This needed its own topic

On 1/22/2025 at 12:06 AM, efis007 said:

What an absurd answer. 😄

Really.

 Thandra had a nice topic going on about future development. I think only thing keeping them in the game is Xplane is actually growing. I asked them if they could do a video on what it takes to develop an addon. Response was, :I started ding one, it was taking up lots of my time, in teh end it was pointless".

I wonder if you can guess why.

We have lost the worst of the developers but lately we have had no new ones that Im aware of. Last new developer I purchased his [plane simply to give him a leg in. It had issues, was his first, but i did a honest review which is still on his forum page. Mentioning a lot of things he did wrong. I believe he changed a lot of them.

But.

People complain there is no new addons in the making. There are, but developers are not silly enough to release anything till it almost release day.

Can you guess why??

Of course they than have to prepare for the deluge of complaints they get because with there limited testing team, they dont see all the bugs. But there are plenty of users out there ready to give them curry.

Have you considered the amount of effort that goes into doing a decent add on, or is it you just dont care. I want I must have , it must be perfect.

If thats what you want go buy a brand new dream liner if you have the money, it will be perfect wont it. How many millions does one of them cost.

 Than I was watching this video, guy was getting check ride in brand new business jet.Sitting there going through usual stuff, oh look, bug in software. Cant start plane. But it was brand new, should have being checked,

off to engineering with bug report, up all night new firmware, than needs to be confirmed by engineer, signed off, finally many hours late they take off.

we live in a different world now, the oldies should know and they should know better.

I was brought up to appreciate everything i got because my parents had nothing, yes even those addons with bugs.

Isnt hard to file a bug report.

a) Under most occasions I purchased addons to "help" the developers, not really counting on a perfect addon.

b) Sometimes I got really mad at developers who start making big hype around their upcoming products, months, sometimes years before release, and then release a product with some really irritating bugs... and take a lot of time to fix it or never actually fix it and start working on a new product and completely drop the former... That really irritates me ...

c) There are very few developers that announce the release of a product after being years working on it, then release it ASAP and... it's *almost* perfect (Aerowinx PSX, FLIGHT UNLIMITED and Airline Simulator 2 come to my mind...).

d) Then there are many developers I would never even consider buying from because their offers are basically so far from my interest / level of exigence that it's not even worth buying them, or because after a really big deception I gave up believing in their capacity to deliver anything worth my interest / money.

e) And, it has happened to me a few times, buying a product because I needed to buy that product sometimes because there weren't alternatives (happened a few times with the X-Plane platform) and end up really enjoying the addon, actually ending up making part of the short list of my preferred addons.

Strangely b) has probably been the case in which I spent more money in flight simulation 😕 - Stupid me 😞

PMDG, specially in X-Plane 11, but starting with Fly! 2, comes to my mind...

I classify FF somewhere between b), d) and e) 🙂 because I was really unsatisfied with the first big purchase I made from them, the FF 777 "v1", specially having the PMDG 777 for comparison in FSX / P3D, then somehow the FF A320, although there have been stances in which updates did make it enjoyable, even though never finished, and there's their FF 757 Pro which I really ended up finding really enjoyable, even if not *perfect*, but hasn't received updates, just as I believe their 767 and A350 too...

Hence my indecision regarding purchasing the 777 v2 because it is expensive, and from the comments and reviews there is still a lot to do before it can be considered a 777 simulation at least at the level of detail I had, for instance, in the PMDG 777 for P3D and now MSFS, even if in some aspects it may be truly remarkable and more interesting / challenging than the PMDG 777. But having an unfinished VNAV and other details...

Edited January 22, 20251 yr by jcomm

Problem i have is i have too many add ons and Im getting really picky what I would like to purchase. Have had 3 in mind for month or so, Still mulling over. Thats another issue developers have to deal with.

6 hours ago, mjrhealth said:

We have lost the worst of the developers but lately we have had no new ones that Im aware of. 

There are fewer products (free and paid) coming out now than there were a few years ago, and I think the reason for this is obvious—there’s no need to elaborate :). However, I believe the MFS market has become massively oversaturated, especially for developers creating scenery and airports, with high-quality releases becoming increasingly rare.

I still buy X-Plane GA aircraft addons (my most recent purchase being the DA20), but many of the products I purchase seem to lack updates or support —though there are exceptions. Glaring issues, often highlighted by reviewers, frequently go unaddressed or brushed aside. In some cases, the developers simply move on to another project or disappear into the MFS market entirely hoping their users will just forget. 

My issues is that even if we do raise bug reports, it seems increasingly pointless unless it gains traction (e.g. By a known youtuber). However, I also understand it from a money point of view, especially if the original product didn't yield enough sales to make updates worthwhile.

There are new developer groups (Jetstream and RetroWings for example) and high-profile releases (Torquesim Citation 525), but they are not on the .org and they don't get reviewed on that review site. Go figure 😉.

 

I often ponder what makes a developer spend the time and effort to make a commercial or payware model. Non Commercial is another developer area where there seems to be an active and continuous stream of aircraft for XPlane. To my mind the effort to go commercial or doing it for the interest as a non professional developer is about equal to a point - depending on complexity aircraft type etc. I can see a lot of non payware model developers get in over their heads and it all gets to hard to finish or fix without extensive skills that go beyond just a bit of blender and photoshop work. Probably the same can be said for some so called commercial or payware developers ( or as they say seemed like a good idea at the time). Of course LR keep raising the bar with XP from 10 to 11 and now 12 and quite frankly they do not seem to have really allowed for forward or backward compatability, so people look at it then drop it! Then I have an offline discussion with a commercial developer about a few things - what surprised me was that sales or demand was still equal between XP11 and XP12, which creates its own set of difficulties and problems for people including non payware. Most either do not upgrade or just do it for XP12 and abandon XP11. This same developer was actually canvassing some possible new model developments (both GA types) and while interesting neither were sufficiently interesting for me to say yes go for it, want those, on the contrary not my cup of tea as they say!

Some never seem to arrive - I have been following the progress of 3 such projects for over a year now and while one can hope it seems a bit forlorn. Yes and there are quite a few in my repair Hangar (Waiting for a fix or update to make them work in XP12). Some of these have been there so long I have given up on seeing them fixed or updated. 

IF you look at the sim world - while the aircraft that could be made for the sim is significant, after all there is over 100 years of flight and aviation activity to do it, we are in a bind with new commercial aircraft or military aircraft, which have become far and few between over the years. Boeing is a case in point, apart from the 737 Max they can hardly be said to have designed manufactured or launched a new design for over several decades really. Airbus has chugged along but the Airbus family is much more amenable to modification than Boeing. Bombadier - basically shut down - Embraer - struggling. GA is as good as dead, yes a few new aircraft in the past decades but overall the heyday of that market was the 1980s. So if I am a developer - what do I build for a market in the sim and who would be interested? Now and then there are surprises like Hangar 23s Bellanca, though a great model for the sim cannot see that it set the world on fire either after all how many enthusiasts are keen to sim in an aeroplane that was built in minimal numbers over 70 years ago?. 

Personally I think MS have mined that vein for FS2020 and FS2024 - hence the over supply - now what? After all there are only so many Supermarine Spitfires one can produce. Laminar by contrast has kept the pace up in the light GA area or experimentals - which does generate some interest after all it is what you see out and about in the RW. So I have high quality Boeings, Airbuses and Embraers in the sim already - certainly do not need another developers version of heaven!

Edited January 22, 20251 yr by coastaldriver

Good luck to X-Plane; all I can say; Laminar took their own decisions.

4 hours ago, Marc22 said:

Good luck to X-Plane; all I can say

Good luck what. Laminar did right thing. Better engine, getting rid of legacy stuff. Even ms had to change engines because of limitations. So i dont understand the comment. Laminar are keeping there promises.

The problem with the drawn out development processes, unresolved bugs and increased pricing is that while standards for add-ons have increased a lot, the required workflows have stagnated and are, by now, pretty much inadequate to support development of complex add-ons in a reasonable time frame with a minimum of manpower and a minimum potential for bugs. Cases in point, from recent experience:

• Why is there still a "one material per object" requirement that drives up object creation complexity?
  Example: An animated door is split up into a glass object, a door frame object and a manipulator object. This object should export as a single one, referencing multiple materials. OBJ specification limmitation, I know, but Laminar is very much free to create their own file format an a Blender exporter that supports it.
• Why do I have to jump through an array of hoops to create X-Plane compliant PBR materials?
  This should be doable entirely in Blender without any need for extrernal tools whatsoever, with the exporter automatically baking them into compliant texture files.
• Why is there no convenient analyzer for an aircraft and airfoil shape in PlaneMaker? Why do I have to go through airfoil maker to get a wing shape and also create a simple wraparound aerodynamic model from hand in an interface straight from the 1990s?
• Why must OBJs be added manually and then sorted manually and set up for their blending mode manually in PlaneMaker? Combined with the "one OBJ per material" requirement, this is pure torture.
  This can very well be handled by appropriate tags inside OBJ files that can be added straight in the modeling software.
• Why do I have to spend days flight testing inside the simulator, wasting time with constant aircraft reloads and return to a certain flight state when there should be a headless X-Plane client where I could simply plug in my desired flight state and get an output of aerodynamic parameters?
• Why is the state of (writable) datarefs, default or custom, not saved automatically, if only in some "developer mode"? Why do I have to set up my entire aircraft again after each and every reload?
• Why is the entire SDK X-Plane API not exposed by default in xlua? Why do I have to go through an extremely clumsy LuaJIT C interface where each typo or unassigned pointer has X-Plane merrily stab you in the gut and crash? Why won't xlua let me draw anything in OpenGL space when SASL allows me to do so?
• Why can't I configure a default FMS for some type of aircraft and in terms of looks?
• Why do I have to obtain a third party tool to do something as essential as viewing the state of internally used datarefs?
• Why is a good chunk of developer documentation outdated or incomplete so that I have to go through collected wisdom at the .Org to get the tiniest bits of things going?

(These are rhetorical questions, so  save yourself the time and don't reply.)

For developers who make a living of it and have been involved for years, my above criticism is laughable. As a spare time developer with a limmited amount of time, however, I want and need to attain maximum efficiency to get projects done and I find that X-Plane simply throws way too many unnecessary rocks and sticks into my path. My last aircraft project was a mere update and already cost me months of quite short nights. I can not fathom what people are going through when they create things from scratch.

And this is just for aircraft. Scenery is arguably a bigger offender, without any indication whatsoever regarding the creation of landclass-based scenery and a toolchain straight out of Dante's seventh circle. Probably the only shining light in that department is WED, which works because it's actively maintained and very well integrated into the gateway.

Yes, technically, Laminar did their part by providing an API, an exporter for Blender, some other tools and some amount of written documentation. But that's simply not enough to prevent inexperienced developers from throwing the towel at some point and is a huge contributing factor why there is an assortment of unfinished or buggy add-ons and stillborn WIP projects out there. Development of a flight simulator is a bit like a cargo cult: Provide adequate tools, workflows and documentation and third party devs will come flocking in and will stay. Do not and the core program's continuous development alone has to sustain crowd interest.

Edited January 22, 20251 yr by Bjoern

7 minutes ago, Bjoern said:

(These are rhetorical questions, so  save yourself the time and don't reply.)

I wouldnt know, but of course you have pointed this all out to Laminar.

Mind you, I have noticed that a lot of developers are producing a modular system that can be used over multiple addons, so if laminar change something it only requires a minor update to a module instead of a complete rewrite. I guess we shall wait and see how that progresses.

8 hours ago, Marc22 said:

Good luck to X-Plane; all I can say; Laminar took their own decisions.

Not really sure what this means.  I've been making X-Plane add ons for a living since 2009, and I couldn't be happier.  Laminar have only increased their productivity and continue to make additions to X-Plane that keep developers happy.  One dev team making a negative comment about add on development in X-Plane, hardly speaks for the other 200+ developers.

3 hours ago, mjrhealth said:

Good luck what. Laminar did right thing. Better engine, getting rid of legacy stuff. Even ms had to change engines because of limitations. So i dont understand the comment. Laminar are keeping there promises.

Looking at his content, predominantly MSFS posts, it's not hard to see why he said what he said.

10 hours ago, Bjoern said:

• Why is there still a "one material per object" requirement that drives up object creation complexity?
  Example: An animated door is split up into a glass object, a door frame object and a manipulator object. This object should export as a single one, referencing multiple materials. OBJ specification limmitation, I know, but Laminar is very much free to create their own file format an a Blender exporter that supports it....

...

There is a lot of thought and truth in that list.

10 hours ago, mjrhealth said:

I wouldnt know, but of course you have pointed this all out to Laminar.

Why always snarky when this stuff comes up? Relax.

2 minutes ago, flightwusel said:

Why always snarky when this stuff comes up? Relax.

Didnt know I was. I certainly dont feel that way, just asked the question. Like you said , relax...