Orbx remarks about X-Plane

[tonywob 4,778]

Here's a memory lane pic of that publication:

 

Ha ha those were the days. Typing in programs from computer magazines and spending hours finding the little typos :-)

[gizmosellsbunnys 106]

"In case I have not made it clear yet, we're still not a profitable company. Yes, we pay the bills, taxes, insurances, travel and all our contractors, but our ability to invest in more R&D and grow the business with more staff is still limited. We have had to tighten our belts in late 2012 due to escalating costs in running the business. Times are tough all over, Orbx is not immune."

 

Losing customers in NOT going to help ORBX be more profitable. JV should acknowledge that.

 

Write off losses with taxcode anyways, and Orbx losing money, but that really how the accounting is done at the company. Still, losing customers is not good anyways, but I think JV knows that Xplane base is too much to justify the risk of captial towards it.

[shivers9 1,174]

This is a fun tread and everyone has a horse in the race. I would not be too hard on JV at this point because although he may not be the most politically correct speaker in the world but somehow he has a way of knowing a lot of little LM secrets. Here is maybe a hint: LM spends probably more money a month on coffee for it's employees than is spent in the entire Flight Sim market in a year. Now why would a company with that kind of power spend what 2 years or more fixing all of Microsofts screw ups as well as come out and ask us FSX guys to join them if they did not expect big things for Prepar3D in the future. I think ver 2.0 is going to be a new beginning for us all.

 

It does not matter about our personal opinion about JV. The fact remains that he has built a very good bussiness and may be the largest number of developers working for anyone company. If I had to make a large wager at this point I think I would have to put my money on Orbx and Prepar3D in the end. To all the legal beagles out there....I will also be that LM has more lawyers on their payrole than you do. I you are not an attorney then this would be a good time to stop playing one on the internet. :Idea:

[Guest]

Ha ha those were the days. Typing in programs from computer magazines and spending hours finding the little typos :-)

 

I sympathize with anyone that had to type in that code, when I designed and coded this game, I recall squeezing as much as I could in a single long long line using ":" separator between statements rather than a CRLF because CRLF took more editor memory. But hey, it was still better than having to do punch cards at University, stack, lock, and load and wait and wait and wait. At home, I had the luxury of using a portable cassette recorder to save my code.

 

but I think JV knows that Xplane base is too much to justify the risk of captial towards it.

 

I don't think it's a risk at all, just leverage work they've already done ... like I said, move FSX scenery to XPlane scenery isn't some massive development effort, most of the hard work has already been done coverting the source images for FSX.

[PingPong 60]

JV's position regarding X-plane is understandable, but his comments are simply not acceptable to me.

 

I just don't get how he could openly bash a parallel product in such a small revenue space, it's churlish and short-sighted. I remember an old FSbreak interview with Mathias Kok, and his comments regarding x-plane were simply that is was too "different" Now 3 years later, his company is making products for it. We can not predict the future, and there's no point burning those bridges BEFORE you cross them.

 

To be fair, Austin does the same thing, and i have called him on that too, remember his comments about Flight? it's part of his whole "unfiltered genius" vibe,(that does not excuse it by any means.)

[Guest]

To be fair, Austin does the same thing, and i have called him on that too, remember his comments about Flight? it's part of his whole "unfiltered genius" vibe,(that does not excuse it by any means.)

 

If you are talking about this interview, it seems to me AM is very realistic about what he needs to do, knows his market, knows he needs 3rd party support, and was very honest about it. He didn't bash MS Flight, he just said it looks more like it was designed for XBOX (which it was), he certainly did NOT say:

 

X-Plane has no future. It’s not a good sim, nor does it have a large enough customer base to make it worth our while. It performs really poorly on hardware with settings maxxed out, unlike FSX which now screams along with new Intel and nVidia hardware.

 

[jcomm 6,053]

My oppinion.... The future will see what P3d v2.0 brings. Only then can any oppinions be valuable.

 

His position, nonetheless, is innapropriate, just like the boss of Aerosoft when "the End" of MS FLIGHT was announced. They could well save some words for themselves...

