7 hours ago, GoranM said:

predominantly MSFS posts

Never venture there waste of my life.

15 hours ago, Bjoern said:

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

I will talk to a few of them given my understanding/impressions/general agreement:

Planemaker stuff - There was (and may still be) a big overhaul for PM planned, I get the impression it's either massively delayed or maybe even ran into churn, lot of new stuff was talked about several years ago that turned into little more than a few cosmetic changes, on the other hand, it has had some very meaningful improvements - saves are now git friendly (really big deal), lot of really nasty bugs have been fixed.

It's messy because once an aircraft is mostly assembled in PM, it's faaar easier to make changes using a text editor, so PM bugs don't get noticed that much, let alone reported. 

Object stuff, there is no ETA or guarantees, but fancy new object stuff is for sure on Laminars wish list, and e.g. Austin talked a couple of years ago about "new tech" to make fancy roads, Xplane2Blender has seen a lot of love, I see the Enhanced Cloudscapes dev has been on it.

XLua: "because it isn't designed to do that", the concept behind XLua is to keep it very "non coder" friendly, so limited to logic and basic X-Plane interactions, if you want something more than it does there is a better tool for the job and it will require coding experience.

Documentation: Yes. I will be nice when we get it.

Unfinished, buggy and stillborn addons: There is to much going on here for a single post, but the background includes generally abusive org mods, young adults that start in the summer holidays and forget about it when exams start, documentation, xplane bugs, unfinished SDK stuff, the generally insanely hard nature of developing flight sim stuff in the first place.

I was surprised that in the recent poll I ran on the org, overwhelmingly users want/expect freeware devs to highly polish their efforts before making them public, on reflection I understand why, but in my opinion this is the exact opposite of what they should do.

My 2c.

On 1/22/2025 at 5:59 AM, Marc22 said:

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

I can agree that Laminar were resting on their laurels for a few years, more or less. I mean, not really taking a break - v12 took many years of development even before it released in public Beta...

And why not? FSX was dead, Prepar3D wasn't doing all that much, and there wasn't much else in terms of general flight simulation.

Then MS came back with a vengeance. But here's the thing: it was a coincidence, not a plan. MS/Asobo had developed the Digital Twin Earth and don't know what to do with it as a product.

They had created a minimal TBM to fly around the planet, but its purpose was to show off the world, NOT to be a flight simulator.

But then, it got shown to a certain group of people, the idea was (re)born, and here we are.

MS has BIG plans for "Flight" Simulator, and our portion of the game is just the beginning.

Laminar never had this type of thing in mind, because their mission was flight simulation, not whatever it is that MS has in the plans.

So the situation isn't Laminars "fault", per se. It's just a new reality that they've got to deal with...

And IMHO, they're doing a pretty good job.

The only reason I fly MSFS over XP is the digital tourist thing.

XP is a great flight sim, and so is MSFS. 

And hard drive space is cheap. 😎

On 1/22/2025 at 10:37 AM, tonywob said:

There are fewer products (free and paid) coming out now than there were a few years ago

Is there a source to check that out? I have been using XP since version 6.70 (1999-2000) and haven‘t noticed that at all, at least not subjectively. For me there are way too many addons in general and they have become so in depth that I lack the time to use an addon to its full potential. So I wonder if there are some objective data about the number of addons over time?

23 hours ago, mjrhealth said:

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

Haaaaahahahaha, what's a candle supposed to do among a field of stars?!

My individual frustrations carry no weight beside what's going on in Laminar's third party developer Slack. It there's one way to make a difference, it is in there.

 

8 hours ago, mSparks said:

Planemaker stuff - There was (and may still be) a big overhaul for PM planned, I get the impression it's either massively delayed or maybe even ran into churn, lot of new stuff was talked about several years ago that turned into little more than a few cosmetic changes, on the other hand, it has had some very meaningful improvements - saves are now git friendly (really big deal), lot of really nasty bugs have been fixed.

What was the upcoming flight model update again? 12.2? Hopefully, PlaneMaker will get some UI and usability love for that one.

Like a button or key to toggle between PM and 3D model view without having to go through the menu, the ability to show every 3D object regardless of any visibility conditions in the OBJ file (perfectly possible, mesh and UV mapping data *is* always parsed by PM) and animation keyframe control instead of an endless loop that can only be turned on and off.

 

8 hours ago, mSparks said:

It's messy because once an aircraft is mostly assembled in PM, it's faaar easier to make changes using a text editor, so PM bugs don't get noticed that much, let alone reported.

Individual parameters: Yes. Addding new objects and reodering them: Absolutely not, unless you know the internal code of every blending, shadow and lighting mode by heart.

