XP10(_64) runs pretty fine with my Radeon 6850 and the open source drivers. The new kernel 3.13 has a bunch of changes for recent Radeon GPUs which seems to improve performance significantly, maybe you can give it a try.

Well, there are so many variables that are hard to estimate. I know total copies sold, but then there is the question of what percent will buy add-ons, at what price, and (as you point out) the saturation of the add-on market.

I think the primary issue is simple: third party developers have a complex tool chain that takes time to develop and targets a specific simulator. Redoing that tool chain is a huge up-front cost, so the easiest thing is always to keep doing more of the same thing you’ve been doing. (I think you don’t see a lot of XP devs go to the MSFS market either – for similar reasons.)

My thinking is that we’ll never lower that tool chain cost enough to make it unimportant … the only way to do so would be to precisely clone the MSFS third party scenery SDK – besides the risk of getting sued and the necessity of rewriting our entire engine, we would in the end end up with a visual product identical to MSFS…so why would anyone then use X-Plane.

Instead I think what we must do is increase the gradient from MSFS to X-Plane by continuing to add rendering quality, features, performance and SDK options to X-Plane that MSFS doesn’t have. This was one reason to do the global HDR lights in 10.0….it is a feature no one can add to MSFS, it makes a big visual difference, and it adds lots of opportunities for third parties to quickly make their add-ons look better.*

(I say quickly because I believe the time it takes to ‘light up’ an airplane should be significantly less than the time it would take to try to fake the same effect using render-baking.)

Arghh…you easily unmask my laughable try to disclose future plan 🙂
I know many more clever veterans failed as well…

Yes, I bet that. I took your 25k figure just to calculate a potential market. The more people actively flying XP the more I’m surprised of 3PD blindness.
Since XP addons market is way less inflated than competitors I guess you could expect the same profitability, even better in the future since the more I read forums the more I see people shifting to XP (as I did recently). Hence my disappointment to read few quality airport announced for XP.

I don’t need/want to know when a 10.30 beta will ship and what it will ship with. It’ll ship when it ships with whatever is included. It’d be nice to get an idea of what is being worked on though. You already have a canned answer for questions of when and with-what.

We’ve sold a lot more than 25k copies! V10 has at this point (I think) outsold v9. A more interesting number might be update checks over a long time period to try to capture ‘active’ users. Over a single week the active user slice is kind of narrow.

Just so we’re all clear, these are Ricardo’s wild guesses on sim ship times – we (LR) have no comment and are not confirming or denying anything!!

What I find surprising is that given that enough wide base of users, 3PD software houses do not start converting some amazing scenery for FSX into XP.

Once you have 3D textured builings developed from scratch (as most of new airports) and photoscenery already licensed, the step to convert into sdf should be quite fast. You could thus increase sell with a limited investment of time and money. But maybe my estimates are way overdone because I probably underrate the pirated market.

If even Aerosoft doesn’t pursue that path, it must be that the fraction of users willing to invest in quality payware addons is much smaller that what I can figure out (i.e. 30% ot 25000 xp users = 7500 X $30.00 [average scenery cost] = $ 225.000 which for me should be good enough to attract new or conversion projects). What is true for aircraft developers should turn true also for scenery devs, still I only read about a couple of announced XP projects among the many started for FSX.

Maybe the reason lies in that veteran FSX developers know little of XP engine and the time spent to train for a new system can deliver more money when spent in new FSX scenery.

Well, given that v11 will not be ready until late 2015 or even 2016 (my guess because you need to put some new stuff to appeal v10 users to make the shift and that takes time) we can easily assume that 95% of gaming OS will run 64 bit by that time.

Well, I think you have described the ‘gap’ between Linux and the other OSes pretty well here: installing the latest drivers requires having compiler tools, killing the window manager, and using the command line.

I have never managed to get the kill-X-and-install process to work right. In the end I made a calculation that it wasn’t worth the time to change driver sets; AlpilotX runs on NV on Linux, so I get good reports from him when something goes wrong; I stick with AMD, which I have been able to install.