“I love my mac, hasn’t given me an ounce of trouble since I’ve had it.”

Because invariably, as soon as you’ve said it, something catastrophic will happen and well, let me just say that I’m eating my words. iMac blew its video card over the weekend, quite literally not one day after I had said conversation with a couple of my friends at our local coffee shop. Needless to say, I’ve taken the iMac in, factor a day or so to look at it and order the parts, a day or two to get the parts, and say a day to install. If I’m lucky, I should have my machine back by weeks end…if not, early next week. Must say that I’m relieved that I’ve still got Apple Care on my machine for another year.

Long story short, consider Alex on vacation until further notice. Note that Sven is still hard at work…Dhruv is still hard at work, so we’re probably more or less okay.

Also keep your eyes open here in about two weeks

Cheers

Alex

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z98qptrnLME

We hope that you enjoy the film and a happy 2010 from XP Jets!

Cheers

Yeah, we miss us too. We know thats its been quiet around here. A little development from Sven, and my announcement of the Pratts several months ago is about all that any of you have to go on. Needless to say, its too quiet for us as well. Back in May, Dhruv and I entered into a preliminary agreement with an organization for some high end X-Plane 3rd party development work. The project has been hush hush which is why we haven’t been able to post any messages regarding it. A long story short, business relations wore down to the point of making progress impossible. At the moment, the project has a solid 4 month period of time buried in it. It remains largely unfinished on our hard drives. After much careful consideration over many circumstances, we’ve decided to end the relationship and are back in full force (good news for you). To maintain privacy of the organization’s identity, we’ll be keeping any information regarding the unfinished project under wraps until such a time when its kosher to do so, so please don’t ask

We know that we’ve been out of touch for a while. One thing that we’re going to try to do is to reconnect positively to the X-Plane user base. There is a lonely forum with our name on it at x-pilot.com that we’ll be using extensively. We’ll also try to be posting weekly in our blog. If there is one thing that we’ve learned during our business experience is that communication is crucial to success. Lets face it, because of our absence, many of you are thinking that XP Jets is incapable of finishing anything. We’re the vaporware experts (and we have a track record to prove it….) Believe us, we’re not trying to be. The introduction of Sven, our resident programmer, to the team many months ago is adding a whole new dimension of possibility to the 777 and is going to open exciting avenues for the future. He’s told me that after the 777 is finished, he would love to get in and start coding systems for the 757. This should be exciting news for everyone. We will be extensively revisiting the old bird when the 777 is finished. We’re also interested in adding some older metal to our inventory later on. Possibilities discussed include the DC-9 series among others. No official word on where we’re going to be after the 757, but you’ll know shortly after we do.

I think that this should suffice for now. We’ve got some goodies waiting in the wings. Some of you may have noticed shots of freshly textured nose gear on x-plane.org. I’ll be putting up a post about the new 777 nose gear here later today. There are some pretty fun features and toys that we’ve been messing with. Sven is making steady progress with the plugin work and he might say a few words later this week. I’m not putting words in Dhruv’s mouth here, but watch out for fuselage texture news before too long. Keep your eyes and ears open and those RSS feeds current. We do feel that we owe it to the community to stick around…believe me when we say that we’re not going to abandon you again. We’ve had our visions of grandeur and have had our fun. Its time to get back to what matters.

Without further ado, it brings me the greatest pleasure to say, “There’s no place like home!”

We’re back! (and we’re never running away again…)

Thus, without further ado, we’d like to announce our latest project:

…XP Jets: The Toaster.

Featuring true-to-life flight dynamics based on numerous highly sophisticated flight tests of several real toasters (including, naturally, the industry-standard 3rd floor apartment window power-off glide), The Toaster has been carefully tuned to provide unparalleled flight characteristics at altitudes up to FL280, while still perfectly browning not one, but two delicious pieces of thick, hearty bread. Never before have elements of a healthy breakfast and flight simulation enjoyed this level of synergy. Of course, we here at XPJ are extremely environment-conscious, and as such would also like to stress that this is the most carbon footprint-friendly flying toaster you will find anywhere, bar none. Revolutionary breakthroughs in Cold Fusion allow The Toaster to generate previously unheard of levels of power, allowing it to reach a comfortable cruise speed of 320 kts at altitude. Furthermore, the power output guarantees that all toasting functions, including the special “Charred Bagel” function, work perfectly, even at The Toaster’s published service ceiling.

While we had hoped to have a downloadable beta of The Toaster ready for release by today, we regret to inform you that component delivery delays have prevented us from reaching our goal (Seriously, how hard can it be to get foodservice-grade stainless steel on 8 hours notice?). Stay tuned, however, for a release in the not-too-distant future!

