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We are making good progress!

It becomes tiresome to read the whinging about upgrade prices from a vocal few who seem to have no respect for the amount of work it takes to develop hi fidelity addons. I bought the IXEG a long time ago nd have flogged it to death and will be very glad to see one of the most immersive addons in any sim updated and expanded upon. Anyone who expects that for free after years of usage is being disrespectful to ALL developers who spend many hours for very little reward. Big thanks to those who are bringing the 733 back bigger and better than ever.

I do have my limits Bulva no flushing toilets and opening luggage bins. I'm not modeling the lavatory interior either (yet). Us flight sim folks are a diverse bunch and we each gain our own individual pleasures from elements of the simulation in differing areas. Some folks just like being in and around planes/cockpits and how it pleases their eye, some like "button pushing", some like the cognitive elements of navigation, some like the "visual pleasure" of being at altitude and looking down and others the sounds. There is one particular youTube reviewer who likes to get the camera about 5cm from objects and if the textures aren't high-rez at that distance, he laments it as some kind of product deficiency...so there's all types of consumer prefs. It has always been my philosophy to "evolve towards reality in all areas", except that all areas can't be achieved at once, hence the prioritization based on our experiences with customer feedback. As you point out, adding more and more possibly eats into performance and until we push the limit, we don't know how far we can go. We don't want to leave 'money on the table', if we don't have to, thats comes with risk of falling into obsolescence as others push forward. But we do go into these areas with strategies to address 'what ifs'. Using preferences to kill heavy FPS suckers is one option.....downsampling the textures yet another...providing alternative, low resolution objects another, etc. You can be sure that good performance is high on my list, and we'll have strategies in place to manage that. I'm a huge fan of configuration preferences...and hence one reason we're moving to imGUI. it will allow us to more quickly and easily impelement interface options for users to manage all that stuff. -tkyler

Thanks for all the sentiments and kind words. I myself am happy to be working on X-Plane full time and will strive to continue to do so. I can 'partially' sympathize with those who are...lets say...."on the fence" to put it nicely, regarding upgrade costs for software development, as I myself am one of those old-timers who came from what I like to call the "golden age of software" where it would obviously be great to buy it once and get upgrades forever, but as it stands, I now have at least 4 software subscriptions to software, billed every month, that is constantly evolving and some don't have the 'obvious features' I want and I understand it now as a developer. It used to be we could model a few polygons, slap a photo texture and we're done, because that's all the technology could handle. Now I have to model a few million polygons, slice them up and lay them all out neatly and texture them all and it takes a lot longer than it used to. I never had to worry about detail lighting before because X-Plane didn't have it, now its a whole "lighting pass" by itself. Same for sound engineering, etc. The technology has expanded a lot faster than the market. For those of us who remember playing Sublogic / Microsoft Flight Sim in 1981....we've come a long way technologically and I for one love it! The growth comes with some pains. I'll note that X-Plane dev requires more specialized knowledge now and finding folks with that knowledge and time is quite hard to find so its a challenge to execute what we now have the ability to produce. After nearly 20+ years of messing about with X-Plane, the important thing, I believe, is to keep moving and there've been some 'not insignificant' sacrifices in the background so that we can keep moving on this X-Plane work...as niche as it is. Its defininitely a labor of love and we all have to live with who we are. I figure if I can do what I love, I'll never work a day .....but I do need a paycheck to keep at it. I appreciate everyone out there who understands that. Thanks again. Back at it. -tkyler