clavel9

I assume it's because the plugin is 32-bit and won't run in XP 10.2 64-bit. You'll need to wait until a 64-bit plugin is published, or just use 10.2 32-bit for now.

My worry about all of this is that it's developing into a 3D modellers' death match. With the exception of Chip and flighttime56's blog (http://xsimreviews.com), there's very little in the way of in-depth analysis of performance and handling going on. I'm all for the very high standard of 3D modelling that we've been getting lately - and it's improving all the time - but I'd actually be more concerned if I spent good money on an ACF only to find that it bore no resemblance to the real aircraft, except visually. The ability to produce very detailed objects for X-Plane is a very recent development; if a very welcome one.

I think the radome of the real plane is more "bulbous" for the want of a better description. You can see it in your first side-by-side image, but it's even more obvious in side views.

Thunderbirds are Go!

Agreed.

I suspect an NG to that standard would take at least two years to get to the market with a team of developers starting from scratch. I'm guessing that that's how long the IXEG 737 will have been by the time it's delivered. In short, unless an NG appears from left-field, the EADT x737 is the only game in town. With a 3D flight deck on the way, and presumably more refinements made possible by XP10, it's only going to get better.

I'm afraid you can't make an ACF backwards-compatible.

Nice

Brilliant

Two airmen are still missing, unfortunately, with the search resuming this morning. It's not looking good, but fingers crossed for them.

It's a pity you can't reload textures on objects in PlaneMaker without switching back and forth between liveries. One of the good things about the "old days" was that you just hit "t" to reload the textures.

As it's a payware aircraft, clearly not everyone who does repaints may be able to afford buying the aircraft in the first place. I've no doubt that the DC-3 will do very well, but that's not to say that even a significant minority of buyers will be interested in - or capable of - creating repaints. Over time I'm sure there will be more contributions, but you only have to look at the download manager on the ORG to see how few repaints, relatively speaking, are done for payware aircraft.

They still are, it's just that all the innovation is in usability, efficiency and other things not apparent from the outside. The basic form of the airliner is unchanged in some 60 years and is unlikely to change much now. The 737 family has always been elegant and distinctive, traits shared with close relatives, the 707/720 and 727.

Very well put.

Pretty much my conclusion after comparing some aircraft back to back in 9 and 10. I didn't feel that XP9 was "stable" until version 9.3/9.4 and there's no reason to expect 10 to be any different. The big question for developers in the thick of a big project is whether to finish the ACF and release it as 9-compliant or to push back the development cycle and just publish for 10. I ran up against the same problem when I was a co-developer on an ACF for XP8. By the time we were 90% done, XP9 had established itself and we would have had to rebuild the whole thing from the ground up to achieve the performance and handling accuracy we had got for 8.64. 2,000+ hours of testing had got us to within 1% accuracy with the 8-compatible ACF but we found it to be outside 5% accuracy in some critical areas in 9, even after tweaking. It might as well have been a different aircraft. We never finished it!

Good post, Pete. Pretty much concurs with what a colleague of mine who's a hardcore FSX user was thinking. His fellow enthusiasts aren't interested in Flight - or X-Plane for that matter - as they have a stable and satisfactory platform as it is. As well as that, they have collectively invested several hundred dollars in payware scenery and aircraft, along with the investment in FSX, and earlier versions of FS, itself and won't be jumping any time soon.

Excellent choice of project. Happy new year.

Thank you!

Pascal, some lovely shots there. I recognise Les Dents du Midi in the last photo of your first post: a feature I know well from a skiing trip to Chatel a few years ago. Might I ask what your equipment specs and rendering settings are? I have been fiddling with my own rendering settings and have yet to settle on settings I like.

I wouldn't go so far as to say the engine model is flawed or mediocre so much as it does a reasonable job of simulating a broad range of types adequately. Try to close in on more accurate simulation of specific engine characteristics and you're unquestionably into plugin territory. For example a plugin is pretty much the only way to simulate low-bypass turbofans or supercharged piston engines accurately. A project with which I was involved got engine performance figures within 5% of reality using PlaneMaker but required a plugin to get any closer to real-life figures. The improvements were dramatic. Since IXEG have claimed 100% accuracy across the performance envelope there's no doubt they are using a very sophisticated plugin. I agree broadly with namaui's comment regarding getting FSX users to migrate to X-Plane. Friends of mine who are long-time FS users (various versions) are impressed with many aspects of X-Plane but are simply not willing commit to another platform having invested so much time and money into FS itself and third-party aircraft and scenery add-ons. They are unanimously unimpressed with X-Plane's default aircraft, though it's fair to say that XP10 is still merely a demo and that the situation will undoubtedly improve. Their opinion was that less default aircraft designed to a higher standard would give a better idea of what X-Plane can achieve.

One thing to remember is that SketchUp regards any flat surface as a face regardless of how many sides/edges it has. Once the SketchUp file is converted into an X-Plane-compatible object, these faces will be split into triangles. I don't think there is any way of controlling how this is done. I'm not familiar with Blender, but I assume that the same thing, or something similar, happens when the Blender file is exported as an X-P object.

Brilliant research, well done Nicola.

Yes, I think that would be most useful and a very good approach to take.

I have done some work on proof-reading real-life Airbus manuals and am somewhat aware of the depth of detail and level of work involved in all of this. I'm sure producing a user manual will be a huge amount of work in itself!