 

8 hours ago, mSparks said:

XLua: "because it isn't designed to do that", the concept behind XLua is to keep it very "non coder" friendly, so limited to logic and basic X-Plane interactions, if you want something more than it does there is a better tool for the job and it will require coding experience.

Had you said "xlua was designed as a tag-on to default aircraft that do not need any extra drawing capabilities", I would have somewhat understood and agreed. But xlua is not for "non-coders". Just because you don't have to worry about BS like memory pointers like in C does not mean that you can have an AI spit out some generic code and get away with it. Not at all. You do need some programming skills to get things done and even then, there are a lot of ways that xlua can shoot you in the foot. Even I, with years of experience, way too often go out of a coding session with a heavy limp.

What I've failed to mention (as usual, sadly) in my rant is that there is XPPython, which had bindings for every SDK function, but is (criminally) underused by the community in practice (and heavily dependent on the system's installed Python version). It handles both aircraft specifc and global scripts and save for a few Python-specific idiosyncracies like variable scope, it isn't too hard get into when one knows Lua (and arguably more powerful because of additional packages) and thus a valid alternative. So Laminar is off the hook when it comes to my criticism reegarding xlua's capabilities.

 

8 hours ago, mSparks said:

Documentation: Yes. I will be nice when we get it.

I'm still hoping for a wiki or centralized database of some sort. At the moment, only a web search finds information on X-Plane's website, with the on-site navigation being pretty much useless.

 

8 hours ago, mSparks said:

Unfinished, buggy and stillborn addons: There is to much going on here for a single post, but the background includes generally abusive org mods, young adults that start in the summer holidays and forget about it when exams start, documentation, xplane bugs, unfinished SDK stuff, the generally insanely hard nature of developing flight sim stuff in the first place.

"Abusive Org mods" is not an argument as there are a lot of other websites on which development progress can be shared with an audience.

"Young adults on holidays" somewhat ties into my "time-consuming and overly complex workflow" argument when not regarding the work required to create a textured and animated 3D model in Blender (requiring a lot of time in itself). I'd even arguee that 3D work is the easiest part because Blender is extremely well documented and focused on productivity (keyboard shortcuts...). It's all the X-Plane specific things that are not.

 

8 hours ago, mSparks said:

I was surprised that in the recent poll I ran on the org, overwhelmingly users want/expect freeware devs to highly polish their efforts before making them public, on reflection I understand why, but in my opinion this is the exact opposite of what they should do.

Ideally, you could release a half-finished project and have others pick up the slack. The problem is that there are way too few people out there with the expertise, if only in a single field like coding, fmod, scripting, etc. due to the obstacles I've outlined before.

It also does not help that users tend to apply payware standards to freeware releases, taking everything for granted. The worst aspect of this is exhibited by the Org's file review system, where frustration over bugs or other non-compliances to current standards is often enough expressed in a low star rating. What this can do to a developer's self-confidence is exhibited by quite a few downloads that were deleted by their creators in frustration and/or exhaustion.

 

 

 

 

 

Edited January 23, 20251 yr by Bjoern

28 minutes ago, Franz007 said:

Is there a source to check that out? I have been using XP since version 6.70 (1999-2000) and haven‘t noticed that at all, at least not subjectively. For me there are way too many addons in general and they have become so in depth that I lack the time to use an addon to its full potential. So I wonder if there are some objective data about the number of addons over time?

You can strike out all add-ons from older X-Plane releases that were updated for XP12 since they are not new. The remainder is what has been built from the ground up to XP12 standards and this number is what Tony is referring to.

If you dig through the version history of the add-ons on offer in the Org store and at x-pilot, you can easily compare the amount of new, native add-ons that were available during the first two years of XP11 versus those for XP12. Although I have a feeling that you may end up with surprisingly similar figures...

Edited January 23, 20251 yr by Bjoern

34 minutes ago, Franz007 said:

Is there a source to check that out? I have been using XP since version 6.70 (1999-2000) and haven‘t noticed that at all, at least not subjectively. For me there are way too many addons in general and they have become so in depth that I lack the time to use an addon to its full potential. So I wonder if there are some objective data about the number of addons over time?

Not that I’m aware of, but it’s something I’ve personally noticed over the past 4–5 years. For example, when was the last time Carenado or Alabeo released anything for X-Plane? Orbx and many others have also significantly reduced their releases for X-Plane. I’d like to believe this isn’t the case, but unfortunately, it does seem to have happened.

 

Just like real estate!

Scenery scenery scenery...because it makes happier (you tuber) videos, increases exposure and possible sales

A picture says a thousand words

 

 

 

24 minutes ago, tonywob said:

Not that I’m aware of, but it’s something I’ve personally noticed over the past 4–5 years. For example, when was the last time Carenado or Alabeo released anything for X-Plane? Orbx and many others have also significantly reduced their releases for X-Plane. I’d like to believe this isn’t the case, but unfortunately, it does seem to have happened.

