StevenM

That's interesting. Besides the fact you can make a living out of a add-on for a niche market product you think the DRM was the main factor for the increase the sales or did other market factors also help? To be clear I'm not attacking you in any way for using the DRM but as a developer/publisher msyelf I'm always very interested in other peoples experiences. The pro-contra DRM arguments are clearly documented all over the web but the real world experiences from developer/publisher standpoint are not so well known. Oh, and the future improvements for the activation sound nice.

What your examples proof is that there are people with much more time and expertise than us on circumventing DRM. I make software and games for a living for about 8 years now and I stopped bothering about my stuff being on the torrents. It takes a lot of time and energy and do not forget the extra support you have to give when your DRM doesn't work on the latest OS'es (I remember some nasty stuff with XP64). Instead we focus our precious time on marketing and customer care. I've read somewhere that a musician has to have about 10.000 fans to get a decent living out of it. This forum has ~980 members, X-Plane.org has ~106.000 members, Avsim has a lot etc, etc. I'm sure you can gather a large crowd of prospective buyers there only by your presence, posting vids/updates/pictures etc. Those millions of people on the pirate bay do not pay for software, not for X-Plane, FSX, COD2. They mod their XBox'es and get R4 cartidges for their DS'es. They're not in our ecosphere. Another example how futile our DRM was for us. We used armadillo from Siliconrealms as protection method. Very good stuff, you issue a key tied to the name of the customer so when a key gets into the wild it's easy to find the person who spread it. In theory..... In practice we had a Spanish person who put the key on the torrents. We are from the Netherlands and since Spain is EU we could file a legal complaint at the police. First the police didn't know head or tails about digital crime and once we got one (of the three) officers on the phone who was responsible for digital crime we where told they could do nothing because the crime was too small and they were to busy chasing kiddy pron. We were advised to get a solicitor in Spain (as if we could pay one) and go after the guy ourselves. I believe that was the moment we said sod it and stopped worrying about the whole pirating stuff.

It is also very important to know that your buying games from very small companies. The support lines are extremely short which eases the reissuing of keys *a lot*. Compared to big megacorps as EA, Activision etc. It's much easier to get in contact and get the correct help fast. From my own experience after switching between computer and subsequently OS it took only a few emails with Cameron to get the MU-2 up and running again. It would even better (and even more quicker) if I could re-issue a key myself from my account at x-aviation but sometimes a bit of human contact is not so bad. That said, this DRM is as far as i want to go since every DRM is a token of mistrust imho. And i can take only so much mistrust and hassle. Personally I almost stopped buying videogames because of the inane "x amount of activations/de-activations" DRM. Leaves me more time with flightsimming, which is good, I could maybe dust of my c++ experience, and start making some interesting stuff.

A couple of years ago I was fortunate to fly from Eindhoven(NL) to Bologna(IT) in a Beechcraft King 1900D (iirc). My experience with flying was gliders (20+ years ago) and Il-2 flying B-25's and A-20's. After take-off I couldn't resist myself to stick my nose into the cockpit and spent the rest of the trip there sitting on my knees. The pilots explained me all the gauges and gave a good lesson on the navigating with VOR/DME. They also explained the most stupid questions: (me) "So, and when do you engage the superchargers?" (pilot)"This planes has turbines....", (me)"Nice,....uh, what are turbines?", (pilot)"Jet engines ", (me) "Okeee...with props??"....

Regarding the passengers i think you're right. Too much polygons on sub par puppets. However I hope the windows are neat, my personal fetish is to land a plane and then replay it a couple of times looking outside from a passenger seat. Preferably looking over the wing...and the moment you see the runway appear under the plane is just golden. I understand the problem with the camera appearing to close to the panels, but does altering the FOV not solve this or makes it the view too fisheyed? And how do other developers solve this?

Sliding chairs in a simulated cockpit? Does the virtual stewardess also bring a cup of coffee The pilot still sits a bit in the uncanny valley for me personally but is waaaay better than the passengers in PDMG's latest J41, which make me literally cringe.

Looks good, but why is he sitting so far to the back? He can barely reach the yoke and is definitely not able to reach the instruments. Even this little fellow has the yoke between his knees: www.panoramio.com/photos/original/7935718.jpg

Ok dear shepherds, here's a talking sheep from your herd: I already know for a long time what the "Best of.." on x-plane.org is and that it not stands for the "best" addon. I also know what X-Plane can't and can possibly do thanks to the interweb, google and youtube, etc, etc. The web is larger than x-plane.org&x-pilot.com. I also own FSX *and* X-Plane and for me they are *different* products with different merits. They are *not* mutually exclusive and I rather not want to evangelized. I bought the MU-2 and love it but also bought RealAirs Duke and love it also. I just play with either one of them when I like it. The Duke because is such a nice well rounded package and the MU-2 because of the constant minute corrections I have to make to steer it right (= the flightmodel) and the "Gosh, I am really flying" feeling when I look outside. For me the org is more of a place for DIY airplane hobby-ists, some technical support and a nice big library with some real gems. It has a bit sloppy store tacked to it with some good and some mediocre products. This forum is in my view more of a gathering of very talented developers (with a grudge). I do see the underlaying tensions but to me they fall under the large category of "Interweb Community Drama" and thus solvable with a good old fashioned bilateral face to face talk. There is room enough for both the org and this place and please my dear shepherds, stop the bickering and start producing nice stuff and let there be peace, its almost Christmas after all. Best regards, Your not so stupid black sheep. btw, I had a very good laugh on the sarcasm of the first few post in this topic. But don't let this forum become a place of anti-org sentiments, point your rants at something else. I personally would like to see some more WIP stuff, and more in depth development talks. If you have to evangelize anybody its new developers. Time to walk the dog and the maybe fly the 727 i bought in Captain Sims yearly 9.99 sale. Puh!! ;D

It looks really, really good. Amazing that you can make such a plane with just 2 people in a fairly short time. I was ready an example of a new 757 for FSX (QualityWings) and they need (iirc) 8+ people. So either X-Plane development is very simple, or FSX development is very complex or you are just very good.

oh? I didn't know that. I'll give it a try as soon as possible.

I have a TrackIr and using manipulators with it is always a bit of a chore since you have to keep your head eaxactly in one position when turning the knobs. It would be nice if rotating manipulators have a sticky focused state (eg. when selected with SHIFT-LMOUSE). Whether you scroll with the wheel or move up/down/left right it still will update regardless of your head movements. Another SHIFT-LMOUSE unleashes the focus. Not unlike holding your hand on the control knob while turning your head.

A good plane is becoming better. Keep the updates incoming, it's very interesting to see how a virtual plane inside X-Plane is build up.