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Most people don't jack...they just think we're all jerks by nature here For those curious as to the x-pilot split from the org, read on for my version of the story. Those not interested probably are the better for it. This is just written history so my fingers and mind can stay busy while I break from dev work. I think there are multiple factors that led to the split but I'd say it all started with the MU2 and it's related development of manipulators. Manipulators were new at the time, no tools existed for aircraft authors to implement manipulators and they had to be done so by hand, not really practical at all. The MU2 had about 70+ of them and I could easily spend 2 hours hand editing the exported object...and I was exporting every 10 minutes or so during final tweaking. It was ridiculous and obscenely annoying. This meant that x-plane add-on aircraft had no 3D interactivity and limited animations. So imagine me with this vision of a nice aircraft, interactive in 3D like FSX stuff and no way to realize that vision due to lack of tools. Marginal, the author of the blender scripts did not support manipulators and had seem to have disappeared from the community so we were all kind of in limbo. I forged ahead and begun talks/negotiations with Nicolas about selling on the org while still working out the manipulator delimma with Ben Russell and we eventually came up with a rough manipulator framework in blender. Now let me tangent for a second... I have always believed that were all add-ons equal in FSX and X-Plane, that a user would prefer x-plane to its rendering quality and smoothness. The problem is that things were not equal....FSX has 10x the addons and the market share. So the only way to get my beloved x-plane to that same level of support was simply to get more people to look at x-plane. If x-plane had low quality...and no features that FSX had, why in the world would anybody want x-plane? This posed a problem. It was my singular goal with the MU2 to send a message to the FSX community saying, "look what x-plane CAN do" and get more people to look at x-plane. Recall at this time that FSX had not been cancelled so we were going up against a juggernaut and needed every advantage that we could get. So I made what I believed to be a nice product, comparable to some decent stuff in FSX, wrapped it nice, wrote a nice manual. Ok, back from the tangent. while negotiating with Nicolas, I observed a couple of things and interpreted them thusly. 1.) He wasn't very professional in his communications. His replies were untimely, never answered my questions directly and were generally evasive. I took a more direct approach by asking more direct questions like: "How often do you pay? What forms of payment do you provide? Do you provide sales reports? How do you handle marketing?" and I would get back responses like, "We pay monthly, a lot of vendors are happy with it". I viewed this kind of as a "I'm the only game in town, you do things the way I want you to do them"....and well, I didn't like that. I would be bringing HIM money and expected a bit of service. His market share alone wasn't enough, it wasn't all about the immediate quick cash flow to me. For many developers I know that it is and that is still affecting the situation to this day IMO. Going with the org means quick up front money, but I still believe it comes at a higher cost in credibility....at least to FSX users and they are still the larger market and I don't think the org is helping the x-plane growth. Nicolas will say it is, growing quickly under his tenure, but his tenure happens to coincide with XP10 dev and FSX canellation. He may have had vision to see the potential growth, but he's definitely not responsible for it in any way. So, I also noticed that Nicolas was marketing stuff with a bit more hype than I found agreeable, almost deceitful IMO, claiming some of his products to be the "best of x-plane" as he still does to some extent, but not as much anymore. Well I could go on other forums and see folks say things like, ".......that's the best they got?" or they'd buy one of his products and immediately feel like they'd been duped by marketing. When they'd voice their displeasure on the org, both the user and their post would "disappear". All that was left was glowing reports and not "counter point". I definitely have a problem with that at a community I helped contribute to. So we began taking screenshots of these posts before they were wiped out and Nicolas has alluded to our "screenshots" as silly and childish....but it was our way to say, "hey man, we're not making this stuff up, Nicolas is burying people for speaking out" and the community is oblivious. It gave x-plane a bad image IMO. Sure there are people who feel they get equal value for their money but remember, I'm looking at growing x-plane and the FSX crowd looked at XP as a play toy. The only people who seem to think these were good values were x-plane fanboys who didn't want to hurt anybody's feelings or get banned. This wasn't the way to grow x-plane IMO......and is probably the philosophical base for our differences to this day. So here I am working on the MU2, an org member, no x-pilot yet.....I have these scripts with manipulator support thanks to Ben Russell, things are going south with Nicolas and he's started to become more and more gustapo on the org when people bash his stuff. They just "disappear" and nobody is the wiser. So I need a place to sell my MU2. So I call up Cameron who founded x-plane freeware at age 13 and has e-commerce programming experience. This guy is passionate and talented and good at what he does. He shared my ideas of promoting x-plane quality in a higher light than we felt the org was doing. As talented as Cameron is though, the task was ambitious to set up a new web store and Ben Russell completed our technological tri-fecta. The one thing we decided though was to not share our Blender scripts for a couple of reasons. 1.) We needed a competitive advantage in these early days of "market positioning" knowing the 1000lb Gorilla, x-plane.org was about to outcast and try and crush us and 2.) the scripts were (and still are) cryptic to implement manipulators. If we put them out, we'd have a plethora of users complaining on how to use them and overwhelming us with support, stealing our development time. The license was open source but only upon distribution. So by not distributing, we weren't violating anything. One person that really needed manipulator support though was Dan Klaue. He was working on his stuff but didn't have manipulator support and it really stalled his work. I later found out from him directly that he thought our hoarding of our own fork of scripts was way uncool and it .."upset him greatly". Dan was shaping up to be a staunch supporter of Nicolas and the org and this added to the emotional divide. Now I'm a good ol Texas boy as we'd say in the US, meaning I'm a simple "straight shooting" (says things very directly) kind of guy..... work hard, enjoy the fruits of my labor and don't ask anything of anybody...and I do love to share, my history on the org shows; however, I can't share if I'm not stable enough to survive. I looked at it as I "don't need to share YET, but the time will come that I want to very much".....and a topic for another day, the community here is about to find out that I have every intention of sharing, scripts and everything I've learned over the years using them......BUT I still have to survive and I do