DannyH73

Really nice work! Almost felt as if I was there, and the music was chilled at just the right temperature

Wow!! Absolutely stunning shots!!

Hmmm ... The original budget was for a significantly reduced scope of game. Amazes me that some people will say "look at the feature creep, that's why it will never get completed", and then we have others saying it should have been finished because they "have made 100x what they asked for". Just demonstrates that everyone is interpreting "facts" in different ways. My version of reality says that we're seeing gradual pieces of the pre-beta (okay, maybe even call it pre-alpha) that will serve as the key pieces to build the Worlds and star systems they're envisaging. That takes time. I really believe a big mistake they did is to issue estimated timeframes, which slip as the quality requirements increase, and that has led to doubt, and fear that people's money won't see any return, and the more negative folk out there (who always seem to be the most vocal) stressing that the sky is falling. They had a small scope with a limited budget in mind, it got popular to a point that more money than they ever thought started flowing to them through ship sales that were demonstrating progress, and so the scope grew and so did the team. As different modules are completed you let people go, and that's why you use contractors as much as possible - it's far easier to scale - and people will come and go as needed. They're developing new technologies, working toward AAA+ quality and most definitely making some mistakes as they go along - everyone does on a project of this type of scale. It also demonstrates that people forget what crowd funding is - it's not buying a share of a company, it's supporting and placing trust in a team to deliver a concept or an idea. Unfortunately a lot of people who have invested have had that trust diminished by a large part of the fear that a lot of people are saying "game over! It's game over man" and therefore loosing that money without seeing the concept delivered. Am I annoyed I can't play the kick butt game that's been promised right now - yeah. But I'm also fairly confident something will be delivered ... eventually. The hype has done some real good though in ensuring the space game genre has received new attention, but I also think it may have damaged software developers to attempt to be so transparent for future projects ... And I think not seeing behind the curtain of other projects will be a real shame.

Not sure if "that chick" (Sandy Gardner) is his wife, but she has been there from the start and managed to market the most successful crowd funded game to date - they're about to pass £90million. Her background seems to have been in fashion, and that kind of makes sense in terms of making things desirable. I'm a backer, and keep an eye on the development cycle regularly, but glad Erin, his brother, is involved. He started up the UK office and has been around for awhile. As for the other staff leaving, disappointed to hear Pugh is departing, but understand change happens. As he was focused on the community it could simply be a fallout of the negativity that's being generated (rightly or wrongly). Development continues though, the scope has been locked down for over a year and I think the idea of open development and involving the community is actually their biggest problem now. People don't understand the development process - just look at some of the responses heard when P3d v3 was announced, and people making assumptions before it could even be tested by those naysayers. The shame of the matter is the entire Star Citizen crowd funding effort was built on not having to answer to a developer, who demanded drop dead dates even if the game wasn't ready .... And it seems vocal components of the community (whether backers or not) are even more demanding when it comes to releasing things NOW whether it's ready or not - damned if they do, and damned if they don't.

Just received an Email update for the DCS storefront advertising 70% off. Runs from Friday September 4th at 15:00 UTC to Monday September 7th at 09:00 UTC. This FLASH sale is for world USD prices only and does not apply to special prices of Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) countries. http://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/en/shop/ DCS: Flaming Cliffs 3: $39.99 to $11.99 (70% off) DCS: A-10C Warthog: $39.99 to $11.99 (70% off) DCS: Black Shark 2: $39.99 to $11.99 (70% off) DCS: P-51D Mustang: $29.99 to $8.99 (70% off) DCS: Fw 190 D-9 Dora: $49.99 to $14.99 (70% off) DCS: Bf 109 K-4 Kurfürst: $49.99 to $14.99 (70% off) DCS: Combined Arms: $19.99 to $5.99 (70% off) F-15C for DCS World: $9.99 to $2.99 (70% off) Su-27 for DCS World: $9.99 to $2.99 (70% off) Su-27 The Ultimate Argument Campaign: $9.99 to $2.99 (70% off) A-10A for DCS World: $9.99 to $2.99 (70% off) Su-25 for DCS World: $9.99 to $2.99 (70% off) DCS: MiG-15bis: $49.99 to $14.99 (70% off) DCS: F-86F Sabre: $49.99 to $14.99 (70% off) DCS: UH-1H Huey: $49.99 to $14.99 (70% off) DCS: Mi-8MTV2 Magnificent Eight: 49.99 to $14.99 (70% off) DCS: C-101 Aviojet: $59.99 to $17.99 (70% off)

Outstanding shots - x-plane looking spectacular

Yeah - what Tony said

That is mighty impressive!

