Ben Russell

Only 'cause I spent years laying the foundations and building bridges so that others may pass..

Some weeks I might get as much as two whole hours to spend on X-Plane related work. There are many factors unseen and unspoken that contribute to lag times in my own personal situation. Given an ideal situation we could indeed be far further ahead than we are but life is far from ideal. Life is what happens while you're making plans.

You seem confused. You're simultaneously arguing both sides of the point.

No company on earth has an impeccable reputation and satisfaction record. Name one if you can. As for the rest of the points you raise, we're already living what you describe, we do the best with what we can and we demonstrably build and improve our products over time and release. Look around. It's already happening.

Resellers act as a very useful buffer to handle sales, advertising, admin, promotion and first level support. There are not enough hours in the day and cash in the system to be able to remove them. Support in particular chews through a huge amount of time which would leave almost nothing for actual product development. Delegation is key to success in many areas of life. Payware for X-Plane is a niche slice of a niche part of a niche hobby. There just isn't that much money moving through the system. What we need is for customers to accept that they're invested in X-Plane flourishing as much as we, the developers are. They need to stop sitting on the fence and wishing for PMDG/ASN/pet_feature and invest some disposable income. Real life consumes money at a much faster rate than X-Plane. Here in Australia a basic evening out for dinner and a movie for two would set you back around $100. The movie will be quickly forgotten, the dinner will be literally flushed down the toilet within 24 hours, yet people cry over a $30-$60 aircraft that will last them for potentially months of entertainment. Yes, there are some crap products out there, but that's no different to your average department store. There's plenty of useless stuff out there to fill your garage with.

Don't believe me? Here's a counter question: How come 99% of content producers that do sell their stuff on X-Aviation are banned on the Org?

Oooh, red rag to a bull. Because they don't want to be banned from the Org.

Resending is counter productive. It will reset your position in the queue... I don't know why, I just know it does, so best be patient.

I think your observations are fairly accurate... There's this, for example: http://www.easycfd.net/windstation/default.htm Obviously more detailed than we need but X-Plane could definitely do a better job of interpreting and applying the reported data to the simulated world.

Jim has made it quite clear twice in this very thread that they are definitely interested in improving the product.

Surprised we haven't see a "Why don't the WASD keys work" yet...

You are the second person to report this. Here is the first: http://forum.avsim.net/topic/429935-question-online-flying/?p=2888534 There is no solution. I will not be investigating the issue.

Sorry, I can't comment on this. I don't know the inner workings of SilverLining and what it does with X-Plane resource files.

Generally no. Machine ID's only change with something like an OS re-install. The machine ID is displayed in the activation dialog, make a note of it if you like. The X-A license database is also stored in the Prefs folder (admittedly a mistake on my part, people still delete the entire contents quite frequently) and can be saved and restored too.

More likely Steam will be the thing that sustains third party developer interest. The customer count at the moment is critically low.

edit: gotta love the spelling mistakes in that, just adds to the juiciness of it all...

DayZ "Mod" has a steam Game page. http://store.steampowered.com/app/224580/ More reading reveals that we would need to submit to the Greenlight process for each and every aircraft. I also found some interesting info regarding existing customers: (determining exactly who is a legit existing customer is a problem that remains to be solved though...) If my game is accepted through Steam Greenlight, can I give my previous customers keys for the Steam version?Once your game is accepted for distribution on Steam, we will give you as many keys for your game as you want at no cost. Revenue split details are not publicly available. More info on greenlight process here:http://steamcommunity.com/workshop/about/?appid=765&section=faq In summary: for third parties being available on steam is a bit of a complex mess... :|

--- forum killed my post ----- blah.

If you can provide me with more relevant docs I'd love to see them. I've used steam a little bit as a player, it's a great service. It'd be great to integrate with it, for a pile of reasons. Steam Workshop appears to be a / the method to integrate third party content that is both free and payware from what I've been reading.

joandreas, on 10 Jul 2014 - 9:30 PM, said:So will x aviation products like saab 340 be sold there. At this point in time it seems unlikely. I've been doing some basic research, reading license terms, etc. Here's an excerpt from the license agreement: Emphasis added by me on sections of concern... it's a very odd clause. I understand that it only applies _if_ content were to be removed from the Workshop section, but it's still murky given that the content we produce would be very clearly "used in-game". Combine that with the fact that we have our own DRM system and I haven't found any documentation on how to integrate a steam DRM system into Gizmo64... Best answer I can give at this time is "Seems unlikely." Steam should be great for Laminar but for third parties it could be a very mixed bag. I also think the customer reaction of people that are used to AAA games with $40 million dollar budgets will be mixed at best. edit: added link to complete license document:http://store.steampowered.com/subscriber_agreement/

"Easier said than done." Combined that with the fact that we have only just been granted the ability to apply forces reliably to the flight model to actually affect flight performance with new features in the 10.30 beta and your statement is naive.

Source code for x-kd "driver" plugin has been posted on Github. MIT licensed. No compiled XPL's provided. Releasing because code has been idle for nearly 3 years on my disk. https://github.com/benrussell/x-kd

There is a user messing around with Python to improve thermals behaviour. It is NOT a complete weather injector. It's only aiming to make thermals more interesting. Interest is extremely low. More info here: http://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?showtopic=78035&hl=

From X-Plane.com: "Then, going forward, X-Plane 10 and all “final” updates will be available on Steam. Pricing will be the same as it is on our site." From Ben Supniks post: "The pricing should be similar."

FlappyBird, Yo, CliffHorse, Potato Salad and now this...