Leaderboard

With a future release of the 737 rather....the ball is in our court. Its been fixed and will make it out on next update.....yes....a real update! -tkyler

We have confirmed the issue with Laminar. They are aware of the issue now and chasing it down. This issue should resolve itself with a future update from XP. -tkyler

After working with Ted from laminar to squash a few bugs in the 3D converter, we have it working and have successfully converted many objects over to the new Blender 3D workflow including some pretty complex ones as well. My hats off to Ted...this converter was a real lifeline for us. This was a very very big hurdle to clear. I expect to have all the objects converted before the weekend is out. This will effectively restore our 3D workflow and allow us to get back on the cabin / door work in the 3D department. We still have sounds to convert to FMOD and also our 2D GUI to rework to the new look. The FMS work will resume once all the 3D conversions are done. It is unfortunate that all this infrastructure doesn't have anything visual to show for it but I can assure you, its quite significant for IXEG ability to get back on track with improving things. -tkyler

Vulkan won't really change much of anything for X-Plane's visuals, or necessarily allow us to do something we couldn't before. In fact, for a while it will prevent add-ons from doing what they can do already in some cases (like xEnviro and SkyMaxx Pro from even working).

So some pretty significant news. One of the contributing factors to our lack of updating was our mostly deprecated 3D toolchain using a very old version of Blender. Because our project is of a significant amount of 3D complexity.....manually transposing all the work (6 years worth) to the newest toolchain used by Laminar was so daunting as to preclude us from even attempting it. Laminar, recognizing the volume of work performed by many aircraft developers in this old version of Blender was significant enough to warrant their development of an "automatic conversion" tool. As such, Ted Green of Laminar took on the task and provided it as of a few months ago.....but we (IXEG) have only gotten around to trying it recently....after waiting for Blender 2.8+ to also evolved and stabilize . But I am happy to report that we have successfully converted about 85% of our 3D work and its now in the new Blender 3D / Laminar pipeline and exporting as expected. The remaining 15%, we will have to do by hand and will take a bit of time....but once done, SHOULD allow us to make more frequent updates as we did early in our release. It is our hope that once we get the new toolchain back up and running (and it was our efficient toolchain that allowed quick updates during release)....we should be able to handle updates well again. It was unfortunate that XP and the toolchain (and Blender) all changed radically at about the same time...leaving us somewhat in a difficult spot, but I do see a lot of light on the horizon. -TomKyler

Thanks for the inputs gentlemen, I fully understand everyones point of view and dont' disagree with folks feelings. The issues to bring the 733 up to speed are indeed challenging for sure, and there are several factors contributing to the complexity of the situation; however, the likelihood of us falling behind technologicially is not as great as it may seem....that's not the issue. The issue has always been stability for myself as I'm the one who needs to fix the glaring issues. Not an excuse, but an explanation....(followed by a course of action) As a self-employeed engineer, I'm always having to gauge project opportunities that can provide for me and my family and the 733 and customers have taken the hit over the last few years while I've committed to other work that has to be completed towards 'deliverables'. ...in particular, what I like to call, "the NASA gig"...which fortuantely is over....and took 4 years of my life at heavy cost....and why I got out. As that gig ended earlier this year, I begin looking for other work, while simultaneously working on the FMS again...and folks have seen those posts around that time frame I'm sure. For those who might say, "why not just work on the 733 full time".....the simple answer is that even with the X-Plane market at its best, it doesn't compare to what I make as an engineer...and it'd only be a matter of time before I went broke on 733 revenue alone (i.e. kids college tuitions, mortgage, etc). I have since secured new work (in the flight simulation industry no less.) and began in November. After much discussion with Cameron / X-Aviation.......the obvious course of action is for me to simply prioritize and focus all my available X-Plane time on bringing the 733 back up to speed. Whereas the NASA gig ate up nearly 50-60 hours week....this new job is more stabilized...and basically puts me back in the same situation I was in when originally working on the 733 years ago. That's the story and the plan moving forward. I need to get on it. -tkyler

We're paying customers, not cheering fanboys. And IXEG and X-Aviation are for-profit businesses. We expect a finished product for what is a very expensive addon that we paid for. To put it politely and with full respect to the developers, after 3 and a half years of ownership this state of affairs is unacceptable. Additionally at this pace of development I'm of the opinion that by the time the FMS rewrite is complete most people would've have moved on to XP12 or MSFS2020. Remember XP10.51 was the last version of XP10, and we're now approaching XP11.50. Vulkan/Metal and the experimental flight models would probably become compulsory by then, and will most likely break this addon in some way. Developing addons for X-Plane is like running on a treadmill. If you don't update constantly, you're at risk of falling off and not be able to climb back up again. Even with the FMS rewrite complete the rest of the addon might become so old that it is unusable without much more development work. And that work need a monetary incentive. This is why early-access games on Steam often fail, because the money stop coming in soon after release. Unfortunately coming from FSX/P3D I find this trend to be all too prevalent in the X-Plane community. What I see is great, but squandered potential. When it was released it was the by far the most detailed addon for XP10, despite it being released in an incomplete "early access" state. From a long-time FSX/P3D user I can see that it has the potential to become PMDG-quality if finished, and this was the addon that got me moving to X-Plane. What happened afterwards was that the devs stopped releasing patches for 2 years while the addon is still in a relatively buggy and unfinished state, and customers like me were frustrated at first, and then progressively lost interest. I haven't flown the IXEG for so long that I forgot that I actually still have it, until today when I did some cleaning up of my XP11 installation. When you charge $75 for an addon, there's no excuse to leave customers with a buggy and unfinished product without an update for 2 years. At least release some quality-of-life patches and ninja fixes that makes their experiences better while you continue to rewrite the FMS. Because if you take too long on the rewrite (or it stalls due to other commitments), you might find that Laminar has already moved way ahead of you, and the rest of the addon no longer works. At least with more ninja fixes the customer would've gotten a bit more enjoyment out of the addon, while you rewrite the FMS. As I said earlier, time is against them. XP12 will come very soon as Austin needs more money, and a head-to-head competitor to the big MSFS2020 launch next year. Like the move from XP10 to XP11, the vast majority of the X-Plane userbase will move forward with each new release from Laminar. The treadmill is only getting faster and faster......