Jack Skieczius

What i have yet to see is cities and weather. Sure a lot of things look great but with great scenery comes poor flight model.

Ah, the power of X-Plane and the talented artists it has attracted!

That was awesome Ben.

Lol and X-plane thread on, "my is bigger then yours"

Yeah, thankfully, these hot days do not last forever. Good time to stay inside and fly in X-Plane. Hell maybe it is a sign you need to practice your landings! Also, it is only that hot midday or so. This morning it was nice and cool.Somewhere around 80° F. Went for a ride around town.

I believe Carenado sells for at least a month on their website first. I am sure they do this since they take a larger cut of the sales that way. I am sure it will be at the org and every other place Carenado sells at in time. They sell them over at Aerosoft as well. When I have some time to play I will pick up the their 172N. Most of there planes i have picked up so far for x-plane are great. They may not use as many polygons to get the detail into their models, but the texturing is great. Also, i would say that their user friendlyness is up there as well. not that hard to use the 3d cockpit and for the most part, they fly right. If you had to count them as a set, all the planes from Carenado so far are among the best GA planes available right now for X-Plane. For those of you who get the 172n, what do you think so far?

Good find man! Really impressive images. Really great for reference for those who want to or are making the 737. Now if only they could have done this for the plane I am working on. I bet this costs a fortune to have done.

Your already getting a lot for something you don't need to pay anything extra to have over the price of X-Plane 10. That is unless you want X-Plane 10 to cost 500 bucks or something. This 747 definitely raises the bar.

What downsides have you found? My main guess are two things, polycount plus that you need AA on if you really want to see it clearly. But it will always be clear with AA on. It will also always look clean, which can be a downside as well. The way you seem to be doing it now, with a separate texture i am guessing, may actually be very good as well. Depending on how much text you have. But that is another texture that needs to load. Right now i am trying to find out what will work best down the road for me.

ah sweet, just noticed Bose has a financing option. Man I sure wish I needed a headset now. Now at least i know what i will be getting next.

Well, yeah, the A20 is like the best headset you can get, period. nothing out matches it, and if you have the thousand dollars to spend on it, that is what you get. Now if you cant aford that, or perhaps if the people buying you your present cant afford that, any DAVID CLARK headset is what you want. I have a David Clark, and what i love about it so much is when i watch movies, i can see my headset on all the pilots. So really, there is only two heads sets out there in my mind, the David Clark and the Bose A20.

I hate to point out spelling and grammar mistakes in released products (if it's likely to be too late to fix) in case the developer's first language isn't English. But I wish more people were available to proofread stuff before release. Absolutely. But as far as I know, Jack, Joe, and Nicholas all know English to the point to know that "cant" needs an apostrophe. I'm half teasing and half being serious here... I'm half Australian myself and my family members from there tease us about our English and vise-versa... Heh, I'm half-Australian too! But half British, so all my halves speak English and no other language. If you know more than one language Kaphias there's a chance you'll know the rules of English grammar better than native English speakers!It would be great if the next version of the Q400 could fix the typos on the overhead panel, and adjust the mapping so the words are all completely visible and not half-vanished off the edge of a panel. Typos - well I know many people who really struggle with spelling due to dyslexia and stuff like that, but failing to fix the misaligned text on the panel borders has no good excuse in a payware product I think; it suggests a lack of attention to detail, but I really hope that that is a wrong impression. For me the Q400 is competing with the Saab 340 in the 'being a regional turboprop' field and the CRJ-200 in the 'being a regional airliner with lots of LCD panels' arena, and that's very tough competition (both for purchasing and for flying time) - the Q400 needs all the refinement it can get! (Especially as it's priced at $40.) Humm, odd, cause all those items you mentioned were fixed a while back. The one item on the overhead that was misspelled was windshield, and has been fixed for a while. the image on the site you may be looking at in reference was from pre-release version. Guess it is time to update that image.

Obviously you do care Ben, and this particular issue was a miss communication, and i will wrap it up soon.

surprised they don't have a "Stop for aircraft crossing" sign there.

Yeah, i have this scenery from flytampa. Looked better in FSX though. I wish i was there man, it is an amazing airport. in the US, that road would have been closed down years ago. And to top if off, the wind is always favoring that runway, so almost never do people land coming the other way. Thank you so much for that pick, it is VERY epic!

Informing our customers better is something on my end i will endeavor to do more, as it is apparent, what we had was not done enough. I see where you are coming from Ed. you don't want to have this extra bit you have to deal with in products you buy. I am sure many people feel this way. I am not sure however that this will be the norm for many upcoming awesome X-Plane products. There are a few products being developed without Gizmo, but i am sure the features for those take much longer to code then if they had been developed using Gizmo. In short, from what the Q400 does in 1.1, shaved off months of development. In a year from now, Gizmo could be laid out totally different. This is what i talk about growing pains. I am sure Ben looks at all the feedback from customers and with that helps make a better product.

I have added a note on the Q400s product page that serves to inform our customers of the nag screen before purchase. This hopefully will minimize incidents like this one. Perhaps setting up a, "what is Gizmo", page on my site will help as well. As one of the only developers to sell a Gizmo enhanced product outside of X-A, discussions like this were bound to happen. I hope these are just Gizmo growing pains. As more people use Gizmo, it is my hope that customers will be more understanding of why the nag screen is there. $10 dollars is not a bad price at all to pay for a Gizmo license key. And as for offering an option, i think Ben has a point when he says "complicated". Right now our customers have the option just the same.

New review posted over at ArmchairAviation.com Jason Chandler's Pipers 970 package review by Simon B

Talking about reviews, i was hoping to continue doing quality reviews over at my ArmchairAviation.com site, BUT, balancing reviews with aircraft development, development seems to take priority. I really believe quality reviews are important to the success of the X-Plane payware market. People right now don't have a clear view on what they are buying 90% of the time. Someday, i think we will hire some people to write good reviews, or at least accept volunteers. Only time can tell.

And that comes down to the problem for us developers, and that is that most people will buy a product only because it looks good. This is not really a problem for developers who can make planes look good. And I am one of those who, in the past only bought planes because they looked good. I for one wants to feel immersed in the simulation. Some of those good looking planes had some pretty horrible flight models, for instance just about all of the CaptainSim planes I have flow. But they looked so good! For the most part, the planes have have been produced in the past year to 2 years have been good looking. Not all of them, but X-Plane is changing, we have better artist and better enthusiast all around.

Now that sir, is impressive!

Looking really good guys. more impressive now then i had recently hoped for.

Wow the sounds in that video, though highly distorted actually sound good. What i mean, is the sounds add to the feel of the plane. as he swtiches views you can hear the change and instantly know you are in a different place.

Wow, look at that engine stack. all of a sudden i got flash backs to an MD-80

So yeah, back to 727 talk. I remember flying the Captain Sim 727 for a bit when i used FSX. was a fun bird, when you overlooked the several major flaws. I guess all captain sim planes have major flaws but they look so very very good that most of the time you can over look them. One of the things i liked most about flying that particular 727 was actually its horrible flight model. One of the neat things you could do with it is approach an airport a 30+ thousand feet, and at about 5 miles out from the landing runway, pull the power back, flaps down and spoilers out. Dive towards the runway. Oddly enough you would not over-speed like you would think would happen. Instead the plane actual slows down once you start pull back up to position for a landing. I did this a few times on Vatsim, and the controllers just laughed. So that was my time with a 72. I haven't picked up the XPFW 72 yet, but if it is only a 2d pit, i may not want to. I am sure someone will make one for Xplane eventually.