DEVELOPER UPDATE 3 : Textures!

If you looked at the title, you would be forgiven in thinking that we couldn’t count to a certain number ;)

We hope you have all enjoyed the past two quarters. As Christmas is around the corner, we are keeping our heads down and continuing to develop our products for X-Plane.

Q4XP

Q4 for Q4XP update? Many of you have kept up to date with news on the visual modelling side of things. A quick thank you to our partners at FSElite and Threshold for their enthusiasm and support in sharing those images. We are pleased to show-off the final in-sim textures for the cockpit.

As you can see, we’ve been very busy on this aircraft. The use of new techniques for texturing not only speeds up our workflow, but allows for a level of dynamic and procedural texturing that was previously inaccessible for us. Some great examples of this include glareshield padding, the correct texture and bump mapping for cockpit seats, scratches on fire extinguishers and checklist clipboards. The aircraft just simply looks gorgeous.

We are on the final phase of modelling, with just the cabin and cargo compartment areas remaining. We’ll keep you all informed in the upcoming months.

People have asked us about the state of systems in the aircraft. Every topic of the Q4XP has its time and place, but we think you’ll be excited by what we have in store. Some of you on our discord did have a few glimpses of some spoilers. Remember, “Mum is the word.”

Shared Flight

People have been eager for a status update for Shared Flight, and we don’t blame you. So why the long period of silence? We’re extremely happy with our development of the current Shared Flight application, however based on user feedback and some of our own discussions, we knew that there was much more we could do to make the experience as enjoyable as possible for both our customers and aircraft developer partners. So we’ve been working towards expanding on the developer backend and pilot portal for Shared Flight.

This new portal brings a curated and easy-author system for third-party aircraft developers, whilst also bringing a much simpler process to account and flight management for our pilot users. By having an intuitive interface, we will make multi-crew flying a much more accessible experience to everyone.

As an example, we have a “fingerprint” system within Shared Flight. This allows us to detect aircraft and their respective versions in sim and make sure that on the backend they are properly mapped to the correct aircraft, product, and Shared Flight configuration. Further we have the ability to create configs that are in development or released, and to make development configs available only to developers or testers on an aircraft specific basis. The end user will experience only well tested and well matched configs that reliably work.

Users will enjoy the ability to view flights on a moving map, and see their flight histories, including participants in the flights and their hours logged as pilot flying, pilot monitoring, and passenger.

There is more functionality to the portal that we have not shown today. But hopefully this will answer a few burning questions. We want to communicate across the idea that Shared Flight will not just be a standard client for multi-crew operations, but also in part as a continual and responsive service to our users.

We will have more news for you in the first quarter of 2020. With our decision to withhold beta-testing ultimately means our registered participants will get a far more complete and enjoyable experience. We want to ensure we get this right, as flight-simulation is long overdue towards the transition of multi-crew operations.

X-Plane 11.50

As many of you know, 11.50 will be the Vulkan update. It is expected that the OpenGL version of our products should continue to run. However, there will be a mandatory update in the upcoming months that will be published (which we hope will ensure compatibility of our products for the foreseeable future.) We will have more news on this hopefully soon.

That is all from us, what a way to end the decade! Merry Christmas folks!