Diving Board

So we haven’t exactly done anything to gain any fans over the past five months. Same pictures, same posts, same hangar render on the front, same basically everything. The only change is the addition of laughter at our cause and angry posts claiming that we’re more dead than elvis, that our geriatric pace is pathetic, and that me might as well scrap the whole thing because nothing will ever come of it. Yeah you’re frustrated, but we’re frustrated too. Its not that we haven’t wanted to put this out for some time now. And believe me, there is nothing worse than putting out another apology post every five months that we haven’t done a damn thing but we’re getting to it. Let me shed some light on our situation.

Let me just, not to steal the phrase from Apple, lift the reality distortion field surrounding x-plane developers, especially us here at XP Jets. Most of us, and I do believe that I speak for the majority of us, actually work for a living or are in school. For those of you who haven’t gone to flight school, Dhruv spends an extremely large amount of time flight instructing, building hours, and doing his own advanced studies. I wish him the best as he’s going to graduate in a couple of weeks. As for me, I’m an art student. I spent more time in the studios than the house that I pay rent to live in during the course of the school year. I for one bit off more than I could chew this semester. There were many a day when I didn’t even come home. Add the fact that both Dhruv and I have bills to pay, well, we had to make money somehow, so we work. Its the problem with x-plane development on the high end. Yes it will pay dividends in the end, but not while we’re working on it.

Admittedly I’m a little spooked by the prospect of the 777 from ramzzess on the org beating us to the punch. It was the kick that has sent all us off of the diving board. We’re getting wet whether we want to or not. I’ve opened up Blender now that I have time and am putting the finishing geometry into the cockpit. I’ll be texturing it and animating it over the summer. I’m completely done with finals this Wednesday so believe me, there will be time. Sven has been more or less constantly plugging away on the plugin since his last post this past November, so with any sort of luck, we can cross that finish line simultaneously, possible cross the X-Plane v10 threshold as well. Dhruv will be firing up the sim doing extensive flight testing and flightmodel tweaking here following his CRJ training.

X-Plane developers live in the real world just as do the rest of us. Let me stress that real life priorities always take precedence. I’m not saying that we don’t deserve some of the chastising that we get because yes, it has admittedly been four long years. We ought to be able to finish what we’ve started and on that, you have my word, we will.

Don’t expect updates in the galleries for a while yet. We’re going to keep updates spread relatively thin because lets face it, there is nothing worse than building up undue anticipation when we’re likely at the very earliest, still a good six months off. Look for milestones, not every little extra texture or polygon that I put into the model.

Keep up the faith. As long as we’re breathing, we’re still capable of dreaming up some pretty spectacular things.
Thanks

Alex