Still sitting gathering dust.

I am one with win 64 bits which crashes out every time I use it.

Answer I am told is to use 32 bit, until he can fix it :mad: 

yep, I have also put it in the dust bin for now. I found it much to difficult to get decent AI traffic at airports if you don't know how to make correct ground routes, and it made my XP crash on different occasions, so no AI traffic for now in XP.

It was the great AI hope for XP-kind, a potential Ultimate Traffic for XP in the making, but it never panned out. The guy who made it is obviously talented, but did not read the market correctly for his product; people want realistic or even "plausible" global AI traffic out of the box, not an over-complicated kit of parts for home programmers.

Created AI aircraft? No. Hacked and recompiled work of The Fruit Stand, AI Aardvark, just to name few of them.

The problem is that apparently the developer was hoping for a massive crowd sourcing effort.

 

This obviously not happened.

 

WorldTraffic still has a lot to offer. I wonder why nobody has created a payware package yet which makes use of WorldTraffic.

One wonders about the profits available in the XPX market. Beti-X was another product I was hoping would spark a surge, but after the release enthusiasm, it all seems to gave petered out as well, and the company has announced no new scenery i'm aware of.

 

Wonder how these things would do on Steam?

 

 

One wonders about the profits available in the XPX market. Beti-X was another product I was hoping would spark a surge, but after the release enthusiasm, it all seems to gave petered out as well, and the company has announced no new scenery i'm aware of.

 

Well, if you remember, Beti-X announced CZST Stewart only a short time (about 3 months) before release, and most of it was finished then already. Nobody ever had them on the radar. I can imagine they might work on a new scenery, but will talk about it once they have to show something.

 

Besides that, X-Plane is just a side effort of the team. They previously worked on AAA games and are now most of the time working on casual games.

I remember them saying at the time that the scenery was an experiment to test the XPX market, and there was a lot of enthusiasm at the time that this level of quality would spur other developers.

 

World Traffic had the same sort of initial buzz, but similarly seems to have lost steam.

 

The one product that exceeded many expectations from that time seems to be SkyMaxx.

 

So clouds are a win. (though weather needs work) And I'm still waiting for more FSX quality scenery and AI to lure any money from my pocket.

 

I looked very hard at World Traffic when it first came out, but the same things that turned others away did so for me as well.

would spur other developers.

 

Well, just in the last few weeks we had several nice scenery releases: Drzewiecki Design came aboard with two airports. TropicalSim released Rio de Janeiro Santos Dumont and will soon release the other Rio airport. Tom Curtis updated Boeing Country. TruScenery released Joensuu.

 

TruScenery is continuing their work on Helsinki-Vantaa. Icarus is working on Manchester, XHT-Labs are working on Prague, the Vaasa developer works on Cameron Park (California), and I'm sure there are other projects as well.

 

I wonder which development speeds and team sizes people expect. Scenery developers are very often not full-time developers, and just small teams or even one-man shows. The day only has 24 hours, and for example Beti-X needed 6 months with 4 people for CZST.

 

Yes, you are right: The X-Plane scenery market is small. It is a niche inside a niche, and in contrast to FSX (whose freeware scene is rather small), payware has to compete with lots of good to excellent freeware. But so far I see it growing, not stagnating.

Well, the Tropicalsim scenery is kind of a case study: Very nice and detailed in FSX with a fully detailed Rio cityscape of detailed autogen. Then the X-plane version with simply the airport. It shows part of the bang-for-the-buck gap that can keep people sitting on the fence.

 

Drzewiecki Designs did a nice job with Tallinn, for instance, and I can live happily with the World2Xplane style autogen, but its in an area in which I have very limited interest.

 

I don't think the market is stagnating, but I will say that until I see the bigger world-class airports at FSX payware quality (not mediocre conversions!) taking full advantage of X-planes features (and with some good AI!) there's going to be a lot of fence-sitting going on.

 

XPX is the sim I test every few weeks/months to see if anything interesting has happened.

 

I'm a pretty avid Ai watcher. In ultimate traffic 2 I could easily spend quality time just watching the various arrivals and departures at a big airport. I even purchased AI sound packs. Its a thing for me.

 

 

but I will say that until I see the bigger world-class airports at FSX payware quality (not mediocre conversions!) taking full advantage of X-planes features (and with some good AI!) there's going to be a lot of fence-sitting going on.

 

I understand you, but X-Plane is too small for a big number of XP-devoted developers, and as long as the number of XP-devoted developers is low, X-Plane will be too small for ... ad infinitum.

 

Anyway... this discussion takes place each year several times, and it will continue to take place in the next few years.

I'm a pretty avid Ai watcher. In ultimate traffic 2 I could easily spend quality time just watching the various arrivals and departures at a big airport. I even purchased AI sound packs. Its a thing for me.

 

You should go to a REAL airport, traffic there is much more impressive .

 

Flight simulators were originally invented, to fly ... guess what ... ONESELF .

You should go to a REAL airport, traffic there is much more impressive .

 

Flight simulators were originally invented, to fly ... guess what ... ONESELF .

 

I believe my nearest airport is a dirt trail, sometimes frequented by dears and bears............  :ph34r:

 

Civilian flight sims have always been, to me, a way to participate in an otherwise improbable fantasy, the dream of flight in all its forms, including just gawking at the planes. (which has a long and respectable history as well!)  :wink: