It should be noted that, while flight sim development is not a democracy, sometimes we (LR) do not know best…it’s tricky getting user feedback when internal business concerns aren’t public, etc.

Completely agree, Thomas. And Ben just took a bunch of space to give all the background info anyone with a crowd sourced input stream idea might want. Everyone has a voice and many want to be heard, but flight sim development is not a democracy. 🙂

Ben, many thanks for a good deal of thoughtful and gentle explanation. Really looking forward to seeing in the distance….I want to take a U-2 up and see for miles and miles and miles…… 😀

My view is that “more structured” wouldn’t be a win. The reason is that what we (the small number of LR employees trying to take in a lot of information) need most is information _quality_, but I’ve yet to see a formal system that produces consistently high quality information without also filtering out some important stuff. The result is that, instead, we all have our ears in different places, trying to keep an eye out for “hrm – that post looks pretty sane.” A few random notes:

– We _do_ have a formal system for bug reporting (the bug reporter) and every bug report gets read by someone. The system suffers from a few problems though:

1. It is overrun with user tech support complaints – that disclaimer to NOT post tech support q’s is universally ignored. We forward those requests to tech support. But if you’re wondering why you can’t file an INTERNAL bug in our bug database, with a real bug #, that’s why. A very very small number of users who have consistently reported solid bugs get a direct link to the bug report. But truth is, if your bug reports are good and you file with the bug report forum, we’ll find them. The easiest way to get your bugs heard is to file better reports.

2. The most important bugs we get are regression bugs from third party authors – and unfortunately authors tend to think that other authors will file for them – everyone has incentive to let someone else file the bug. If I had an nickel for every time an author reports a bug that’s been in the sim for a YEAR and (when I say “You are the first to report this”) says “oh, we’ve been discussing this on xyz forums since 1979” I’d be able to buy an island.

– I consider forums to be a PITA…I don’t have time to go reading forums to search out information, and they tend to be badly curated – they display information chronologically, and (this is just me being grumpy) it’s a lot of signatures and avatars relative to information content. So when I get a bug report that links to a forum, that’s (to me) a total fail, because the forum post is pretty much never a clean, well written bug report.

With that in mind, if you write up your bug report cleanly somewhere, I’m happy to click the link, if the info is all there on the other side, and it’s correct and has the info I need without stuff I don’t need.

– We don’t take public polls re features too seriously because of selection bias: we hear directly from categories of users who buy X-Plane whose needs are very different than the sub-section of the community that is _most_ active on the forums. (You only have to look at the size of VATSIM’s population that flies on a regular basis with XSquawkBox vs. the number of X-Plane units sold to understand that small groups of users can be vocal.) It is interesting to see what people want, but polls tend to go toward the “neat toys” category of things (e.g. just about any special FX could get some poll votes) while totally ignoring things that actually keep the lights on.

(For example: installation really, really matters — if getting the demo works badly, ours odds of selling you the sim are slim. If you buy the sim and your installation process sucks, you’re in a bad mood about x-plane from day 1. The installer is not why I got into writing flight simulator code, but it is the “first date” of X-Plane. And yet…you’re not going to find any poll that puts installation in the top todo items. And if I post about improvements in the installer to this blog, the comments will be totally off-topic – even more so than normally.)

– There’s mismatch between what users are interested in telling us and what we have time to investigate deeply. The sim is heavily road-mapped and a lot of the next year of development is already planned. We may change the plan (a lot) but in the end if you come to me and say “I really want to talk to you about snow shaders” – well, this is hard. We do have snow shaders on our road map, but we’re not there yet. I sometimes ask users to write up a ‘1 page’ – that is, a short but detailed summary of their point that I can then file in my notes by topic, so that when I do come back to the subject, I have the info archived.

You can see this mismatch in this blog when the topic post is completely unrelated to the comments, which go off in another direction.

Finally, I think that any user serious enough about X-Plane to be reading, well, down here, can help disseminate information. All the way back in X-Plane 6, Andy Goldstein had the “Unofficial X-Plane FAQ”. Andy’s a smart guy who has been using X-Plane since 1637, and he put down answers to the most common questions in a clean, well-curated format. I think this did contribute positively to the amount of info about X-Plane that was out there.

I think Ben and company have a pretty good idea of where they what to take X-Plane, and I think they’ll get there alot faster without “we the community” bugging them with what we think is reality….kinda like all the first graders picking what the teacher,, teaches….cheers

Sounds fantastic.
In something like the Carenado A36, I’m looking forward (once they update to the new GPS) to popping out the Aspen PFD and the G430/530 right next to it and then just flying with the forward view and no 3d Cockpit.

Max performance and hugely readable gauges that are interactive and all you need to fly around and do approaches. 🙂

Sounds like a dream come true!

I think you mean suggestion by the “Laminar” team, Tom.

A key difference to remember is that LM has the manpower resources to interact with a community of suggestions. Laminar is orders of magnitude smaller, and we already bug Ben too much. 🙂

What we really need to do is to start a coffee fund for the guy so that he can work 24×7 on X-Plane.

I support the idea!
I suspect that you guys at LR are tired of answering the same questions/complains/feature request even though you are trying your best to answer them and keep us updated. I think it could be worth to establish more structured/centralized way of communication. Maybe forums, each one per feature request/issue, where X-Plane users could follow the current status of development and exchange the information between themselves and LR? As of today the information IS there but it is scattered around many places (this blog, x-plane.org forums and so on). E.g. questions & replies regarding visibility range have been posted numerous times on this blog but only fraction of X-Plane users follows it thoroughly and reads all entries/comments.
Also how about setting up some kind of voting system where X-Plane users could cast votes for their favorite new feature? Just to let you guys know what is in demand and what features are not so important to us.
just my 2 cents..

Here’s the short of it:
– The existing 10.25 old GPS was very small – 62 pixels tall. Therefore it tends to look blurry in a 3-d pit, because there just isn’t that much detail in the base instrument. Due to weird code, the base instrument cannot be up-sized and retextured – a known limitation of 10.25.

– In 10.30 there is the option of the new GPS – it really wants 240 pixels tall – 4x the res. So here’s what the NEW instrument does, more or less, last I checked, Philipp may have to set me straight here:

1. If the new instrument is given a REALLY SMALL spot (e.g. 62 pixels tall) it draws a compact display with just frequencies – not realistic, but at least readable.

2. If the new instrument is given a BIGGER spot (I think the cutover is around 100 pixels, but authors SHOULD give it the full 240) you get the full instrument layout, and how sharp it is will be a function of the spot size – at 240 pixels tall you get the ideal look.

3. At all times, at any size, you can click on the NEW instrument’s screen in 3-d or 2-d and get a POPUP that runs at full size and full sharpness.

So…until people remap their panel texture UV maps to give the instrument more size, it will look blurry or even reduce complexity. But the popup will always be available.

We can’t really do better than this – we (X-PLane) can’t change the amount of UV space for just one instrument on the panel.

But instead of community hacking the art controls every time in order to create fantastisc looking enhancements of this great platform, why not follow Lockhead Martin community engagement with Prepar3D. Create a dedicated forum and invite the community to give feedbacks, suggestions, creative tips and solutions Laminar can implement if so decided?

I would be happy to accomodate such a collobration and re-build the forum to fit any suggestion by LM dev team.