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Behind the Screen : February 2016


Stephen

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Behind the Screen : February 2016

 

For being the shortest month of the year. Then February feels the most longest in terms of being the busiest, packed, squeezed, no time, full on month of the X-Plane calendar. As January 2016 was almost an empty oasis of nothing, then the short February calendar certainly made up for it all.

 

The Rotate MD-88 dominated almost the whole month as I wanted to dig down into this aircraft to find the truth in why it made 10% of users to throw tantums. Not just flying the aircraft to almost destruction in (and I counted) 43 takeoffs and landings, there was a lot of discussion and feedback through the beta channels with constant updates to the aircraft and working through the bugs. Most of the major bugs had however already been addressed so it was down in the fine tuning you found with the devil in the detail. Never be a beta tester, it is a long hard slog of repeatable fights to get down to the problems, and the aircraft are undoubtably...  well buggy.

 

But it is your job to weed out the real from the false. Going up blind alleys is a constant source of pain. But you have to give major awards to the developers behind the scenes. You know them by name, but not personally. They are shadows really moving around the background, but their skills and pure professionalism is what delivers those amazing experiences on your desktop. It is an horrific job of complexity to get everything right and working as it should, as they disappear for years to cover all the hundreds and thousands items of code and modeling to produce the best machine they can. Changes are usually swift, but developers are not perfect, but we expect them to be.

 

Complexity means spending hours with your head in manuals, real and produced by the developer. Hours of watching real cockpit video's and making notes on every task, action or changes the pilots do in flying the real aircraft. Then it all has to be translated to the virtual version and getting your flying profiles honed down to almost perfection (which in the MD-88 case meant it was in getting absolutely no alarms). 

 

The thing that made really hot under the collar with the MD-88 was that as I have repeated ad nauseam through out these reviews is that these complex aircraft cannot be judged on just a few hours or even a few days of flying. But to squeal that it is a hopelessly bad design and not well put together is going to hurt developers in thinking "what have I got myself into" and the sales to go south just as quick. In this MD-88's case a very loud minority (10%) did a lot of damage, but when they scream and squeal like this when their own incompetence is mostly the base problem is to show their own ignorance of their own skills and the professionals they are not. Myself I did not judge too early to make a clear statement on the aircraft, yes it had issues, but 90% of users were certainly more professional in their evaluation towards the aircraft and the released v1.1 update shows they were correct in that evaluation.

 

You would think I wouldn't even want in any form position myself again in front of the MD-88 yoke for awhile. But nothing can be further from the truth as this complex and demanding aircraft is always a challenge, but so rewarding to fly, and is still easily the top of my list every time when I want to hit on X-Plane again. No doubt Rotate's MD-88 is addictive, complex and I love it.

 

On developers, one is again creating a masterpiece. Ddenn created the sublime Challenger 300 Personal jet of which is certainly the best personal jet in X-Plane and has been for years. There was a feeling that Ddenn's Challenger 300 would become his only masterpiece as his output dried up except for the odd yearly Challenger update. But last year Ddenn announced his next project in another personal or really large executive jet in the Bombardier Global 6000 (earlier called Global Express). Your dream was for the aircraft to match the quality of the Challenger 300, but again the grand master is producing...  well a masterpiece.

Go checkout this internal cabin video and be ready to be totally amazed in the quality of this work. I hate the expression "Awesome" but it fits here as the interior work is above anything I have yet seen in X-Plane. Who says that X-Plane does not deliver in quality aircraft. Noted is the Global 6000 will also have a fully functional FMC as well and no doubt this will be an amazing machine once it is released, I was simply astounded.

 

There is speculation that JARDesign's next project is the Airbus A340 to match up with his excellent A332. Some images on facebook and a few rumors abound, so watch this space. However I feel the A320neo needs a bit more loving care before a new release, it feels old now compared to the higher quality A332, but I have had notes the update is coming later in the year.

