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While we're on the topic of 737, let's take a look at it's older brother ... must refrain from taking screenshots!

Super Moon over Toronto. Livingston Montana, heading south for Yellowstone. Mammoth Hot Springs, Yellowstone National Park.

737 over Beauvais, France.

I just got through some recent life changing events, during that time I put a lot of things on hold. Fortunally I am back on track, but have nothing to announce at the moment. All I can say is hang tight Ill get there......

Isn't it great? I'm rediscovering JARDesign A320 along with SkyMaxx Pro 2.0. Both are impressive! X-Plane is getting better and better.

DR400 Soissons, France - Beauvais, France.

Just a short test flight from Toronto to Montreal with the FF 757 in the new Air Canada Rouge livery i created But no matter how soft i land, the wings flap every time like a bird on touchdown

Gerhard, Quit making a bunch of something out of nothing. Why don't you create a support ticket at X-Aviation and just request 1.3.3 if you want it so bad? I really don't understand your behavior here. 2.0 only adds new features, not takes any away. Therefore, if you wanted to, you could essentially set the defaults that were present from 1.3.3 and be done with it. We have had a number of customers do this with success. Perhaps listening to what is being told to you by people like John about using the UI to adjust items to your liking would be the smart thing to do. No Jedi Knight included.

The application itself is ready with only a few minor bugs remaining. Now I will try to make a communication plug-in for X-Plane.

Hi TinCam, Thank you for your comments. Regarding the high detail and high framerate paradox, most people i think would be surprised at just how efficient X-Plane is at rendering polygons. There are directives built in to optimise a fast path through the GPU, in the form of ATTR commands. Keeping all geometry single sided, or all geometry double sided is one of the key things to do to keep GPU state switching to a minimum. I also find that merging multiple objects into one for the export, and snapping multiple co-located vertices together to reduce overall vertex count helps with both frame rate, and z buffer thrashing. Removing surfaces that cannot be seen, or do not need to be seen, is also important - consider the floor of a basic 4 sided house object with a roof, we are always looking at it from the outside, removing the floor surface may only be one polygon in one house, but consider the saving when you have 1000, or 100,000 house objects in view. It is texture size, and the VRAM they use that can affect framerate more. One key thing we can do here is to ensure that ALL alpha is kept to the same texture, even if that means breaking up the model into multiple objects. Lastly, when one considers the polygon use inside the cabin of a large airliner, e.g. the default 747, with people sat in toilets etc, the type of aircraft modelled can have some bearing on where one can afford to spend their polygon budget. The Jaguar has no cabin, so i used the budget on the landing gear instead. Also, keeping some modelling crude when it is not in direct view all the time is important. Although there is a lot of detail around my landing gear, a lot of it is done in a crude fashion when compared to the 3D cockpit, the number vertices in a cylindrical object, for example. Hope that helps! Keep your eyes peeled for a Jaguar update in the coming weeks. Work has been ongoing, and external livery work is progressing very nicely, while the cockpit is beginning to come together.

I noticed too a loss of fps, but not "steady"... Instead it seems the fps goes up and down, but I suspect it is not only SMP v2 problem; I think there could be something wrong with the latest beta of x-plane 10.30 (b8). May be we have to wait a bit more for bug fixing in both products to be completely happy. Other than that, to me seems the performances are still acceptable with most hi res settings. I'm using a i7 3770K @4.7Ghz and a GTX680 4Gb (I'm mostly convinced the high VRAM is the best solution to improve performances in x-plane, together with some FSB overclock of the system bus).

Hi Tonka, Thanks for posting this incredible work. I'm just getting started in the world of making my own xplane aircraft (this is my very first post on the site actually) and would love to learn more about how you optimise your geometry to get the kind of performance described above. I'm comfortable with the requisite programs (Blender, plane maker, GIMP, Sketchup etc) but don't know anything about making stuff that looks that good deliver great frame rates. Looks like it's off to trawl the forums for advice! Thanks again for posting your exceptional work and I'm really looking forward to flying the finished product. The Jag is an old favourite of mine too TinCam

Made my 50th flight today for Qantas Virtual. Having a great time as this truly is a brilliant Virtual Airline. After lots of time in the 777, went back to basics and took the Q400 up to Mildura.

These planes probably "paid off" a long time ago, which means these are some of their more profitable aircraft. That is offset by maintenance I'm sure but its as simple as "are they making profit". At some point, the operating cost, upkeep, risk and even passenger perception will begin to make these not so attractive, but on paper, they are probaby still turning profits. It makes sense to keep them along as they make money with an calculable amount of risk. Regarding the -300 model. Way back when, we did this because the x737 was making good progress and we did not want to overlap work. We do not see things the same way now of course, but it is what it is...HOWEVER, this -300 has really really grown on us. We kind of get the best of many worlds. We have a reasonably modern EHSI / EADI with an FMS so we get all the fun from flight planning and dancing with the magenta line...but we also get a little bit of nostalgia from the steam gauges. We have put enormous effort into making the steam gauges look and feel absolutely realistic. If you watch some of Jans videos in-flight, you might have caught a bit of motion blur on the RMI DME scrolling digits. You might also have noticed the "servo powered" mechanical speedbug on the ASI during power up. Combined with a lot of attention to detail in the sound department, we think this aircraft is tons of fun to fly and really immersive. Considering a lot of -300s are still in service today speaks volumes that its certainly still viable. TomK

This is a forum to discus aircraft opinion and not me asking for aircraft.