Woah! That's looking great ... Bring on those water vectors!!

Woah .... Epic alright! Nice work. Did you find any major issues needing a manual fix when you did the conversion?

Awesome! Really impressive as always and looking forward to the release! A note of thanks for all your hard work, and looking forward to the many changes I and friends did in OSM with the expectation to see it materialise in Ver3.

Quite a few developers have actually moved their payware products to free are after a period of time - Iris comes straight to mind. Also keep in mind other developers that fund products before even launching a final commercial product are asking significantly more for add-ons. Star Citizen just bringing a salvage ship to market for $US 350 and about to bring a luxury cruiser to market for $600 which buyers won't see in the currently pre-alpha versions for some time. There's also Elite:Dangerous who let you join their Alpha development cycle for $US 200. I realise these prices are to help development, but isn't that why we also pay the prices we do for the add-ons we want to see in FS? We're supporting a revenue stream for add-on developers to keep using their time and their skills for the extra aircraft and sceneries we want to see in our sims ...

Woah - ok, thanks for the headsup!

Wonder if the Steam release gives it more focus from the graphic card guys?

... but don't let that stop Milviz from creating an awesome version!

the mention of "on the hoizon" makes it pretty clear right - obvious indication it must be a flight simulator!! Besides Martin is probably an alias for Martian .... so that should be "everything is based on rumours, rumours, conspiracy theories and rumours." EDIT: just adding a to ensure people don't think I'm being completely serious ... or is that just what I want you to believe??

Oh wow ... and that thread was only just closed by the developer .... spen25 14 hours ago Any new simulator projects on the horizon? #74 DTG_Admin [developer] 4 hours ago Originally posted by spen25: Any new simulator projects on the horizon? Yes. - Martin I love a good conspiracy theory!!

Just a quick note - EFASS manages the distance blur/haze and also deepens the sky colours - it's really quite good. You can also affect cloud shadows "darkness" and a few other art controls. Free for 14 days to trial, and then about €25 to purchase so you don't have anything to really just try it out. I'm running the moving maps and weather generator on a MS Surface Pro with the server running on the Xplane machine and it performs very well.

EFASS weather injector does work across multi-PC's - am using it and it looks spectacular. Have Server running on the Xplane machine, with an instance of EFASS running off a Microsoft Pro Surface (finally found a decent use for it). Great solution! The horizon haze, improved cloud shadows, enhanced sky colors - it's all good. From the manual: Multi-PC for X-Plane This is quiet beta, but should work. Go to the UltraWX settings and click the XPSM tab. Enter the IP of your Simulator-PC and restart EFASS. Make sure the UDP Ports mentioned above are reachable in your network. EDIT: oops, just realized you may have meant running a single instance to support a multi-PC setup ... in that case, unknown as I'm just running a single X-plane PC.

Absolutely stunning - you should be doing their marketing shots! Off to buy now ...

Can't you also select to have Beta's installed, and then if you want to return to the last RTM build you uncheck it in the Install app?

Lovely shots! Scenery, lighting and effects give it a great feel. I'm still back and forward between P3d and Xplane10 - seems this year we're seeing both make some pretty impressive strides.