long to help and see a new level of shareware begin to take shape and watch people engaging in the hobby of development. Dan's attitude to me was one of, "give me your hard work (Ben Russells actually)". I might have, but philosophically, he was supporting someone who was engaging in really bad behavior in the banning of it's membership. Granted it was passively, I don't think he had any discussions with Nicolas about the matter and chose to keep to his blinders, thereby maintaining plausible deniability. Money was at stake though.....standing against Nicolas means loosing lots of money up front and it's not easy to walk away from without a hit to your pocketbook. To me, it's a tether around your neck though and you don't break from oppression with that technique though so to me it was just a matter of Dan choosing his side and living with the consequences of his choice, nothing more. I certainly have taken consequences from mine and that's just the way it is. Ok...so here we are, you have me with my MU2 and manips, not wanting to sell with Nicolas on one side......and you have Dan, already determined to support Nicolas on the other side.....and there was some animosity here....not by us so much. I had nothing to be angry about. I have my MU2, I have my manips, I have a store to sell on, I'm good to go. The one thing I did do though that really fueled the fire was I implicated Dan's work as inferior....NOT a good way to make friends, regardless of the truth. Now I didn't do it directly, never called Dan a bad developer, never explicitly said a piece of his work was bad, BUT I did point out technical areas that were deficient compared to the standard FSX users were used to. Dan's inevitable response was "why would you do such a thing"....and a very fair question to him. This was one of those difficult moments for me. I could 1.) Play nice and make sure everybody felt good.......while watching x-plane continue to grow slow because Nicolas called works like Dan's, "the very best of x-plane"....or I could stand up and say, "no, this is not the very best of x-plane". People's feelings hung in the balance and I chose to go my route. Selfish? possibly.....do I regret it? certainly not. I think there are a great many people out there who fully understand that exposure is paramount in marketing. It had to be done so I did it, knowing full well a lot of folks probably wouldn't be too comfortable. As long as I could get this message out, get x-plane add-on quality up a level through good old fashioned free-enterprise competition, then everybody would benefit. This was my only driving factor. Dan's work today is fantastic I think. He would probably agree that his work today is better than it was then and that he's learned more and has better resources. I am very happy for the work he is putting out. It does x-plane proud. so that was the environment right before the MU2 came out. Tensions were high because of my insinuations of inferior quality and Nicolas banning ways and we knew it was only a matter of time before we were out of there. So we kept our head low, built x-aviation and then built x-pilot as our inevitable forum outlet. So sure enough, the MU2 comes out, Nicolas finds out, shortly later, I'm banned, Cameron's banned, the MU2 is the first all 3D plane with manips and it gets some good reviews and lo and behold several people say the Mu2 is the reason they came to x-plane. I feel justified and vindicated...yet pretty much hated by many org members. Now don't forget that x-plane.org is STILL the 1000lb gorilla in the room and when a 1000lb gorilla gets upset, you go into defense mode real quick. Every time we got attacked (always passively with deleted posts by members or a banning of a x-aviation supporter), we counter-attacked. Everything we did on our end we felt was defensive only, BUT we were the more aggressive publicly as that's all we had....if we played on the org playing field, we'd be wiped out. Product quality and freedom of speech is all we had at the time, one thing Nicolas doesn't quite subscribe to. Nicolas used guerrilla tactics, we used bombs. Folks see what we do, they don't see what he does, he operates the org like a mob boss, in the shadows. Bad stuff gets done, but as long as no-one sees it, nobody knows. That continues to this day. For us here at x-pilot and x-aviation, the mission is the same. Show the FLIGHT SIM MARKET.....not just the x-plane market what x-plane is capable of and we'll all benefit. So as time passes, you see Dan get Sam256 involved and eventually Dan gets his scripts and manipulator support and things keep on rolling. By this time, we're going our separate ways back to back but there's still tension to this day, like North Korea and South. All we ever did was want to elevate x-plane's add-on image and quality outside the x-plane arena as this was the real flight sim market in our opinion and when we left the org, we got attacked and we came back very hard and aggressive verbally. This is why you see no apologies from us save one, from me to Dan for sweeping him up in our issues with Nicolas. Later on, the announcement of the changes in FSX changed the landscape in x-plane. I got picked up by Laminar and got caught up in that instead of doing more add-ons. In the time it took me to do the scenery and four aircraft, I might could have done two other add-ons, BUT I was forefront in XP10 tech and this was a bonus, I was help shaping methods that benefit all developers, for the org developers too. In the end, my path in all this will have a good community effect that has yet to be implemented. I plan to take all my knowledge, experience, evolution of the scripts, documentation and do video tutorials and written tutorials and teach folks how to develop high quality stuff in a hobby fashion for the community. Will this be detrimental to payware developers? Absolutely not in that payware level has gotten to demand a LOT of detail and time. What I'm looking to do is get folks making shareware like the King Air or Baron and possibly in an open source capacity where we can increase community involvement in a more "guild" style environment. Very nice stuff can be done with default tools and I for one think it would be cool to have a big download library of aircraft of the King Air and Baron level. We might implement this in a low cost subscription based environment which provides tremendous value for the dollar. As a parent of 3 kids in college, I have to take care of my family in order to have time to do anything for the community. In the end, all I want is higher quality in x-plane . I do not subscribe to the "everything for free" model though. I have always provided "some free...some not" to balance it out. I've taken for free and therefore feel the need to contribute some for free. At the end of the day, I am interested in a 1.) Vibrant community with great social interaction, mentorship, and culture of quality shareware development and 2.) Providing great value for the money whenever money is exchanged for anything I have a hand in. So that's where x-pilot came from in my version. It started with the Mu2 and my refusal to sell at the org because of what I perceived to be a strategy detrimental to x-plane growth. Cameron and Ben felt the same and we all headed out. In the separation, bad feelings ensued and this little settlement here is the result. Like the org though,in the end, we will go where the community lets us go. Best, Tom K Sorry for the ramble...but it was a good opportunity to spill since you asked Jack

