Thank you very much Tyler!

I commented on the discussion of this in the other post, but wanted to let readers know here as well: this is fixed now!

http://gateway.x-plane.com/utility/release/diff/from/10.40/to/10.45

We can’t enforce pricing for sale of aircraft for any third party vendor, or enforce price uniformity. Stores are free to sell their aircraft at whatever price they want, in agreement with the aircraft’s authors I suppose.

if your going to let steam sell aircraft they need to work with ALL versions of Xplane

or you need to enforce pricing across all versions

ie if the steam aircraft are one sale then the non-steam one must be as well

Angelo

I don’t disagree, but X-Plane from the beginning has been about instrument training, so while landmarks are mostly used for navigation in a VFR environment, the focus was on IFR. The main, points that X-Plane was designed around in the beginning were accuracy in instrumentation and flight physics. It grew from there, but most of the conversations that I had with Austin in years past always left me with the impression that looking out the window other than to see the runway was not what X-Plane was designed for, thus making the fact that other flight simulators had more major landmarks (not to mention accurate taxiway layouts, airport buildings, etc…) 20+ years ago unfortunately irrelevant .

Now, I think that Ben and company have done a remarkable job in bringing X-Plane out of the 1980’s Level-D simulator style graphics, but they are a small team, and probably too small to effectively develop all that we want in the same time frame as anything that Microsoft or Lockheed Martin are able to do. Thus, one has to rely on third party developers. However, with X-Plane, there just isn’t the user base buying enough of these third party add-ons to justify most people trying to make a living out of it, which is really what needs to happen to get the amount of 3rd party support equal to that of MS/LM. The amount of money that a third party developer for MS/LM makes compared to what an X-Plane developer makes is not even comparable, and the amount of time it takes to develop high end packages is considerable. My hat is off to anybody who can find the time to dedicate to making this hobby more enjoyable for the rest of us, freeware and payware.

I would love to see more VFR checkpoints in the simulator (including golf courses). I started to look at developing a World Landmarks package because like you, I totally agree that not only does it give a pilot the ability to practice VFR/Dead reckoning navigation, but I think it also gives cities and parts of the world character. But the list was fairly extensive, and in order for me to dedicate the time to such a task would not only require a small team to shorten the development span, but also for me to quit my real job so that I could dedicate the time needed to effectively develop a quality package without spending 3 years on it. Porting (at least from the sources that I looked into, like TurboSquid, SketchUp, TF3DM, GrabCAD, etc…) is not an option as there are ownership and legal issues, and most of the models are not optimized at all, so it would be lethal for people with older computers from a frame rate perspective. Thus, all new scenery would need to be built from scratch and optimized with both creative poly counts and LOD’s. None of that penciled out for me personally, so my attempt at such a project was scrapped.

The real question that should be asked is; What are people willing to pay for [insert scenery/aircraft/functionality request here]? That is what will ultimately determine what, if anything, gets done outside of what Laminar provides.

No, we do not use these extensions.

http://www.nvidia.com/download/driverResults.aspx/96883/en-us

https://developer.nvidia.com/opengl-driver

“These new OpenGL 2015 ARB extensions require NVIDIA GeForce 900 series or newer GPUs:

ARB_post_depth_coverage
ARB_fragment_shader_interlock
ARB_texture_filter_minmax
ARB_sample_locations
ARB_shader_viewport_layer_array
ARB_sparse_texture2
ARB_sparse_texture_clamp”

Does X-Plane use these OGL extensions on GeForce 900 series Maxwell2 cards?

I don’t think I understand the issue here.

hmm then sales 3rd party devs needs to have there stuff on sale on there own sites too or the aircraft should work with any copy of xplane