PMDG PMDG Announces the 600 and other updates.....

[Fiorentoni 4,224]

20 minutes ago, Christopher Low said:

My 600 is not impressed with that last comment. I had to comfort her, and convince her that you were talking s......

It'll get harder the older she gets and starts asking "Dad, why are there no other kids like me? Am I weird?". But I appreciate you taking care of the abandoned ones 🙂

Edited June 5, 2022 by Fiorentoni

[Fiorentoni 4,224]

53 minutes ago, Riah069 said:

I find it amusing that nearly all posts from PMDG throws a ASOBO kick in. Oh we cant do this or its difficult because we don't have this and ASOBO needs to make this in order for this to work. TBH its getting quite tiresome. From where i see other developers aren't having half the problems PMDG seem to have. Fenix has released what 3-5 Big patches? They don't seem to have issues. Maybe and i am guessing here that if PMDG wasn't being lazy (Porting old Code. Round peg in square hole?) and made the 737 from scratch to work in the MSFS environment from the get go the might have had a better compatible plane. But that is my humble opinion. I think Fenix is a good standard to which other developers should come to. Great communication, Good pricing, and a overall good product. Hats off to those guys.

It's two patches for the Fenix, but that's already one more than the 737-700, though being "younger".
Apart from that it's how PMDG do it. They've been doing this "soft complaining" for the past two years. I'm quite sure they are mostly factually right, e.g. about debugging in MSFS, but PMDG made the decision to abandon P3D and go all-in on MSFS, so please PMDG stop mentioning MSFS's problems every single post. Just work on finally getting your product into the 21st century in regards to user friendliness and integration.

[lwt1971 7,408]

6 hours ago, Riah069 said:

I find it amusing that nearly all posts from PMDG throws a ASOBO kick in. Oh we cant do this or its difficult because we don't have this and ASOBO needs to make this in order for this to work. TBH its getting quite tiresome. From where i see other developers aren't having half the problems PMDG seem to have. Fenix has released what 3-5 Big patches? They don't seem to have issues. Maybe and i am guessing here that if PMDG wasn't being lazy (Porting old Code. Round peg in square hole?) and made the 737 from scratch to work in the MSFS environment from the get go the might have had a better compatible plane. But that is my humble opinion. I think Fenix is a good standard to which other developers should come to. Great communication, Good pricing, and a overall good product. Hats off to those guys.

Been discussed many time before at length, so the TLDR of it is that PMDG, due to their decision to stick to the existing C++ codebase for aircraft implementations (which was fleshed out and refined during the FSX/P3D years) are dealing with a still-evolving area of the MSFS SDK that other devs like Fenix are not having to deal with (i.e. the WASM path). I don't really think this decision was based on laziness but rather a more realistic evaluation of the effort that'd be required to rewrite everything from the ground up following "native" MSFS dev best practices, versus porting C++ code (i.e. it might have taken them 2x or 3x the time, who knows). That, combined with PMDG still learning a few things here and there about the new platform leads to their current dev pace, one which does seem to be fast improving however now that the 737-700 is out.

Now could RSR serve PMDG better by not voicing out their issues and blaming Asobo for this and that? Definitely.. but RSR is RSR, and although he is the primary voice and face of PMDG, maybe it's unfair to judge the whole of PMDG and its silent hard working devs behind the scenes purely based on RSR's internet forum posts ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

Edited June 5, 2022 by lwt1971

[TomCYYZ 215]

21 hours ago, jrw4 said:

But that 9K was sold in a time window prior to 31 DEC 2019 only. The discount didn't apply thereafter, so presumably there were more sales made in 2020, etc.,, but we don't know how many. Given the number of forum postings about how unfair that was, one would think that there were many such purchases.

How about overall customer loyalty. Unfortunately  (or NOT) I bought the NGX after the fact, outside of the discount window. I’m not complaining, but some kind of a discount for previous owners would have been a nice gesture. I will most likely will buy the 800 though.

[Riah069 157]

Fair points. But I'm just calling it as i see it as a consumer. Nothing more. Its just the constant digs at ASOBO when ever a statement is posted. And as you said they decided to stick with and continue to use C++ in there aircraft and hence the issues that they are facing. TBH if they worked ground up with not using C++ then yes we properly wouldn't have the 737 atm. But maybe in the long run it might have worked out better. I'm no programmer don't claim to be, I'm a simple man. But at any rate i own the 737 i like the plane. I dont see myself buying any other iteration of the airframe besides the 700. So i wish them the best.

[eslader 1,783]

22 hours ago, JYW said:

I mean, is that really a community investment?

I took that to mean the community invested in PMDG. Because many of us bought the p3d NGXu knowing we wouldn't get much use it of it since we knew we'd be switching sims soon, but it was an investment for them to put towards bringing the 737 to MSFS.

[JYW 2,980]

6 minutes ago, eslader said:

I took that to mean the community invested in PMDG. Because many of us bought the p3d NGXu knowing we wouldn't get much use it of it since we knew we'd be switching sims soon, but it was an investment for them to put towards bringing the 737 to MSFS.

You might well be right, on reflection 👍

 

[JYW 2,980]

14 minutes ago, Kyuss said:

I think you guys get much more entertainment value (and time) out of complaining about everything and anything than you do with any plane in any flight sim. If I had this many grievances with a hobby I'd just find another one.

