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My virgin test flight of the MU-2. Once I got use to her she flies like an Angle! Awesome!

Beautiful scenery... (i'm actually going to Madeira on holiday in couple of months, so this will be amazing to get myself familiar with the location ;P )

Edwin, I have always seen two parallels within the X-Plane community both contribute equally to the overall experience. Personally I do not get into debates over realism with the other side since the reality of flight sim is it is art and not real life. With that said there are limitations to X-Plane I try to overcome to bring things like Urban Textures, Vivd Skies and Tropical waters to to users who are looking for such. Additionally the debate is fruitless overall since either side will never agree..... What I do know is many of the people who do use my add-ons are very happy, this is good since I am bringing something to them that they felt as the end user was missing from X-plane. This makes the community, X-plane and development stronger which keeps things moving in a positive direction...... Don't get me wrong , I respect your opinion and strive to achieve a somewhat realistic balance with eye candy and flair...... But just like any kind of art, interpretations are always going to be different....

I talked to BenS and the answer is, "not yet". Here's why. BenS is trying to merge Ondrej's (Sam256) 2.49 work into these scripts to kind of provide a "super 2.49" strain. The XA strain by BenR and Ondrej's scripts both have limitations for various valid reasons because as Ben Supnik says so well...."it's just a tough damn problem that demands time". We're not going to release half-baked scripts out there, it would cause more headaches. We think we're in the "few more weeks" range though so its coming. I will say the difference in workflow is amazing! In 2 hours, I took all the loose collections of my old RV6 project...all the texture files, photoshop files, disorganized folder structure, blender versions and had it highly organized with current, proven dev standards and exported out the entire aircraft (7 objects) in one quick export. Threw on some new V10 lights, tweaked a thing here and there and all the sudden, a project with too high maintenance costs just got viable. I really hope we can develop an open project guild here, there are several technical and logistical issues to think about, but I'd consider it darn near developer utopia to have common projects with team contributions...everybody on the same page and stuff like airfighters Avanti the result. Development is just fun! TomK

What!? You don't just load up X-Plane at low texture resolution with massive jaggies w/no anti-aliaising and take a picture of your plane sitting upside down on a car roadway somewhere?! (... oh, and don't forget to do it at midnight too ) Sacrilege! - Ck. p.s. all John's masterpieces work fine on OSX in terms of the texture replacements, skycolour replacements, etc... ( Some of his latest creations use a client-side GUI to do the actual install of the textures, tho - John can help you out in this regard ).

That's great, John. Will you also be releasing CloudMAXX for OSX? Does UrbanMAXX impact FPS at all (for good or bad0? One last question...is UrbanMAXX Extreme v2 3D OSX ready/compatible? If so, I'll buy it today and support your 3rd party development effort. Sorry to turn your debate on realism into a pre-sales support thread. :S To get it back on topic, I did read a comment on your site from someone which asserted that photo scenery is a move backwards from the XP10 design goal of 'plausible realism.' I understand what they're saying, but until the hardware is capable of supporting the sim rendering dynamic 3D based on the underlying terrain/land use type, I'm not sure there is an alternative. Kudos to Austin for forward thinking and building the engine now, but I don't think we're anywhere near that (plausible?) reality.

Anyways,

JohnMAXX, you're over-reacting, IMHO.

I appreciate all you have done to add to xplane 10. Thank you for your contributions. It has made my flying experience more enjoyable.

Really like niebieski's & gheeds screenshots but theres something not quite right to my eye but can't quite put my finger on it. They both look very much like 'Water colour paintings' by one of the famous 19th Century artists (My favorite Art medium) & I get the impression a lot of the scenery being turned out (But by no means all) is veering towards visual 'Art' rather than a visual representation of reality which I consider paramount for Flight simulators. Absolutely no disrespect intended on his great work but I feel JohnMaxx's latest postings of his work are veering quite radically in the direction of Art ( & not water colour this time) at the expense of reality ..Only an opinion Folks..Cheers

Hope it's more bug-free than the real one.

Antonov An-2 And VSKYLABS DFSP-39 Prototype

I'll ASK if I can make them available here. I need to get an OK from BenS. In the meantime, I have a "guideline sheet" I wrote a few days back and will post it later today. This guideline sheet it kind of "biased" to my preferences....I even call it, "the x-scenery way", but it's battle tested on Laminar aircraft, the MU2 and the IXEG 737 and has shown to be very reliable on projects of any size and it also is very conducive to collaboration and open source contribution becasue of it's standardization of many things. It's an evolution of processes given every headache I've ever had in development and is now to the point where there really is no more headaches or pretty close anyhow. This guidline sheet will set you up for using the scripts but doesn't limit you should you not choose to. Call it, "best practices". I'll try and get that document up later today. As far as letting the community make tutorials, I certainly wouldn't care, but at the same time, when the community goes after something "free for all", it's usually chaos, one-offs and not as much gets done as could be done with a organized effort. Lots of folks make tutorials for exposure or self-gratification reasons and a lot of time, do more damage than good by leaving out pertinent or incomplete info. I expect that will happen as folks like to tinker and that's fine of course. What I am after myself though.....is to eventually establish an organized "guild" membership where projects are managed and organized, tutorials are linear, structured and organized and projects will therefore have consistency and predictability and steady progress and yield the best results IMO. TomK