 

Ah you meant also airport sceneries? Yes those have slowed donw, I also realized. But for the aircraft-addons I haven't noticed. I saw many ones being released in the past months, mostly from Thranda or other I don't remember the name. COWS as a MSFS-dev will enter the XP-market with a DA40 or DA42. And I simply think the market is quite saturated because we have almost all kind of planes covered. The only one (GA) I am missing is the Bristell B23 because it's the one that I have been flying in real. But I have seen that it was planned (I think it was from AirFoillabs, not sure?). And for airliners I even have the impression that more "major" ones got released than ever before like the FF777v2, A339, X-crafts, Rotate MD11-passengers etc. And the A350v2 is in the making, as well as the B787. So apart from the airport-sceneries I haven't noticed any less releases of aircraft-addons, at least good ones. LevelUp just updated their suite for XP12 a few weeks ago, adding a major Boeing family.

But what I have noticed is that the depth of nowadays addons are becoming... insane. Years ago we used to try out more addons because they became boring quite fast. Now, for the CL650 alone, it would need months and months of intensive studying to get to know it goo enough to use it "seriously" 🙂

3 hours ago, Bjoern said:

Just because you don't have to worry about BS like memory pointers like in C does not mean that you can have an AI spit out some generic code and get away with it.

Its more than just pointers - nothing hardware specific, so dont need any deep understanding of how computers, sdks, apis or even flight simulation works under the hood. That makes it perfect for anyone with zero coding experience to get reasonably productive reasonably quickly.

So e.g. when an artist is having a mental break down that the strobe lights are not flashing in the correct sequence they can be quickly pointed to a customisation that they can get working relatively easily without installing 200gb of developer tools and learning the difference between arm and x86.

3 hours ago, Bjoern said:

The problem is that there are way too few people out there with the expertise

The problem imho was more nothing shipped with permissive licencing, so the snafu has historically been someone new starts to try modding something broken and abandoned as a starting point

then gets attacked by rabid dogs for being a pirate and not asking the original author for permission.

how rabid?

One of my org bans was for being unpleasant to someone who was trying very hard to get the PSVR repo taken down because I "clearly stole stuff from valve and didnt give proper credit to the original authors" - because it includes 

https://github.com/mSparks43/PSVR-SteamVR-openHMD/blob/master/subprojects/openvr/openvr_driver.h

They didnt use Linux, let alone VR on Linux, yet wasted their day looking for problems that dont exist and my day for trying to be polite to someone who had no idea what they were looking at, while reading them being downright toxic in my (very limited space) PM inbox.

Oh, and then there are those who do actually steal stuff, set up sockpuppet accounts to try and get potentually new developers to "work" with them in order to destroy their reputation when they go public, before disappearing like a stink in the wind. 

Just as a forewarning of the kind of flight sim politics you will face when you go more public with your endeavours....

4 hours ago, Bjoern said:

"Abusive Org mods" is not an argument as there are a lot of other websites on which development progress can be shared with an audience.

 

3 hours ago, Bjoern said:

versus those for XP12.

Pretty much everything for XP12 is on discord now, beyond "lots of people really active" its hard to judge because its not that transparent, we will know a bit more when the in sim store drops, and there is a more centralised place for more consistently high quality stuff and better discovery.

I checked in on Stratosphere Studios for the first time in a year or so last week, they have been making huge leaps and bounds doing things the org mods spent the last 10 years+ telling everyone was impossible and to not even try, and locking the threads of anyone who disagreed....

15 hours ago, Stefti said:

Scenery scenery scenery...because it makes happier (you tuber) videos, increases exposure and possible sales

Also because the default scenery is an immersion-killer for low-and-slow pilots. This is why I worked on World2XPlane(Simheaven) and the TrueEarth series, but in MFS the entire world now is at a similar level with little effort from the user and MS/Asobo are really concentrating on making this experience good. It'll be interesting to see where the scenery goes in X-Plane going forward with the new system they're creating.

14 hours ago, Franz007 said:

COWS as a MSFS-dev will enter the XP-market with a DA40 or DA42

There is already a high-quality DA40 from RealSimGear, so at least for me, I'm not that interested in buying the same aircraft again unless it's substantially better. I'd love some higher quality single engine GA classic aircraft such as a Cessna 182, Piper Tomahawk etc, but nobody seems to be working on these at the moment. The quality of the Thranda products have always been a mixed bag for me, and although I buy their products, I rarely use them more than a few times as they all seem to suffer the same problems.