 

I am very critic about many aspects of X-Plane10, but the fact is that it doesn't prevent me from expecting the best from it's future, and I try to enjoy the most from it's present, which is already very good.

 

Being cross-platform makes the task of developers a lot more difficult, but for me, and although I do not use Linux at home, or any MAC, it's an excellent feature in any simulator.

 

BTW: I strongly hope that things like seasonal effects can be accomplished sooner or later in XP10, and then many secenery areas will look just as good as those expensive sceneries produced by Orbx... Alas.... look at some of the shots sometimes posted here ate this forum!

 

The potential in X-Plane is there to be used and abused... :-)

[kludger 7]

JV's comments don't really surprise me the same way that Austin's comments don't surprise me anymore, it takes a good amount of arrogance to be a CEO and anyone who has followed the public comments from either of these guys in the past, should know by now that neither is going to answer some questions in a soft touchy-feely way, each is convinced that their direction is the right one, and neither particularly values what the customer thinks.

 

At this point I just consider that both channel that arrogance to produce some very cool products that I like, and both have some great developers that work for them, and I judge the product they produce based on it's merits and whether it meets my needs, not on whether that product's CEO is someone I'd like to be buddies with or even whether I'd like to hang out at their forum for my "flightsim community" needs, especially when those forums are overly moderated to avoid any criticism of the product. That was the main revelation for me from the end of 2011 fiasco, don't expect a neutral community on a product's biased forum (especially when there are great neutral community forums like this one and others).

 

I think the good developers will follow the market, if X-Plane becomes the superior stable sim for customers and 3PD's (if the betas ever end) then I'm sure either Orbx will change their business strategy and support X-Plane, or some of the great devs that currently work for Orbx will bail and start doing work for X-Plane.

[EngineRoom 205]

The potential in X-Plane is there to be used and abused... :-)

 

Spot on. The potential is there - and it's a huge potential. The problem is XP10 - unlike FSX - is a moving target for developers. If Laminar can settle down on a stable XP10 x64 it will help the third party support situation hugely.

 

 

I judge the product they produce based on it's merits and whether it meets my needs, not on whether that product's CEO is someone I'd like to be buddies with or even whether I'd like to hang out at their forum

 

My sentiments exactly.

[PingPong 60]

@ robains

 

Actually I was talking about this:

 

Laminar Research press Release, Scheduled for April 1 but released early here:

 

 

Hello, I am Austin Meyer, author of X-Plane, and I am announcing some major new improvements and pricing strategies for X-Plane 10.1, due out in a few weeks!

 

First of all, starting with X-Plane 10.1, we will be REMOVING almost all of the world-wide dynamic scenery that X-Plane is known for. It is simply too much work for us to create, maintain, and improve this kind of massive database, so we are cutting the Global Scenery out of X-Plane starting with version 10.1. Of course, we still need to have SOME scenery to fly over, so, to keep our jobs simple, we will be cutting the scenery down to the smallest and most geographically isolated area we can imagine: Hawaii. We chose Hawaii because that is such a small area that we can very easily create and distribute it. As well, this tiny flying area will be TOTALLY STATIC. There will be no moving cars, no dynamic lighting, and no living cities. No immersive 3-D world loaded with AI cars and planes to fly in� there is simply no need for this complex and dynamic environment and it is actually a very difficult job for us to continue to provide this stuff for you.

 

As well, we have grown tired of supplying so MANY airplanes. It takes effort for us to build the countless airplanes that we do, so we are cutting the fleet WAY down. Starting with X-Plane 10.1, rather than having about SIXTY-FIVE airplanes, ranging from the Cessna 172 to the Space Shuttle, with the SR-71, X-15, B-2, Piaggo Avanti, and Boeing 747 in between, we will cut X-Plane down to TWO airplanes. Both single-engine props. That is simply all of the airplanes that we feel the need to give you in a simulator like this. And, you will NO LONGER be able to design your own airplanes to test how they would fly in reality, as Plane-Maker will be removed entirely. I see no need for anyone to have any planes other than the TWO that we give you. So, rather than the SIXTY-FIVE planes that come with X-Plane and the THOUSANDS of others that are freely downloadable from the net, and the ability to make ANY AIRPLANE YOU CAN IMAGINE for FREE, you will be restricted to TWO airplanes. We may let you buy three additional aircraft as add-on purchases at some point in the future, though. These will be incredibly boring single-engine props, though, and will be surprisingly expensive.