Kind of sounds exciting ... http://developer.x-plane.com (Spoiler alert: the answer to the “when” question is going to be deeply unsatisfying and annoy you. Sorry – there isn’t a date. But at least you’ll know what’s going on.) It’s been over four weeks since Philipp publicly demonstrated an early X-Plane 10.30 build with the new GPS. What’s going on now? What about 10.30? What’s In X-Plane 10.30 Here’s a rough overview of what’s going into 10.30. We’ll have a complete change log when we release a public beta; right now the change log is not compiled, and it’s going to be long enough that I can’t go through everything now for a blog post. (To give you an idea, Austin has 158 commits on his branch going in.) The one truly big new features is the new GPS Navigator that will ship in X-Plane 10.30. Please note that an aircraft must be modified to take advantage of it. It looks like a basic modification (e.g. if the aircraft already has the old G430) should be a few clicks in Plane-Maker. Similarly, you can add the GPS to your aircraft with drag-and-drop in the panel editor. Philipp has Oculus Rift support working but we’re still trying to figure out whether to ship it in 10.30 or wait; the actual Rift support is usable but the user interface is still quirky. Since they’re not actually selling devices to consumers yet we may wait. We’re working on a number of visual improvements: Tuning and improvements to the look of the clouds, including their behavior as you fly into and out of them. Optionally increasing the distance the DSF scenery is drawn for better long-range rendering. Better fog in lower visibility situations. (I’ll try to post some experimental pictures over the next few days.) This stuff is not finished – in particular, my fog work is not done yet, but if we can get it all working together it should make the visual experience in X-Plane 10 a lot better, and a lot closer to what we imagined. Under the hood 10.30 contains major changes to Plane-Maker’s panel editor and the entire OpenGL stack; these changes don’t provide any immediate features – this is just us putting in new infrastructure for future updates. I mention this only for completeness; infrastructure changes can cause bugs that we’ll fix before and during beta, but they’re necessary to keep the product evolving. The OpenGL changes in particular can affect plugins if they haven’t followed plugin SDK guidelines. 10.30 has some small extensions for third party developers, including a number of new dataref-based interfaces to customize sim behavior; we held off on this kind of thing during 10.20 to ship 64-bits faster so now we’re catching up on adding flexibility for third parties. I’ll post a complete list with the release notes; some of this work is already done and some is still in-progress. Finally there’s just a huge number of bug fixes, including a number of high profile and stubborn bugs. Please do not ask about your favorite bug in the comments (I will nuke your comment!). We will post complete release notes when we reach public beta. The Release Process We’re trying two changes to our release process for X-Plane 10.30: We are doing extensive private pre-beta testing before the public beta. Normally we release a public beta and get 300 reports that all tell us the same one big bug. This time we are starting with a much smaller group of testers and slowly growing it; this gives us much more efficient feedback and should speed the whole process up. We are doing private testing on parts of the sim individually before we jam them all together. I’ve had users test my “lots of DSFs” code separately from Philipp having people test the GPS. Traditionally we’d test everything at once, and the chaos of having so much new code in one single build made life hard for both testers and developers. So this time we’re starting small and slowly bringing the pieces together. (Please do not email or post requesting private beta access – we are not looking for additional testers at this time.) This process is an experiment; when 10.30 is done we’ll have to step back and see if the added complexity saved us real development time. When Will 10.30 Be Released We are currently privately testing some parts of 10.30. My expectation is that we will reach a public beta of 10.30 with the GPS, but without all fog-related features in weeks. (I don’t know how many weeks – it depends on how fast the current bugs get fixed and what new bugs are found.) Austin and I have differing views on this; I always push toward “don’t public beta until all of the bugs are gone” and Austin pushes toward “let’s get people the new GPS ASAP.” I think the actual public beta will be somewhere in the middle. The current plan is to get the GPS public before we integrate some of the newer fog features so that users can use the GPS (and third parties can start to add it to their airplanes) without everyone being held back on my incomplete fog code. We’ll roll the fog code in when it becomes stable enough. What Else Is Going On That’s Not In 10.30 A few things that are not part of 10.30: Alex is still working on autogen; we’ll release art assets when they are complete and shippable, but 10.30 won’t wait for them. (10.30 does have the autogen engine enhancements he needs.) I still have a bug left to fix for DSF recuts; those also aren’t tied directly to 10.30. The Airport Gateway and WED 1.3 (to send airports to the gateway) are in late development and early test; they’ll ship as soon as they are ready, but don’t require an X-Plane update. Once the Airport Gateway is live, we’ll gather up all of the airports users have shared with us since X-Plane 10.25. We’ll include those airports in an X-Plane patch whenever they’re ready – if that’s after 10.30 we can do a small update to push out airports very easily. Put another way, X-Plane 10.30 is mainly about code changes; if the various art asset and data updates become available early enough, they’ll go into 10.30 but if they don’t, we’ll do a 10.35 or some other small patch to get them to you as soon as we can.

Simply stunning .... :im Not Worthy:

Thanks for the heads up!