The GA+scenery market seems very oversaturated now in MFS but is still lacking in X-Plane since 2020 onwards. Maybe the upcoming store will change this as I only generally bother checking x-plane.org for addons.

On 1/22/2025 at 1:15 AM, jcomm said:

never actually fix it

This one hurts my head. Certainly there's a pecking order to bugs, their fixability, and the cost benefit, but consistent effort to improve your product by releasing bug fixes is easily a "top 3" biggest thing a developer can do to boost a long term reputation. What's more is that if they're a good dev, they are building a library and knowledge base of tools and processes that work for subsequent products.

Reading the recent Xcrafts reddit AMA was interesting but I did notice one head-scratcher: he explained how much effort went into adding some significant upgrades to the FMS and was heartbroken when there was little change in sales after that update was released. Now you've got a toolbase for the next product but also, anyone could have predicted that market response. Devs could often stand to manage their own expectations and bemoaning that fate in public doesn't help you much.

LR haven't exactly made it easy though either. SDK documentation has quite a few messy spots and the datarefs can be a minefield. Thankfully there's now someone working full time to clean all that up.

21 hours ago, tonywob said:

For example, when was the last time Carenado or Alabeo released anything for X-Plane?

They're gone from XP for good since they do not have anybody to adapt their 3D models to X-Plane anymore. Thranda went over to JustFlight's camp.

 

17 hours ago, mSparks said:

Its more than just pointers - nothing hardware specific, so dont need any deep understanding of how computers, sdks, apis or even flight simulation works under the hood. That makes it perfect for anyone with zero coding experience to get reasonably productive reasonably quickly.

Not really. People even fail to jump over the low bar set by a language as easy and well documented as Python.

 

17 hours ago, mSparks said:

So e.g. when an artist is having a mental break down that the strobe lights are not flashing in the correct sequence they can be quickly pointed to a customisation that they can get working relatively easily without installing 200gb of developer tools and learning the difference between arm and x86.

Good point. All you need is a text editor and a hotkey to reload scripts in X-Plane.

 

17 hours ago, mSparks said:

The problem imho was more nothing shipped with permissive licencing, so the snafu has historically been someone new starts to try modding something broken and abandoned as a starting point

then gets attacked by rabid dogs for being a pirate and not asking the original author for permission.

Yes, licensing is an issue. Either developers forget defining licensing terms or including a premade license, which locks down the add-on for good for anybody else or are way too restrictive which precludes even simple bugfixes. But it's their call.

 

17 hours ago, mSparks said:

One of my org bans was for being unpleasant to someone who was trying very hard to get the PSVR repo taken down because I "clearly stole stuff from valve and didnt give proper credit to the original authors" - because it includes 

https://github.com/mSparks43/PSVR-SteamVR-openHMD/blob/master/subprojects/openvr/openvr_driver.h

They didnt use Linux, let alone VR on Linux, yet wasted their day looking for problems that dont exist and my day for trying to be polite to someone who had no idea what they were looking at, while reading them being downright toxic in my (very limited space) PM inbox.

Technically, you're violating Valve's copyright by not including their license. 😉

See: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/openvr/blob/master/LICENSE

 

17 hours ago, mSparks said:

Pretty much everything for XP12 is on discord now, beyond "lots of people really active" its hard to judge because its not that transparent, we will know a bit more when the in sim store drops, and there is a more centralised place for more consistently high quality stuff and better discovery.

A lot of it is, yes, but Discord is quite bad for carrying a conversation about a specific subject among all the other conversations happening in a channel. It always feels like IRC for people with ADD.

 

 

58 minutes ago, Bjoern said:

But it's their call.

IMHO it was more trend rather than call, no one really thought about it or even knew permissive licencing is a thing. Mostly they still dont, about once a month or so I get someone asking permission to modify the 744.

1 hour ago, Bjoern said:

It always feels like IRC for people with ADD.

It is pretty much exactly IRC, but with more features, streamlined access and a much nicer UI than we ever got from an IRC client. (which I said to Thomson just before we got an official Laminar discord server)

1 hour ago, Bjoern said:

by a language as easy and well documented as Python.

python has far more opportunities to break things in ways that require detailed knowledge to fix.

That doesnt mean lua is perfect (e.g. the memory leak in the original 744 took a very, very long time to track down).

What you get with x(t)lua is just enough to do everything you need, and very strong hints that if you cant do it with x(t)lua you probably shouldn't do it at all... (because if you try it will be far harder than you expect, break often in unfathomable ways, and often not work at all on anyone elses computers, so if you really need it, you need to need it enough to battle with that)

sidenote, all this changes very soon once the rest api and avionics devices are the norm.

3 hours ago, Bjoern said:

Thranda went over to JustFlight's camp.

I think there was a disagreement, beiween the two. Was mentioned long time ago.