 

Also new for 10.1 will be a new "flight model" for X-Plane! Unlike previous versions of X-Plane, this model will not have un-needed things like "accuracy". We here at Laminar Research feel that "accuracy" is over-rated, and the most important thing that we can do is make sure that X-Plane is so easy to use that nobody feels sad that they cannot fly like a professional on their first flight. Marketing assures us that customers "feel better" if they have no challenge. Certainly, the FEELING that you can fly is more important than ACTUALLY BEING ABLE to fly. For myself, I cannot think of a single reason that anyone would ACTUALLY want to know how to fly a REAL airplane! Better to leave ACTUAL FLYING to someone ELSE, and simply have a game that is accessible to all. So, the new flight model will be designed by our marketing team to be accessible even to toddlers. Starting with 10.1, the ACTUAL laws of physics need not be applied� why would the laws of PHYSICS matter to anyone? MARKETING is more important than PHYSICS!

 

New also will be the removal of all navigation, air traffic control, and real-weather options, since they are somewhat challenging to master and would be too much work to properly code. Since these elements of aviation may pose 'challenges' for 'some' we have decided to remove those feature from the sim entirely so that NOBODY can enjoy them.

 

Also, we will be changing our pricing structure. 10.1 will be free, but by the time you have bought the tiniest quantity of add-ons, you will have paid us a notable amount and never be able to expand upon that without paying us more. And more. And more.

 

Our programers did notice that this update to X-Plane 10 will make it completely useless, but our marketing team has decided upon the perfect solution to this problem! We are going to 'spruce it up' by adding JEWELS IN THE SKY! You will aim one of the TWO airplanes you get towards those jewels!!! When you do so, there will be a little noise that is played, or something like that� our marketing department is still working out the details.

 

Also, we at Laminar Research have noticed that it is a somewhat formidable achievement to make X-Plane work on Mac, Windows, and Linux� it simply involves a decent amount of knowledge, savvy, and work. Also, we love the constant viruses, crashes, and frustrations that we go through with Windows so frequently, so we have decided to REMOVE support for Mac and Linux and JUST provide X-Plane on Microsoft Windows. We here at Laminar Research believe that the success of Apple is just a fad, and that MICROSOFT will be the future of computing, since we all love Microsoft Windows so much, just like we know you do.

 

So, hopefully this will make X-Plane have more "mass market appeal", and therefore be a better sim for all of us!

 

To the future!

 

Austin

[Muskoka 104]

I think the good developers will follow the market, if X-Plane becomes the superior stable sim for customers and 3PD's (if the betas ever end) then I'm sure either Orbx will change their business strategy and support X-Plane, or some of the great devs that currently work for Orbx will bail and start doing work for X-Plane.

 

Great post John.....all of it, this in particular.

 

Glen

[woweezowee 10]

@ robains

 

Actually I was talking about this:

 

Laminar Research press Release, Scheduled for April 1 but released early here:

 

 

See the date? Of course it failed as an aprils joke, but it wasn't meant to be what you make out of it.

[PingPong 60]

I did see the date, and I know it is a "joke" but he's still criticizing a competing product.

[JonRD463 146]

I was just thinking... I wonder how many of the so-called "Orbx sheep" are even aware of scenery developments like Helsinki and Wilmington airport. Might be amusing for someone who already has an Orbx forum account to post a really nice screenshot, showing all the advanced scenery features of XP like world shadows, lighting, along with the high res texture work of the airport with a cheery note saying "No worries, John. We got people taking care of that over here." B)

[Geofa 108]

I have to say in some of the areas like the Pacific Northwest of the US I am perfectly satisfied with default Xplane and don't feel a need for an orbx type add in-perhaps that figures into the equation . Where Xplane is good it is stellar. (I would not mind orbx or some other company filling in where it is not-just like fsx though-and sooner than later).