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Aaron, I am going to be diplomatic concerning this situation but I do feel it is an obligation to air out a few things regarding how you have done business in the past and a few notes on my involvement with you. Recently you started pushing this sky product by providing very few and vague screen shots of your work. Only when I asked you to show more detail did you post more shots. Terrain Europe XP was marketed the same way. You asked for pre-orders and when anyone ever asked you for more screen shots you didn't provide much of anything. You also promised updates and landmarks as part of the product. Recently you did a 180 and decided not to support the product any longer which angered a lot of individuals in the community. In conversation with a friend of mine, from the community, you touted the sucess of your Terrain Europe XP, but here in a public forum you are telling people it wasnt a sucessful product. I think you may have lied to that individual in order to get something out of him..... Additionally you recently reached out to another friend of mine asking for his services to create a product better than UrbanMAXX, this is OK but you were making all kinds of promises as to a "new technique" to place textures and line them up with the roads.....This is all OK, but you were looking for this individual to figure it out, which isnt possible BTW.....Not without code anyway. If you did have this at your disposal why would you need to enlist someone from the community to do the work for you? That seemed very fishy..... And lastly you reached out to Sun-Dog, looking for them to develop another cloud add-on as work with me and Sun-Dog were already underway. And you found out pretty quickly that we were under an agreement. I don't mind that you did this, but again it shows you are trying to exploit the talent around you..... How could two versions of the same product compete? I think you were trying to cut me out, not good..... Another point is you do not even participate in the community, side converations, development threads, not an ounce. You show up out of the blue and try selling stuff with little information and thin content. Becoming a good developer in this community requires you to become a part of the community. Developers need to have a true relationship with the user base. You found out how strong mine is recently and I continue to work hard to maintain this.... Don't underestimate the intelligence of this community, they can see past shifty answers. Always be honest and open with them, especially in the area of how a product works...... Im not telling you what to do, or telling you to ignor the business side, but you should never let business take over, you need to keep a leash on it until you develop a reputation.... Plus a few of these points noted above are why you are having a hard time winning over the community. Frankly it is very painful to watch...... My Involvment With AWG Ok there is some hear say above so let me hash out my involvment with AWG. Aaron contacted me wanting to use UrbanMAXX with his Terrain Europe XP. So we started talking and I said that may work out. During our converations on skype I asked about reporting of sales and Aaron replied that he did not have a way of reporting sales statisitics RED FLAG.. I let that red flag slide and kept in the back of my head that we will just work that out later. During this time I offered him up some custom glacier textures which he put into his terrain europe product. One thing we discussed was a formal announcement of the product and our partnership. A blog post came out showing the glaciers and touting them as a feature in his product, with NO mention of Maxx-XP....RED FLAG I was a bit irrate at this point and after a conversation he added a little something down at the bottom of the blog post.... Around this time a member of a popular X-Plane review site contacted me with some concerns surrounding Aaron, Ill be honest I dont remember the details but it was surrounding his use of OSM and another irrate X-Plane developer. RED RED RED RED FLAG This review site was going to run a piece on AWG but decided to back out because of his reputation......And that was the straw that broke the camels back....I contacted Aaron and said he can have those glaciers and Im out....... Many other details were left out, but these are the facts I remember and this is why you have a hard time around here Aaron....... Dont get angry, really read this and try to take something away from it......But Im afraid you may have already have tarnished your reputaion to the point of no return.....

Where there's smoke there's fire, and there's plenty of smoke around you buddy.