 

The lovely Victory VLJ (Very Light Jet) by Aerobask was a shock on how good it was. Aerobask turns out very complete aircraft these days and the Victory was very complete. To note some developers tend to hold their releases until they are very polished and Aerobask is one of them. Aerobask was very proud of their work on the Dynon Avionics Skyview feature, and I was impressed on the way it was so functional. I'm not a big fan of menu driven panels, and I am still not converted to the cause, but it was very well done.

 

Another developer that impressed me was also new to X-Plane. Under the Aerosoft banner was Omar Masroor that created the excellent KRSW - Florida Southwest. The release version had a few areas that needed attention, but some points were my own fault in not setting up X-Plane to cover for them in the "Anisotropic Filtering" setting. I don't use the setting high as it is really heavy framerate filter killer, and I just don't have the headroom for that much of a loss. But clever ideas to adjust the amount of objects (using WED) is thinking out of the box and allows for scenery to be tailored for your capacity of use. I was very impressed on Omar's professional dialog and the way they responded to the issues, I had to amend the review three times to cover the changes, and it is now a high quality scenery that you should have in your custom scenery folder.

 

A lot of noise was around releases that were announced as coming "Very soon" and failed to appear. IXEG B737 Classic is still very non-existent, and I was disappointed on how many features on that extensive published list were missing after the aircraft has been in development for almost over half a decade...  could that be a reason for the continuing delay? The EADT x737 v5 (Virtual Cockpit) is still also a missing fixture, but I have a very good source the aircraft now well down the road in completion and it was real world distractions that have been the cause of the delay, certainly a release will be in the next yearly quarter Q2. PMDG, for X-Plane...  god knows?

 

The upgrade to JARDesign's excellent "Ground Handling Deluxe" plugin gave me lots of pleasure and spurred me into action to create some liveries for my own use. You can download my handywork for Qantas, British Airways, Emirates, Delta, Alitalia and United, and thank you for your kind comments.  The van is almost impossible to recolour as the images are taken from a real vehicle, white is a "just get away with that" but I spent hours trying to recolour the thing, I doubt I could get say a yellow or harder colour. There is a paintkit (no van in there) and it is a big help, but you really do bring your ramp activity alive with this extraordinary plugin, great price and certainly a must have if you do spend a lot of time around the ramps and gates of X-Plane. I will try to do some airport sets, but time is time and finishing repeatably late at 2am in the morning is reflected on the bad flying skills the next day.

 

I flew FlightFactor's Boeing 777 Worldliner from Dubai to London in a fit of finally having a few hours to fly long-haul. It was nice to spend time with the big twin Boeing and to cover some serious distance that is becoming harder to do with all the time constraints. Overall the experience was overwhelmingly great, but the extended X-Plane scenery seeded to heavily see-saw between brilliant 50fr-60fr to marginal 20fr-19fr depending on the amount of visual terrain on the ground. I never had this before as once to cleared 30,000ft as I usually sat in the 50fr to 60fr range until descending into using a heavy airport scenery and a lot of autogen on landing. Worrying is that the FlightFactor B777W is very efficient on framerate, so I need to redo another long-haul to see if that is common now. The Boeing felt a little tired as well and in need of an update, but usually FF are very good in keeping their aircraft up to date, and it notes how very quickly something in X-Plane can now feel a little dated, I hope an update is due for 2016.

 

Another note is when I updated to the latest X-Plane v10.45 the simulator started to throw out errors of custom scenery at an alarming rate. Scenery that has been part and parcel of my X-Plane world don't work anymore (KFMY - Page Field is one) and open them up in WED and they look a mess of faults, worse in KFMY's case the developer has long gone. I am hoping this is a bad X-Plane version glitch because if it is not you could have a serious loss of great scenery that is instantly thrown out as the simulator just crashes to the desktop.

 

X-PlaneReviews are always looking for new reviewers to give their views and points on X-Plane. We have not issued any invitations before now as the changes in versions to the newer IP.Board v4 was complete. It has a vastly improved editor which vastly helps in the time required to create your reviews or comments, if you are interested then send me a message by the messages (envelope icon at top of the page) and leave your email address.

 

High Flying

Stephen Dutton

 

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