tkyler

Not much to tell. With the 3D very close to completion, we are focusing on the FMS. Being this is our first project and not having the benefit of being involved in FMS programming prior/leveraging others code or reusing our own existing code yet, we are having to create the FMS from scratch.....and well, it takes a while. I expect things to be very quiet on the forums for some time while we continue on this path as there will be nothing to show until its complete. I will say we are well into it though and moving along predictably. Do not think that lack of screenshots or updates of visual items means the product is stalled. This programming thing will go on for a few months yet. When the FMS is finished; however, we will begin the "wrapping up process", which involves punchlist 3D items, beta testing, document proofreading, marketing, tutorial development, distribution infrastructure and will easily take several months also. We are on the home stretch, but its a long one. TomK

It will be available in 64-bit at some point though I can't say exactly when. It is about 90% towards that goal now and the remaining work I have not found the time to do given other responsibilities. I hope to find a window of time in the upcoming months to bring it into the 64-bit world and make it viable for several more years to come. TomK

Well we have some thoughts on that. One thing that you get with a "boeing license'...is a license to not only put the boeing name on your product, but also use boeing copyrighted material, including pilot handbooks. Most developers do not like writing customized documentation...it is absolutely tedious work. You need a template, standards and guidelines, standardized headers and graphics, a revision management system, etc. etc (yes we have that). Why do all that when you can just toss the user the real manual and save yourself all that time? I mean, by skipping customized documentation, you can shave months off your delivery date. I'll tell you why, because sim users don't hve 1300+ hours of flying experience and dedicated hours of training. Part of the appeal is having a simulation that you are confident represents the real thing thoroughly, but also having someone show you "the ropes" and walk you through using and enjoying it. We have desgined into the product a series of training manuals to help newbies jump in right away and get flying as soon as they "open the box" but with opportunity for more tutorials in the future. This whole hobby isn't just about the simulation itself, its the enjoyment and satisfaction we get from reading, learning, doing and mastering. We want to help users along the way with that and let them get the most out of it. That is an immense benefit we get with Jan...you get a real airline pilot with real airline experience who is also a dedicated flight simmer and a natural at teaching to help users get the most of out of the simulation. The complexity in most of those products in our opionion isn't the complexity of the aircraft, its the complexity of the documentation Here's a snippet from just one of our WIP training booklets. We'll be shipping with 4 at least, probably more though and will introduce others in the future. TomK IXEG

well certainly the org's right and perogative. I have no issues with it any more. TK

Alan. I caught your question at the org but do not have posting priveleges there. Regarding your mixture on the 172, X-Plane's mixture ratio goes from 0-1 BUT does not really do anything from 0 - 0.48 except cut off the engine < 0.48 or so. A mixture ratio of 0.49 will BARELY allow the engine to run. At mixture ratio > 0.5, the engine will then be able to run. I'd recommend animating your mixture handle from 0.45 - 1.0....but you'll probably have to use some show/hide tweak as x-plane defaults the mixture ratio to zero when starting cold and dark and your generic graphic would probably not look right at a mixture ratio position of zero. TomK

Mick, Default x-plane, like FSX, comes with marginal complexity. The GPS system is currently not very featured BUT is going to get a pretty sizable update in the very near future. Now that being said, you will not be getting FMS style functionality out of the box.. Only the 3rd party add-ons, again like FSX, will have FMS functionality with SID/STAR and route mapping abilities. There are only 3 aircraft currently that have this, the CRJ200, 777 and 757...all using the same code base by the same author so they will all have a similar feel. There are other 3rd party aircraft in the works with that will also have FMS functionality and I'm sure more will make their way into x-plane in the future. Folks are so used to acquiring add-ons for FSX, they routinely 'think' of their addons as default after a while. When folks move over to x-plane, they forget how much money they spent on FSX add-ons to get all that goodness...but that's just the way it is. X-Plane has some catching up to do and it will get there. It has been built from the ground up with stronger and more accessible "legs" than FSX and I believe we will see x-plane carry flight simming where FSX has not. TomK

Seeing as there are two contrails coming out of it.......I'll go with a 757.

Ditto Kris. we've all been there. I walked out for 6 months during the MU2 dev period....a break is a good thing. All the best, Tom

What can I say....it was a long flight and I had to brace myself to wiggle my bum and get blood flowing again. TK

Not necessarily, there are some subtleties and caveats related to camera and acf settings though, both in planemaker and in sim that have tripped me up also. For example, if your aircraft loads with a 2D panel visible (dependent on a few factors), then it will appear as if you are drawing to the xplane window when in reality you are drawing to the panel texture....its just that the 2D panel texture is visible. Try going to a 3D view using SHIFT-9 and see if you openGL drawing appears any different. TomK

There are two phases specific to drawing to the panel texture....'xplm_Phase_Panel" and 'xplm_Phase_Gauges'. The phase in which your drawing callback is called is defined during the registration of your drawing function with 'XPLMRegisterDrawCallback'. First, ensure you registered your drawing callback to be called during the phase, "xplm_Phase_Gauges" like so: XPLMRegisterDrawCallback (myDrawingCallback, xplm_Phase_Gauges, 1, NULL);This says you want the function named "myDrawingCallback" to draw during the Gauge drawing phase (which is drawn to the panel texture)....the 1 says, "draw before x-plane draws(I think.....the docs do not clarify but if you don't draw on top of xplane graphics it won't matter). the NULL, of course, means you're using no reference pointer of any type. Without your registration function, we can't know if this is the problem for sure...so this is just a stab. The following link covers this topic http://www.xsquawkbox.net/xpsdk/mediawiki/XPLMDisplay TomK IXEG