I am with you in welcoming new technology. I think the NG is a great aircraft, and the MAX will be even better. Thats just the way advancement in technology goes. For us the choice of simulating the "classic" came about with the availability of data for it, and the "iconic" nature of this aircraft. Plus the cool hybrid cockpit that seems to combine the best of two worlds (can´t beat big round mechanical airspeed indicators and altimeters for readability, even if you install a 50" plasma screen!). And don´t forget that in the last two years while we were developing this bird the real classics use was declining, at least with the major airlines. But I am sure the classics will keep flying in some parts of the world for many years to come. As an airline, the desire to operate new aircraft is paramount - less fuel and operating costs. As a simulation pilot you don´t have to worry about that (hmm, do I sense a great business model here?), so the option of operating newer or older aircraft is a matter of choice. I personally think that flying older or even vintage aircraft is a great way to experience different stages in aviation history, and I think that operating an older aircraft can be far more interesting than just watching a modern aircraft go through it´s automation steps. Jan

After finally coaxing the HD Mesh that Andras kindly provided me into working (by literally replacing the original files in the default world scenery after a clean install of XP10, It works. No photos of that as it really doesn't look like anything but a default scenery area with no beaches. This post is mostly an update on assets: I'd like to thank Peter T for pointing me towards CGTextures for resources, I'm remaking the entire project from the textures up. I will be creating taxi lines, hold lines, custom everything. I would also like to thank Peter T for allowing me to make use of some of the Aerobridge textures, I'll be using one or two of them in the final release of this. I'd like to point out that the photo above is only a preliminary test of the low-resolution runway signs, the lines are XP10's crap default lines (sorry, they just look like swiss cheese without enough holes. This airport will look nothing like this come January 2014, the pavement will all be custom (again thanks to Peter T for the recommendations). By November you guys should be able to see some preview shots of what the preview will look like (previewception), on the island of Tau. After doing a couple of midterms, it's relaxation night and I'm sitting back with a nice cup of hot chocolate, eating the last piece of my birthday cake, and starting to work on NSFQ Tau Airport. Shots of that around midnight, probably. Cheers! Proof that I still exist and that this project is still underway! Yay! Exclamation point! Maybe I should just get some sleep........

Thanks for that clarification John, now I understand much more !

Ben, I do not like how you are going about handling this. We are under no obligation to release the emails exchanged between Austin and I, they are confidential. I appreciate you are looking out for the community however I do not appreciate interfering with internal business. We have stole nobodies work. I do not know where that ludicrous idea came from. It is a very bold statement to make especially considering you have not yet used the product. Yes we released a sub-standard Scenery/Terrain: EuropeXP product for X-Plane and it was not a successful as we hoped however we have learned a tough lesson on product and customer management. Everything has been created in-house except for the glacier textures provided by John. You have made a great plugin system for developers to use but your actions do little to inspire confidence in me, especially in this thread.

I vote for more popup functionality too. I only have an X-52 throttle, don't want to assign -anything- to the CL's... would much rather use the popup than the shitty manipulator quirks that X-Plane provides. (Drag down to move forward, until you change camera angle... or wear different socks... it's absurd.)

I have a pet theory that we are approaching a limit to how much of a modern airliner we can realistically model on a 'study sim' level with justifiable efforts and that in the future, we will mostly be flying ridiculously detailed models of old aircraft. This is because the aircraft industry is quickly closing the gap (or already closed it) between the amount of software development that goes into the real aircraft versus the simulator models provided for entertainment. Coding up a model of the 733 systems (like we are in IXEG) or even the NG is one thing because the real aircrafts are still very much based on 1980-1990's hardware and computing power (think 386 CPU's...) and this severly limits the range of functionality. And this still takes years and years! If you look at something like the Gulfstream PlaneView cockpit or, I assume, the latest gen Boeings and Airbuses, you have probably 10-50 times the software functionality to reproduce if you want a near-complete simulation. And if you manage to code it all, I doubt that our Macs and PCs are equipped to run the simulated cockpit software in parallell with X-Plane at acceptable framerate since the real aircraft probably has similar computing power to run the avionics software ONLY. I may be underestimating the capability of tomorrows simulator modellers a bit but I still think those of us who are into 'classics' with steam gauge or CRT/steam combo avionics are going to be way more satisfied in the future than those who crave latest gen cockpits. Now back to topic.

One last update tonight: Taxi sign for NSFQ.

KC-10 arriving at KEDW.

Mother of all X-plane aircrafts for sure, damn shame it isn't the NG version. But hey finally a 737 that does not look like crap, such as some freeware that will remain nameless. Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk - now Free