Where's the fun in that? 😄

(But yes, you're absolutely right.  I've been flight simming since 2004 and I've always found us an odd, demanding, over-emotional bunch.  And I'm including myself in that!)

[jrw4 624]

43 minutes ago, TomCYYZ said:

some kind of a discount for previous owners would have been a nice gesture

Yes, it would.

But I don't recall that PMDG had previously offered discounts to their customers running FS9 or FSX when the next generation of those flight sims came along. There was no subterfuge here, no misinformation. This was their policy with the notable exception of that period in late 2019, when (presumably, since I have no insight into their business model) they made that rebate offer in order to maintain the cash flow they required to help build the MSFS add-on that we're now enjoying.

[threexgreen 3,139]

3 hours ago, jrw4 said:

This was their policy with the notable exception of that period in late 2019, when (presumably, since I have no insight into their business model) they made that rebate offer in order to maintain the cash flow they required to help build the MSFS add-on that we're now enjoying.

What I would point out as well because I've seen people claim the offer was unfair is that it was valid for almost 2 months and they made this clear in the release announcement. I think that's enough time for people to become aware and decide, while a permanent discount offer for the full price would probably not work from a business economy point of view (too much revenue lost from the MSFS sales).

[andy1252 3,859]

13 hours ago, Fiorentoni said:

The -600 will be the only PMDG plane I'm not gonna buy. There is a reason almost no airline used it, and it's def the ugliest Boeing plane.

Ah, personal choice. Wonderful thing.

I'm not a tubeliner person, but I did buy the 737-700 because I thought it looked nice (I'm shallow like that). But for me, the -600 looks much better. I have so little interest in airliners generally I didn't know such a thing existed but I do like a nice stubby tube. Likewise, it saddens me that there are all the various versions of the A320 but no sign of an A318 anywhere.

I like stubby! (but not enough to get the 146)

Edited June 5, 2022 by andy1252
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[Johnny Wyatt 152]

Concern I have about the 600 is how many liveries there is going to be for it. If it's less popular, the community will make less liveries for it...

[OzWhitey 3,353]

I know that most of you have probably not read this latest update from The Captain - ain't nobody got time for that. Luckily, I speak PMDG, so I should be able to both translate the announcement and pare it down to a readable length. Here goes:

Captains.

1. The PMDG 737-600 is our third product for MSFS. You may think it's just a minor variant on our 737-700. Wrong! If it was, we wouldn't be charging you so much for it. So it's absolutely a whole new product, quite distinct from the last 737. Sort of.

2. The -600 happens to be a favorite of the team. This may sound odd, because obviously nobody on the forums could give two word not allowed about this type, but we chose to ONLY recruit devs who absolutely love this aircraft. Unfortunately the Venn diagram of "Devs who like the 737-600 the best" (seven people on the planet) and "Devs who know how to code an EFB in a timely fashion" has zero overlap.

3. (.....incoherent ramblings about aircraft toilets - why?? - nobody knows...)

4. (Two thousand words about how short, ugly 737s are actually the best despite the "meh" opinion of 99% of simmers and almost every airline. But wait - Air Algérie and Tunisair like them! Tunisair even bought a second one!)

5. The 737-600 is running 7-9 days behind our originally planned, vaguely-outlined schedule. But schedules are for losers.

6. LNAV doesn't work well on our planes. I know, right - how hard can it be? See note above about only hiring devs who think the 737-600 is THE BEST. We kind of promised this to our P3D customers who recently paid us $77.72 for an upgrade pack for the T7. Syke! Not going to happen, suckers!

7. So, this new LNAV. It is beautiful, just like the Sistine Chapel! It's been programmed by our "in in house mathematical wizzard." (sorry, I might have stuttered there). Yeah, the same guy who messed up the math for LNAV v1. Hopefully, he'll do better this time.

8. The Tablet - we have nothing to show you and nothing useful to tell you about this. Yes, we know every other dev, including the freeware guys and word not allowed Carenado, have tablets. <shrug> We would too, except for Asobo.

9. Adding new features to the 737. We'll be doing this! Things like: PFDs that don't flicker! Cockpit textures that are actually good! A cabin that doesn't look like it came from Bruce Artwick Flight SImulator II! Engines that spool up properly! (actually, not that one, and please don't mention it again). And also, this will kind of not be happening on the schedule that we originally promised when the 737-700 was released.

And finally - the big one - our $350,000 Community Program!

We got the team together, sat down, and tried to work out how we could best help the community. We had literally dozens of great ideas. Maybe start a soup kitchen? Free DC-3 rides for the homeless?

After much thought, we finally decided to go with the crazy, radical idea of meeting our contractual obligations to purchasers of the NGXu.

We have gotten a number of very kind, very thoughtful emails and messages from PMDG customers who were surprised to find that we did the minimum legally required of us, and chose not to defraud our customers! Huzzah for us!

We may also choose to meet our basic contractual obligations at various times in the future. If we do so, we'd greatly appreciate an email sincerely thanking us, or maybe a nice fruit basket.

Please enjoy your weekend!

Captain Bobby "Michelangelo" Randazzle.

Edited June 6, 2022 by OzWhitey

[JYW 2,980]

19 minutes ago, OzWhitey said:

I speak PMDG, so I should be able to both translate the announcement and pare it down to a readable length. Here goes:

[SNIPPED]

Very funny 😁  Had some genuine laugh out louds reading that!

[rjack1282 316]

@OzWhitey, I'm dead...now to clean all the coffee of my monitor.