Dear Jean-Francois, Thank you very much for your interest and nice comments. We kind of have the same background. I was a hardcore Falcon 4 user for many years in the past and also use DCS, but only to fly around in a realistic P-51D. The A-10C is amazing with high fidelity, but I am lacking time to really get involved there as well. A few years ago, I fell in love with bush flying and also developed an interest in add-on development. Guess that came naturally, because I am a real world pilot and professional simulation/aerospace engineer. At that time, I was still using FS2004/FSX (started using it with Flight Simulator II), but Microsoft shut down the Aces studio and I thought, like so many others, that FSX will be dead as a development platform soon. As you know that is very far from reality and developers are still pushing the boundaries every day, delivering amazing products and it will stay like that for some years to come, I am sure. However, I chose X-Plane as my development platform and I will stay with it, because it has LOTS of potential. It is like a huge sandbox with many possibilities and opportunities, even it drives me crazy sometimes. Air Combat is challenging and demanding and I like it in a simulator, but I agree with you that flying a bush plane in the Rockies, Alaska or in the valleys of BC is just amazing and creates even more fun, if you do it in a realistic way using real weather. As for the release date, I can just repeat what I said in the past. I will only give a release date if I am sure that I can make it. I don’t want to disappoint anybody. There are too many factors involved which can change the release date. This is my first real add-on and I have to find out dev things from time to time, which takes time, and also real life gets in the way often as a part time developer with a full time day job. However, I can assure you that Beaver development is moving forward nicely. I hope to have the cockpit fully animated by the end of this week and also the flight model is in beta, being tested and evaluated by the test team and it is behaving great so far. The beta team consists of people with a strong technical background, people with a strong background in bush flying and real world pilots with flying experience in the Beaver and other similar aircraft types. We at SoulMade Simulations want to create the ultimate experience for a specific aircraft and the initial/first aircraft release will just be the beginning. So not one aircraft after another. There will be more to come for the Beaver and in general, but I can’t talk about it right now, because these things have never been done for X-Plane and I guess also not for FSX. However, that info will only be revealed after successful prototyping and when implementation is on its way, ready to be shown off. First things first, though. So I ask you and all the others waiting for the Beaver, please be patient with me …

File Name: Simple Season File Submitter: ShePooley File Submitted: 08 Jan 2013 File Category: Plugins and Utilities How to install: Select the version of snow you want: normal snow, deep snow or very deep snow. You only need one of it. For Alaska I prefer the version with very deep snow. Replace the old Simple Season with the new one and delete the file "SP_version" in the root of the folder "zzzzzz1000 world terrain" or delete the folder "zzzzzz1000 world terrain" in your custom scenery folder. This short python script will give you the 4 seasons! The script puts a copy of the default scenery in the custom scenery folder and adds 4 sets of textures: winter, summer, spring and fall. If you are starting X-Plane 10 or moving the aircraft (location -> select global airport) it will calculate the needed season and activate it No restart of X-Plane is needed. January - March: winter in the north...summer in the south April - June: spring in the north ...fall in the south July - September: summer in the north...winter in the south October - December: fall in the north...spring in the south If the temperature at your airport is below -2° C it will set winter too If it is winter and the temperature higher than +2° it will switch to autumn. My script do not include any texture files, this must be done by the community. That means you will not see any difference between summer, spring and fall until you have added textures for it. It uses the default texture files to create a very simple winterworld for X-Plane. It is not really a nice winterworld but better than nothing. I only added the simple winter to show that my script is working, do not expect too much. X-Plane 9 users can install the well known WinterWorld into my script. It is easy to add texture files to it. If you add your own texture files to my system then you must do it to the folder "SP_texture_template" with the subfolders summer, winter, spring and fall. The folder "SP_texture_templatefall" will be the root of the scenery folder after the season fall is activated. If you put your files to the normal texture folders it can happen that you overwrite the default X-Plane texture files. If this happen then you must run the X-Plane installer to repair X-Plane! Scenery designer can use my script to switch their scenery too Harddisk space: --------------------- This script do not touch any real file, it is no more than a gigant softlink manager. That means you do not need free harddisk space untill you are adding texture files. X-Plane Versions: ---------------------- This script will work with all versions of X-Plane 9 and 10 till 10.99, X-Plane cant break it (at least i hope it) If my script detects a new version it will rebuild the system and every thing should work fine How to install: ------------------------------ It requires Sandy Barbours Python interface http://www.xpluginsd...n_interface.htm Drop it in the folder PythonScripts and start X-Plane For the first start my script will need a very long time to copy the default scenery, my system needs around 17 minutes for it and my computer isn't slow After the installation you must restart X-Plane to register the new scenery. Known limitations: -------------------------- You can change all files inside the default scenery except the library.txt. This file is always the default version. If you change it then X-Plane will crash! If my script is switching the scenery than X-Plane needs a few seconds to do this. During this time X-Plane is not responding. This is a limitation by X-Plane, there is no way to change it. Click here to download this file Simple Season - complete.zip

