Jack Skieczius

now that is some sneaky spamming right there..... Wow yeah, i'll say. That is more sneaky then usual.... Took me a second to even see what was happening.

Its a nice timeline, having read through it, but it really misses a lot of points along the way, and seem to point out a lot of not to epic things near the end like algae driven planes. i did like the part in the beginning with the old balloons.

I think this is a bit to soon to be asking that. they will only know the final numbers nearing release. From my experience though, since the classic uses mostly mechanical gauges, this plane should run ok on most hardware. Just because the visuals look absolutely stunning doesn't mean it will be an FPS hog.

Funny, i was actually looking over the concorde's Wikipedia page yesterday. I wouldn't make one though, and i double anyone really will. it is far to complicated with not as much interest to people as say a 767 or 747. I think xplane needs some real jets be made instead of the concorde.

Oh, so you are saying there is a short pop of a freeze every now and then? This could be caused by the sim loading something that takes a bit longer then expected to load. are you running the sim with X-Planes traffic? If you are now buying a lot of high end add-ons and have X-Planes traffic turned on, perhaps the freeze comes when one of these guys gets close and X-Plane has to load it up again. Or it could be scenery loading. Do you have the option of scenery loading in the background turned on?

FPS also seem to change, while in 3d cockpit, depending on the view you are looking at. I find the frame-rates to be lowest when looking towards the horizon and best when looking straight up or down. But i also want to point out, you eye cant distinguish between 80 FPS and 120 FPS. In fact, if FPS is generally over 30 then you are fine. Some can notice the change between 30 and 60, but for the most part, animations look smooth at 30 FPS. If you are reaching 120 FPS then you are in a better boat then most of us.

Yeah, i agree with Nicola here, X-Plane really isn't that expensive of a hobby. Of course it can be, if you bought the top line computer with 6 screens, rudder, yoke, and all that extra stuff. Generally though, you don't need all that to really enjoy the sim. I look at it as how many hours did i get out of something for the money i put in. say i buy a video game for 60 bucks and put 30 hours into it, well that is pretty good if you compare that to going to the movies, spending 15 bucks for an hour and a half to two hours of enjoyment. Now if i look at the PMDG MD-11 which i flew when i use to use FSX. I bought it for 80 bucks, and from what vataware.com says, i have flown it 60 plus hours on vatsim. What i want to say is you can buy a lot of planes you never fly, or by the right ones you will fly and make it worth it. If you buy an X-Plane add-on and you get 10 hours out of it, i think that is pretty good, if you get more, that is even better, but really that is up to you. Are you going to fly 10 or 20 plus hours with a particular add-on?

There has been a lot of talk about X-Plane vs FSX and such recently. some ask why we dont have planes like FSX yet in X-Plane. It has even been settled that X-Plane has the capability to have planes like we see in FSX and even better. In my opinion, as a developer for X-Plane myself and a former user of FSX, I think it comes down to the total profit you can make from developing a plane. PMDG for example is a big team of developers, not just one or two people like most of X-Planes teams. With that each person would expect to gain profit from developing one plane, say the MD-11. In the FSX world, everyone can profit from such since their user base is exponentially larger then X-Planes, hence they have the potential to sell more copies. Lets put in my own experience here, and say, i spent two years as one person developing the Q400 for X-plane, and i will be only luck if i make any money justifying my own amount of hours i dedicated to developing it. Many factors go into what makes something sell so this may not be the best example but i am sure many X-Plane developers don't make planes as their full time job yet. I am hopefully though, cause over those two years, i have seen X-Plane grow and mature, and i am sure that will continue to be the trend. As the user base grows for X-plane, developers will start to see more profit, hence they should start to feel more confident in taking the time out to grow a successful development team that can make top quality, PMDG or better products. We just need to let time tell. I hope that someday we can all look back at conversations like this and say, "man remember those days, they came and went and now things are better"

Yeah i saw the guys in shoutbox saying 100 to 120 bucks and i couldn't help but wonder what drugs they were on. why would it be SO expensive? I am betting around 50 to 60 bucks tops. But whatever it is, doesn't matter much to me cause i will get it.

Yeah man, they're aiming for July 8. Let me know if you're gonna make the trek and I'll meet up with ya! As you can see, my spot is pretty sick Ill let ya know. btw, where is that spot? you are really close there.

Amazing photos! I really wish i was there. Geez i am only 120 miles away drive time. One more launch after this right?

Thanks for the heads up. Done.

I have decided to review this aircraft. Yeah, haven't even bought it yet, but today i sat in a real one, and may be flying it next week. review wont be out for a bit, but i wont make anyone wait to long. GA airplanes stir something deep within you.

