Hi All,
First off, about the simulator. It's very high tech, it pushes high auto-gen levels and beautiful scenery at even higher frame-rates. We already have decent auto-gen, a nice flight model, and this weekend at FlightSimCon we ran the TFDi 717 at a consistent 90 frames-per-second. We're loading FSX aircraft so that you can keep your existing add-ons, but run them in a super-charged environment. And of course, we'll be including all of our VR innovations. This simulator offers something truly unique, and you'd be crazy to write off a potential platform because you're already happy with one simulator. Everyone who tried it at FSC this weekend was excited and impressed, including plenty of experienced FSX, Prepar3D, and X-Plane users. If you think our add-ons have been impressive (black screen aside), ths sim will blow your mind. We'll be publishing videos and info over coming months, if you're interested you can follow via our mailing list here:
http://www.flyinside-flightsim.comAs for FlyInside XP, we haven't ceased development on it. We've had a developer on it full-time (plus some efforts from myself and others). Windows like ATC will be working soon (late June target), as will external views. We 're continuing to attack the black screen issue, but it's been super elusive and difficult to replicate repeatedly. I've set aside this Friday with Stevil (a big thank you to him), to analyze the issue on his computer, and I'll post back what I learn. With any luck we'll be able to figure out the root cause, and finally solve our most nagging issue.
I know some of you are upset that we're splitting our efforts between multiple projects. Truth is, we always have, and always will. Back during my Kickstarter, we only had FlyInside FSX. When I announced FlyInside P3D, I got an angry message from a backer, stating that he paid for FlyInside FSX and I should purely focus on that. First off, if we only ever did FlyInside FSX, I doubt we'd still be in business, I definitely would never have gone full-time with the company. Even better, several companies took notice of FlyInside P3D. Thanks to their interest in FlyInside P3D we received multiple contracts, which helped grow the company, and helped us develop more features. We were actually paid to develop some additional features, which were then incorporated back into FlyInside FSX, benefiting all customers. When I was publishing a lot of XP specific updates to the betas group, I received complaints that we were doing so much on X-Plane and some users didn't care about it. Once again though, we've had numerous improvements bubbling back and forth from XP to our other products. We're an innovative team trying new things, attempting to push the bounds of both flight simulation and virtual reality. On the other hand, we will make a good-faith effort to continue supporting said product, improving it, and fixing bugs.
I would like to apologize for the slow progress on FlyInside XP. I've been trying to split my time as effectively as possible, but over the past few weeks I've been more and more consumed preparing our simulator for a FlightSimCon demo (and dealing with P3Dv4). It's not easy to balance different projects as a small business owner, and I'm always trying to improve at it. Thanks to another project wrapping up a couple weeks ago, we will have one software developer on FlyInside XP full-time, plus myself and others part-time. First we want to wrap up the major nagging issues (views, windows, black screen), and then we're going to start porting some advances from our new simulator to all three of our add-on products. Today that's mainly Leap Motion/Touch/Vive controller improvements, but we expect many more in the future.
I also hope that you'll all give the new sim a chance. We're doing some new things (Vulkan-based engine, proper multi-core support, new scenery system), and also have some very cool add-on developer tools unlike anything on the market today. If you have no interest in a new sim, know that our add-ons will continue being developed from now into the future, and even benefit from the tech we develop for the sim.
Thanks,
Dan