We here at XP Jets, along with a select group of accomplished x-plane developers, are proud to announce a new partnership with www.x-pilot.com, a new X-Plane community site. Through our dedicated forum at the site, we plan to preview and showcase our projects, provide technical support for our planes, and assist in answering any technical questions new developers may have regarding aircraft and/or scenery development. We are committed to growing x-plane add-ons and believe this forum venue will be a good place to do that.

We consider it a privilege to be included amongst x-pilot.com’s featured developer partners, and believe that it is an incredible gathering of some of the most accomplished minds in the X-Plane atmosphere. As such, we hope that you, our readership, will join us in embracing this new community and look forward to seeing some of our “regulars” there!

For those of our readers who prefer our in-house presence, rest assured that we will continue to concurrently post project news and development updates on this blog. We do hope, however, that in the interest of first-rate customer service, you choose to join us at x-pilot, as it stands to become our primary channel of providing support for our products.

In a few words, this is by far one of the most satisfying fixed wing aircraft to fly that I have encountered, a joy that shouldn’t be lacking from anyone’s hangar.

A big thanks goes out to Nils for an astounding piece of work. Way to raise the bar and make me work harder!

Now this posting may feel out of place for some of our regulars, but one of the original intentions with the XP Jets blog was to do just that, blog.  We don’t have to talk shop all of the time and for a nice change, lets move the conversation over to what we like to do in the sim.  Expect us to do this more often!

Click images for larger view:

For the last 2 years I’ve been either working full time or flying/studying full time, and unfortunately had more or less abandoned X-Plane. I attained my CPL in May, and on the 1st of September, I completed my “study” when I passed my IFR flight test. The schedule has been very free these past couple of months which has allowed me to finally get back to work on the Cessna. It’s been a mission re-learning everything again along with learning all the new stuff X-Plane 9 has to offer…and boy does it have a lot to offer! I’ve taken to generic instruments like a duck to water, they have proven extremely useful, as have key frame animations, and manipulators!

As mentioned above, manipulators! I’ve managed to find a few uses for this wonderful new feature. My favorite is the sun visor, which I’ve managed to work a two axis manipulation into, up and down like you’d expect, and left to right to adjust it like the real thing! There’s also manipulations on handles in the cockpit such as the throttle, flaps, and trim. We also have key frame animations appearing here and there for various knobs in the cockpit, that just make the animations that much more perfect. And of course, generic instruments. Generics have made it possible for me to do some very high res, and extremely accurate instrument faces. Take for instance the Air Speed Indicator, the real one uses different scaling to X-Planes. This means if you were to lay the artwork from the real thing onto an X-Plane ASI, it may read correctly at 0 and 163 kts, but at 100 kts, it would be totally out of sync. Not so with generics thanks to the key framing, and as a result, all the instruments are incredibly accurate and totally faithful to their real life counterparts! Every dial has been made from scratch, using high res photo’s from the real 172, using generics, and I must say the results are startling! There’s a whole host of other little innovations going on behind the scenes, such as a magic yoke that makes living with a full time 3D pit a breeze. Here’s a picture of the Cessna cockpit in default view:

Now, the big question… When can you expect to get your hands on this? Well, soon! It’s so close to release, it makes me all giddy just thinking about it. There is of course a few more instruments left to do. Some polish here and there, then a flight model “re-calibration” and bug testing week since a few things got broke when importing to V9… and well, that’s it! Not a whole lot at all. If anything is holding it’s release date back, It’s getting the means of delivery set up! We have some legal jibberish to sift through, as well as the technical stuff to make sure you get the plane when you want without delay! The silver lining to this, as originally planned when we started the project, is that the little Cessna is literally paving the way for the heavies, so that they may have a smooth release with as few “technical difficulties” possible!

Lets face it, you don’t want to read 1000 words for a picture and nor do I want to write them.  Enjoy!

The bottom line is, we all feel that the scope of the work has eclipsed what we would consider a freeware release and we are going to have to go against our own word and change for it on release. We haven’t set a price, but we mean to make it very affordable and will include all future variants of the bird in with the 200ER package (300, 300ER, 200LR and 200F).

Now before everyone decides to tar and feather us, we do realize that we did promise a freeware 777 solution to our users. That being said, we will retroactively update our current 777 offering with the new panel from the forthcoming for-pay release and perform a maintenance update to the flight model at the same time. Hopefully, this alleviates some of the disappointment of not getting the upgraded exterior model as a freeware release.

We would like to take the time to mention that the A320 is still in cooperation with XPFW and that we are absolutely sticking to the freeware philosophy on that project.

We all appreciate everyone’s understanding and continued support.  Without loyal users such as yourselves out there, XPJ wouldn’t have ever gotten off of the ground.

Thank you all

The XP Jets team