Yup, i can pretty much say, she can takeoff from 6,752 ft. and i used very little of the runway, 1/3 of the runway to takeoff with flaps 10° and half at flaps 0°. had 14 kts of wind helping me though. I don't know of any real world Q400s that take off up that high, but i cant see hwy it wouldn't be able to. And just to test, the HOT in hot and high, i bumped the temp up to 80°C and tried taking off. Oddly, X-plane seems to have a bug here, cause with the temp so hot the props will try to go into to high of a pitch which will ruin thrust. to solve this, simple leave Torque at 40%ish till about 80 knots, then increase to 90%. And i still got into the air before the end of the runway. Now i hope that the temps wont reach 80°C in the Andies, but what do i know. So, yeah, i don't think you will have to much of a problem flying the Q in the Andies.

If you give me an exact airport ICAO, I can go load up the Q400 right now and test if she can take off. Interestingly, the Q400 actually is a bit overpowered, that is why the engines are normally derated to 90% power for most operations.The pilots in some Q400s can actually select a Max Takeoff Power setting which gives you the full 100% power during takeoff. This is all controlled by the FADEC. I will be adding this option to a future update. I am loading up the sim right now to see if i can takeoff at Big Bear, which is in California at an field elevation of 6,752 ft.

I will relish the day i get one. To many other priorities atm, cant get one. I think i can add skype to the list of things that slows it down too. Now that the screens are refreshing at a good rate, i can actually fly the CRJ. woot. Joe will best really happy.

I LOVE Ga, but i don't think i will be buying any more of the Carenado planes for X-Plane until they have someone converting them that knows two shits about how to make a plane fly right in X-Plane. If a GA plane dosn't flight right, then it is absolutely useless.

Unfortunately, there is nothing I can do about that. openGL is completely single-threaded, which means all accesses to the openGL context must be synchronized. I took great care to get this absolutely right in the CRJ, which uses up to seven threads and all the draws get serialized to go through the openGL pipeline just in time - if you see this in a thread profiler, you will see I built really some kind of choreography to get this right. Now, if there is yet another program that wants to draw openGL and makes changes to the context which are entirely out of my control, this can't work anymore. So I'm not surprised that a "competitve" openGL program messes this up. So, as for your display refresh rate problem, can you please test the CRJ without any third-party plugins running? They have to be definetely more than once a second given your PC! I have reports from people with quite comparable or even slower PCs and the displays are running good there. 1. run CRJ on clean X-Plane - displays should work with your PC. If they still don't there is something wrong with your NVidia driver or you have a borked setup 2. try adding back the plugins to find the one that kills the display refresh. I fear you will have to do without this then, since I cannot program a gazillion different versions of the CRJ for every combination of other plugins that are out there. Philipp This may sound strange, or it may not, but i think the slow down on the displays has to do with having an internet browser open on my second monitor. I did some test like you said. Disabled various plugins, but that didn't seem to do a thing. When I closed out Google Chrome, i almost instantly had better frame rates on the displays. to test if it was just Chrome that did this i opened safari, but safari did the same thing. Not sure of this myself but would you mark an internet browser as an Open GL program? A little annoying if this cant be resolved or circumnavigated since I normally look up all my charts online during a flight. Otherwise, i can just turn off the browser.

Interestingly enough, you guys seem to get shutter, but i don't get any BUT i have VERY low framerates on the EFIS displays, like 1 fps. I wonder if this has to do with a driver issue more then anything else. Just my two cents.

I noticed this as well. Where is it?

What happened to the clock in the bottom right?

My system: -win 7 64 bit -intel core 2 duo E6750 2.66 GHz -8 gigs ram -Nvidia GTX 470 1280mb vram The Frame rates i am getting are in the high twenties to low thirties, but occasionally will drop to 19. I am actually happy with system frame rates but i am getting like one frame a second on the EFIS displays. This really sucks cause it is hard to tune anything if it only updates once a second. I heard this is CPU related, but why do i get good frame-rates on the plane but the displays are so slow? Also i noticed frame rates drop like a rock if i load up VAT-spy, which is using openGL. So i am guessing opening any other OpenGL program would just about cripple frame-rates. Any tips on getting better frames for this displays?

Welcome to the world of vatsim man. have fun.

Put pilots into a room and they will be talking for hours. It sure is like a big club. I would love to hear what Tom has to say on X-Plane development for sure. I if an event was planed in the US though, how many would actually make it. If it was at air venture or fun n sun, i think more people would be inclined to come. Sun N Fun this year was a disaster though. As for one in Canada, i know i am most definitely going to Canada this year.

My dad (a journalist) told me of this cartoon he had in this office, of a monk working on an incredibly elaborate tapestry. He's turning round with an angry face saying "Deadline? Nobody told me about a f**king deadline!" In a slightly different look, someone once told me, art is never done, only abandoned. To say you are done is to simply say you are satisfied and are willing to abandon it at this point. Someday someone else many finish it.