“So Why A 757, Anyway?”

We’ve had a lot of people ask us that question over the last few weeks, ever since we posted our last round of renders. It seems that the general sentiment among most X-Planers is that X-Plane Freeware’s 757 is satisfactory and that they’d rather we build something else. We do try and listen to what people are saying, because we feel it goes a long way towards helping us build what people want to see. That being said, we’d like to discuss some of our motives for building what in some people’s eyes is “just another” 757.

To Alex and I, the 757′s always been one of the most graceful and sleek looking airliners in the world, and we’ve been quite fond of its appearance for several months now (more specifically, basically since we both first laid eyes on the thing). While we were both part of XPFW, we never really found ourselves to be very happy with the state of their (at the time) .acf format 757. When we first branched off to form XPJ, a “new” 757 wasn’t remotely on XPFW’s current radar. So we decided that if we were really going to get the kind of quality out of a 757 that we personally wanted, we were going to have to build it ourselves. We weren’t really trying to step on any toes when we started the project, and by the time XPFW announced theirs, it was really too late to quit on ours. We did come to the decision of payware rather early on, and I think that’s probably sparked some ire among the masses. Obviously, I can sympathize; many of you are probably thinking, “Why pay for one when there’s a freeware model out there?”. Well, whether or not it’s a widely accepted release by our users is going to be their prerogative, and we understand that already. So we’re obviously not expecting to make a fortune off our 757. We do, however, know that XPFW has no plans, for example, to model neither the 757-300 variant nor a 757-200F, both being derivatives that we plan to model.

Basically, the basic attitude at “Camp XPJ” is that there’s enough room in the X-Plane-o-sphere for two high-quality 757 projects, and we feel that our model will offer some things that will (hopefully!) make it worth the price tag.


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