they are not the same. I am not sure if the blender scripts for version 2.69 contain xplane .OBJ import scripts, I do not think so. The original "xplane2blender' scripts for blender 2.49 DO have an import option for xplane OBJ; however, it is a bit limited in that it does not support a lot of "modern" OBJ commands. The method to import an OBJ into blender is to: 1.) Use Blender 2.49. Menu item under import exists 2.) IF the import fails (which it probably will), remove all lines in the OBJ text file that begin with 'ATTR'. This usually requires a custom script or 'GREP" search/replace to remove those lines as there might be a lot and hand removing could be tedious but doable. 3.) Retry the import 4.) If successful, save and then open with Blender 2.69 CAVEATS: Make sure the 3D cursor is at the (0, 0, 0) position before the import. IF the import fails after cleaning out all lines with "ATTR" in them, then clean out the lines beginning with "ANIM". If that fails, clean out every line that doesn't begin with the word "TRIS". Only do this 'cleanout' on the part of the OBJ at the bottom of the file...after the sections with lines beginning with "IDX". those IDX lines and all above must stay intact. The blender 2.49 import script will choke on some "ATTR" and "ANIM" commands so that is what you want to clear out. TomK

This ones is on me. Gizmo is allowing devs to add much deeper simulation experiences but there are not many of us programming with it yet and so our time is spread thin at the moment. Jason has done his part and is waiting for me to finish up some part of the 152. I think you give him too much credit Cam.

use the "open" function in blender and point it to the fuselage.png found in the paint kit folder. TK

What folks like about PMDG is two-fold. 1.) They simulate what folks want....deep simulation. 2.) They deliver! Number 2 here cannot be overstated and as mentioned earlier, they have a reputation for delivering. When PMDG develops a simulation, you know what you're getting. In the x-plane world, that kind of repeatability of uber-detail has not yet been demonstrated IMO. With IXEG, we are trying for not only uber-detail, but the "next level" also. That is, we look at PMDG..what they offer and we say, 'we have to offer that"...but we also look at what they do not offer and we try and offer that too to push boundaries. Now until we actually deliver though....we can't be trusted and therefore do not have the credibility that PMDG has. Individually we all have credibility, but not as a team yet. XP devs MUST provide not only top quality over FSX counterparts....but repeatable quality. If developers do that for x-plane, then the migration of FSX users to products by 'native' XP devs will be seen IMO...though it will take time. X-Plane is a superior platform for customization as evidenced by what we're squeezing into our 737 vs. what FSX can not even simulate at all.....but until this is demonstrated repeatedly, FSX folks will not believe it. We have to be so convincing in our simulations that the evidence is irrefutable. PMDG should be a goal to strive for. They have a great reputation for delivering and I, for one, aspire to that. All we can do is keep producing top-quality work and let the market go where it may. TomK

It is just standard x-plane FOV settings; however, there are view settings in Planemaker that control not only the camera position of course, but also the "tilt" of the camera up or down and we have set this value specific to our cockpit based on Jan's input. A lot of authors do not tweak this value, but leave it default and as such, do not provide an optimal view for the aircraft they are modeling IMO. TomK

The nose wheel tiller cannot be operated at all by the mouse unfortunately. Most folks use a joystick or pedals to turn on the ground anyhow. This is due to a limitation with x-plane's nose-wheel algorithm which we searched for a way around but to no avail. The tiller is coupled to the nosewheel however and not the rudder angle so once the plane leaves the ground, the tiller will not move with the rudder. We discussed the option of deactivating the rudder while on the ground to simulate tiller only operation but deemed it insignificant in the grand scheme. TomK

yessir @ 18:00 GMT +/- 1 minute

its certainly that smooth if you have a decent system. I am using an older iMac i3 chip with 512 card and I can't tolerate this aircraft and busy scenery without hitting 15fps or so. Devoid of complex scenery, I do 35fps no problem.......but 99% of that FPS hit comes from my small graphics card VRAM limitation and x-plane has to do memory swaps with hardware, which is death to performance. Most video cards now exceed 1GB easily and everybody with 1GB card seems to do very well. I've seen it run on a 2GB card and just absolutely fly with everything cranked up. We have really worked hard to optimize this thing and for all that you get, I think it runs very very well. The video has been "processed" color and pixel sharpeness wise...twice. Once by the video editing software and again by YouTube....the quality we see on the screens is represented in our screenshots and not on these videos. 3 of 4 online at 18:00 GMT today. TomK

Part 2 of 4 up

Unfortunately, the Aerosoft data wasn't available when we started programming the FMS and the route building code is the nastiest code in the project so reworking it to Aerosoft will not be an overnight thing. We will; however, look into it very soon after release. It might be easier to code with he Aerosoft format, we'll see. The next video, part 2 of 4...we will release some time between 18:00 and 19:00 GMT today.....and it gets better! Tom Kyler

Part 1 of 4. We will release the others on consecutive days. TomK http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMRKx8hZjXw#t=0

We are going with navigraph data...so subscribers get whatever they give. We will look at moving to Aerosoft's format in the future though as we feel this is a more robust dataset better suited to the future needs of flight simmers. TomKyler IXEG

Just wait till the next teaser movie comes out in a day or two. We are having a bit too much fun immersing ourselves in the cockpit and sounds. TomK

night shot. a video should be coming along in the near term. Not just a pretty face as the upcoming video will demonstrate...most everything is operable with considerable attention given to immersive detail...aural, visual and tactile. TomK