15x7 coverage. We had 16 people flying around the other night (unusually busy). Horani has it right, though, the drones will keep you on the lookout for traffic if you're below FL180. We do have some commercial customers coming online in the next few months that will likely change the face of the network quite a bit (ie, consistently high traffic), but even without that, it's still valuable. The fact that you get can guaranteed ATC presence and quality is probably the most important point. If that isn't important to you, then the rest of the features will probably not be enough to pull you in, but if you do want that ATC on a reliable schedule, and you want it to be high quality every single time, there really is only one game in town as far as I know. I have to admit, when I fly on PE (and full disclosure, it's my network!), I really don't pay too much attention to whole else is flying. I use it to train and stay sharp, period. Whether the radio is busy or not, I have plenty to do in the cockpit between all the freq changes, flying the airplane, etc. Check out this short IFR flight from SNA to BUR to see what I mean:

*stands up and starts the slow clap*

OK, I thought this is cool and worth posting. We just got around to tying in the reversers to the hydraulics. There are 3 hydraulic sources: Engine power, Electric pump and a standby pump...each pump weaker than the next. Well how fast the reversers deploy is tied to how much hydraulic power is going into them. So the reversers will deploy nice and fast with the engine pumps. Not so fast with the electric pumps...and just downright slow with the standby pump. So lets say you have one systems down...the 'A' system on the left side. In this case, the left reverser won't deploy...not good on landing (sort of...the standby pump cuts on automatically under certain conditions but I'm making a point . You CAN; however, turn on the standby pump and use that to deploy the A reverser, BUT it will take a bit longer than the B (right) side so on touchdown, you'll have a bit of asymmetric thrust as you deploy the reversers until the slow reverser opens up fully....but only if you advance the throttles though. You could "pull into reverse"...wait a few extra seconds to let the slower side deploy, THEN crank back on the reverse throttle. If the standby system has to power both sides, then the extension time is doubly long.....almost such that you won't get significant reverse thrust till you're a good ways down the runway. You can play with the hydraulic switches, turn pumps on and off and see the reversers deploy at different rates. When I was testing it, I deployed the reversers, turned off system A....commanded the reversers closed and sat there for about 30 seconds staring at the reverser lock annunciator waiting for the other one to close before I realized I hadn't turned on the standby pump. very cool! Tom K Laminar / IXEG

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

Thank you cyrille. I am "keep going" right now, working on the last few parts of the exterior model even today (sans landing gear). We should be providing some in flight exterior screenshots in the upcoming weeks. Tom K

We really don't know when. We know when we would LIKE to have it out, but our experience over the last 2.25 years has shown that you never know what comes down the way. Sometime in the first half of 2013 is desired by the team and that's really all we can say. We are very much committed to not cutting corners and providing a complete product. Work continues regularly however. I am nearly finished with the exterior and maybe in the next four weeks we can put up some screenshots....I'll work towards that milestone. Tom K Laminar / IXEG

Again some steps further. Added some more detail to the exterior normals. Introduced normals to the interior,after giving the interior other colors (likewise I did on my LED DC3 paints) Its fun to see what a man with brushes can do.

Two for one. another video of Jan flying around the pattern at Nice.

Hey guys. Jan has done another video showing some more details of the electrical system, which is pretty much ready to go. We have 17 electrical busses powered, we have equipment tied to each of these busses so when a bus goes down, things dependent on that bus go down. We have modeled generator heating and cooling, taking into account ambient temperatures and heat transfer coefficients, DC battery drain and voltage drops under heavy load, galley power, ground service bus with attendants switch, even coffee maker and hot air ovens. We have filament fadein/fadeout so the lights don't just pop on instantly. Momentary generator disconnects on switching power sources (you'll see lights flicker during this process) Warning annunciators are tied to their appropriate recall system..and lights dependent on voltage dim under voltage drops. Seems like a lot of detail but the coolest thing of all is you just let it run and it looks and feels real. No funny needle jumping, no instant on lights, it just all seems normal. Another video to follow shortly where Jan flies a simple pattern around Nice. -TomK

As I had to interrupt the work on my scenery due to too much stress on the job, and on the other hand some people were waiting anxiously for a realease , I decided to upload it in the current state. I'd say it is finished about 97% for V1.0. Nevertheless, I will continue to work on the scenery when I have more time. In later releases, I plan to add ATC taxi routes, houses in the vicinity of the airport, maybe an orthophoto at the airport, more ground markings, oil spills, this and that ... There are still some things missing and/or buggy, like the curved lead in lights for RWY 05, some textures for the runways, the PAPI for RWY 23, some (minor) bugs in the elevation of the mesh, roads, etc.. But I think the scenery is "flyable". It isn't an "official" release, so I decided not to upload it here on x-pilot. You can download it here (german site). Click the "Download" button (easy, isn't it? ) After unzipping the downloaded file, you get 3 folders: P_Madeira_12-11-12 P_Madeira_a_roads_12-11-12 P_Madeira_mesh_12-11-12 Simply place them in your Custom Scenery folder. Have fun (hopefully). If you have other issues than the above described, please let me know. EDIT: you have to turn "runway follow terrain contours" ON. EDIT 2 (it was too late yesterday night ): if not already done, please install OpensceneryX and FF Library.