for support, when politely told 'no', mostly disrespected that polite no....and entered in on some kind of diatribe about our lack of customer concern or care.....when from our perspective it is equally arguable.... "and you don't care about my support of my family"?  Just simply trying to convince anyone that linux support is justified economically in this market can be construed as a form of insult to general business sense and that is where the jaded attitude comes from.   

 

As a previous linux user, my attitude has always been one of, "I know it makes no sense to support it financially...anybody can see that...but would you consider supporting it just the same?"    I can't say we've see that kind of attitude in years past from the linux crowd, we do tend to shoot first.....our apologies if you're swept up in our prejudices .

 

-tkyler

 

Let me get this off first before commenting to your post: I'm really amazed of how you deal with the community, you seem to be really interested in the opinions of your customers, and your activity (both you and cameron) in this thread is amazing. I will buy the IXEG B733 no matter which platform and AIRAC support it ships with.

 

And now for the comment on your post:

 

You are generalizing here a lot. My favorite platform of choice for the past years is linux, mainly used for developing and work though. And I'm quite offended by your statement above. From my personal point of view the great majority of linux users do not demand for linux support, hell, most of them don't even ask for support cause they don't care or are aware that most companies won't put the effort in supporting linux due to the facts you already mentioned. There is however a small minority, as in all communities, of linux users or "wannabe linux users" who are trolling the community forums demanding linux support. Those are the people you are erroneously thinking do represent the linux community/users, cause those are the only people you are hearing from. The only thing you are doing with your post is feeding those trolls, and maybe offend a few nice linux users while doing so. I'd love to have linux support for the IXEG but I totally understand that it's not financially viable for a niche application like an aircraft addon and I totally accept running windows for my hobby though I honestly hate every bit of it (I couldn't survive without MSYS) 

 

I do however accept your apologies since I think I've been swept up by your prejudices

 

But due to the fact that you opened Pandora's box here, and since I'm a developer too (actually I'm not, but I am forced to write a shitload of code in my phd) could you give me some insights what exactly is so time consuming in supporting linux? As far as I understand it you are going to support mac? Shouldn't be a great difference between mac and linux, though I admittedly never dealt with mac and addon developement for X-Plane. 

Sure, libraries tend to change a lot. But if you're using a library in your application that is not platform exclusive (e.g. closed source) you are dealing with the same problem for every platform. There are also a lot of quality libraries and developers that do try their best to keep backwards compatibility. You also don't need to include every library change into your final application, just stick with a version and occasionally include security or stability patches for that version. Just ship the libraries with your application (shared or statically linked, if the license allows you to do so) as you would do in windows. You don't need to struggle with libraries supplied by distro packages. That's the way I'm used to develop my application, and it works quite well. Steam for example ships a great deal of libraries, which should be rather stable (from a versioning point of view). Deploying on windows is the hard part for me (Though it is a numerical application, so this might be a completely different topic). I don't want to give you advises I just want to understand what the difficulties are, since, as I already mentioned, am not a addon, mac or windows developer

 

Keep up the great development and community work!

 

Best regards,

 

BaBene

Edited November 24, 2015 by BaBene

[Cameron]

BaBene,

Thanks for your well thought out post. I'll let Tom answer his side to this, but I'll also remind you that after sales support is every bit a factor in this. Linux does not behave as "easy" as mass consumer operating systems, and it's made even more rough by the multitude of flavors. The simple answer to that is to say we only support one flavor, but even then there's the staff support training costs and upkeep of the plugin development (which believe it or not is not as simple as drop and compile and up to this point has required quite a bit of work to achieve almost the same Windows and Mac functionality). It all ultimately comes down to economics, and that's something we'll continue to pay attention to in the years going forward.

As for these wannabe Linux users? There must be a lot of them in the X-Plane world. Most of them are quite demanding and even vengeful in other public venues. I'm sure there's plenty of good folk, but when the only ones who want to speak up are these so called "wannabe's" it doesn't put a good taste in our mouth.

[BaBene]

Hi Cameron,

 

don't get me wrong, as I already mentioned I'm totally with you for those niche applications. I don't think that it's financially viable to support all three platforms. If you would have preferred the combination Linux / Windows I would be more happy (and I guess this could be a serious thought, since the quantitative difference between linux and mac users isn't that big), but I totally accept running my Simulators under Windows (This is not just due to your upcoming software release. I mostly run FSX/P3D, so I'm bound to Windows anyway). My experiences regarding software development may differ quite drastically to yours when it comes to deployment for linux due to the fact that my background is another. I started with development under linux and since then solely developed under and for linux. And as i mentioned in my post above, deployment for windows is giving me really hard times. It's just not that easy to generalize the aspects of software development and deployment regarding the different platforms, it all depends from where you are coming from and which background you have and what you are developing (as mentioned I'm developing numerical simulations, and It is a pain in the a** to find precompiled libraries for Windows that I need for my software. Compiling them from scratch can be a pain in the a** too under Windows) . I just wanted to point that out

 

As for the "wannabe" linux users (I might have been too harsh with the word "wannabe" here. It depends on what you want to define as a "true" linux user For me it's the kind of persons that stops crying and starts developing his own open source aircraft and simulator. I'm not crying though, so don't expect me to even try developing one ). You are only reading and hearing from those linux users cause the others simply don't engage on this kind of topics. I mean why would they? The only thing you'll ever hear from the linux users is them asking or demanding for linux support. I bet there might be quite a few people, even on this forum, that use linux on a daily basis, for entertainment, work and development, that are totally fine with running your software under Windows or Mac, like me. And none of them will come up and say "Hey great work in not supporting Linux, greetings the Linux guy". It's just not the way internet works nowadays. You either are happy and say nothing or you give the developers a hard time. And due to the anonymity quite a few of them are likely to get offensive and choose the wrong words. Just read a few YouTube comments

 

There are of course quite a few black sheeps under all those linux users, like in any other community. And i truly understand that they will leave a bad taste in your mouth. I simply beg you to not generalize

 

Best regards,

 

BaBene

[Cameron]

Hey BaBene,

 

Thanks for all your coherent commentary in this, and best wishes going into the holidays!