Flight Simulator with X-Plane on a PC running X-Plane and the iPad 'Picture in Picture' view of running 'AirTrack' App controlling the Flight Path of a Cessna 172SP through the mountainous terrain of Rainy Pass Alaska as just one leg of the annual Iditarod Dog sled Race from Anchorage to Nome. The full flight plan and Iditarod trial will be provided in subsequent postings as the annual Iditarod occurs in March. http://youtu.be/A5eDR866JSc

Start tracing.....

Amazing! I might upgrade to V10 now. Calling texture guru! John Maxx, you up for it?

Regarding Blender export scripts. The original scripts written by Marginal (I'm pretty sure) only work for 2.49b as they are built on python 2. Sam256 (over on the .org, I think I got his name correct) has been updating the blender scripts with new functionality to be more inline with the latest features of the X-Plane .obj format. He has one for 2.49 and one for 2.5x (and now 2.6x). I'm not sure how far along the ones for 2.5x are, the last time I checked he was still adding functionality and there were bugs, but that was a while ago. Have you seen Dan Klaue's tutorials on YouTube? Also I recommend Blender Cookie for tutorials (most of them are free), they even have a getting started in Blender series.

There will be shortly. I'm working on the King Air Autopilot this week...as well as a few other quality control things. We've been revamping our export tools to ensure one-click export consistency for the entire aircraft and it should help keep things reliable. Tom K Laminar / IXEG

Today I flew CYUL-KMCO on a Explus (United Express) E-170. More pictures HERE.

Oh, fantastic. Can we write a whish list? Well, I have not to many. Have graduated (self training) from C172 via Baron58 and now the c90B, and found the C90B to be quite superb except from some small things. First of all, the autopilot is for me a nightmare to handle. It's ok to initially set Heading, but if deactivated, it's a challenge to get activated again. I strongly suspect there is missing a button or two like (flight Director off/on/auto). Also changing flight level is a struggle. But it might also just be my lack of knowledge on how it should be operated. Also I had to assign a button on my flight stick to set "headset" for Com1 or Com2, but with no indicators it's a guesswork to know which one is active. And the fuel level instruments seems to me to be a static picture. Nice if they could show the remaining fuel. If these things are to be attended, it would really enhance my flight experience with this plane. I thought I might be able to address some of the things in plane-maker, but to be honest, I did not understand much in this tool, and absolutely not in the 3D-panel that for me not look to much like in the plane. Hopefully, some of these whishes will be “mended” some day. e

My pen was broken and the batteries ran out on my calculator, otherwise these would have been far more graphically pleasing.

Testing another Texture pack for UrbanMAXX Extreme

I was so into it, that I did not bother. From the cockpit all felt 20fps plus, outside views at 400 / 1,000 ft stopped occasionally for one to four seconds for scenery creation. I had to dial the world distance to low, because loading times were next to unbearable, HDR is set to 2x. Passed very low over NYC... For the same flight southward over Manhattan - with a few building enhancements from the .org I rescaled to 1000px / 220kB - those screen shots are 4.5MB in size and very detailed. Yes, I could have made shots in broad day light with clouds - but this is sooo much nicer.

Hi all, I usually fly the CRJ in XP9.7 on a nearly 5yo MacBook. And I love it. Since we got the Airbus A330-200 from XPP painted for my virtual airline and I had a graphic monster computer temporarily around, I gave this plug-less aircraft and XP10.20b9 a chance. I was blown away. Nope, never thought it would happen with XP10. XP10.20b9 68bit to be precise. OK, starting up took ages (six minutes overall to be 3nm out of KJFK). I decided to have a look at Fredes updated KJFK. On final I saw all those houses. Hi KJFK, you look nice, lets go to KLGA... No extra scenery installed - other than KJFK. Could not believe what I was seeing. 125 screen shots later I post a few. What more

With the Blackshape Prime to Trier (Germany). http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=49.7388&lon=6.6263&zoom=13&layers=M

Nope. Not even close. Cameron is much more clever. He's probably cuter, too.

Hmmmm .... Could it be (drum-roll for dramatic effect) ... that Nicolas and Cameron are the same person The EDIT - Huh .. I messed up my post. Originally I'd also added that the reason being it could be a conspiracy to drive everyone away from org to x-pilot ... but I must have wiped it in my haste .. lol.

This whole topic is plane stupid.

I added new villages (buildings, streets, power-lines, forests...) to OpenStreetMap, like Mondorff, Puttelange-lès-Thionville, Beyren-lès-Sierck, Vigy... http://ggka.online.fr/xp/josm.jpg'>http://ggka.online.fr/xp/BlackShapePrime07.jpg'>http://ggka.online.fr/xp/BlackShapePrime08.jpg'> Available right now for all the XPOSM and OSM2XP users.

I would like to have a better engine programming in future. I pretend if philipp has time, to make a maintenance plugin for the CRJ.. and in that plugin, record the way you fly. In that area fuel consumption will be important, so any information is welcome. Thanks.