“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

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

Cheers

I think that I may owe explanation on a few new features. The brake status indicator lights just below the landing lamp housings are functional. Green means that the brakes are off. Red indicates that the brakes are active above 1300 or so psi. Yellow indicates that the parking brake is set. All of the lights are functional as you’d expect them to be. The complete P40 panel is also something new. I’ll be working with Sven later to hopefully achieve some functionality through the panel including the annunciators, the ability to set off the APU extinguisher in case of APU fire, and if we’re lucky, an audible APU fire horn. Obviously, APU fire doesn’t exist as a failure yet in the sim so there will be some work to do first.

As for the rest, I’ll let the screenshots do the talking. Next up on the external agenda is the RAT, but first, I’ve got an overhead to start work on.

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…)

i think it’s time to give you an update. Not too much to tell. Most work is “behind” the visuals. However, i thought that it would be a good idea to show you a new video. Youtube videos only can give you a hint of how these displays are looking. Vector graphics, as good as they are, have their limits, but we are working around most of the issues. Most of the displays will also be “undockable” so that you can view them at larger sizes. The size of them will be configureable (up to 512x512 px). Also it might be possible that the panel layout will change, you know we’re at e really early state with the project

So what’s next? The basics on the code are almost done (except of fixing bugs or something to improve). We use a lot of threads now and we’ll add some more (you have a multicore CPU, right?). This will help to keep X-Plane’s performance as high as possible. The displays don’t affect fps at all (on my machine). But there are much complex things to come. One of these things is the fly-by-wire system. Work on that starts tomorrow. Expect at least 3 months until it’s usable. Why 3 months? Remember, we’re on X-Plane . A lot of control surfaces to steer. But i’m really sure it will be fun to fly that bird.

Ok, here’s the video. Please don’t comment my approach, it was a “quick & dirty” run to bring her down. And you might notice: no AFDS And if you can, go to the youtube website and watch in HD!

Admittedly, we’ve not kept up on the blog near as often as we’ve liked as other commitments have taken precedence for the time being. Having said that, we’re still plugging away. Sven is hard at work on the systems end of the equation and is just about to dive into the 777 FBW system. Dhruv and I have been working with some of the texturing but primarily our focus has been the flight model. We’ve been working on airfoils, engine numbers, fuel consumption, weight and balance (the lot really) to make sure that we’re really flying by the numbers throughout the entire flight envelope and communicating through Austin to try to make sure that we can get the most out of the sim as accurately as we can. Most recently, I’ve been slaving over a wacom tablet working on Pratt textures. I think that you’d all much rather appreciate something to look at than listen to me droll on. With that, I bring you the Pratt 4077. Here’s a startup sequence and a reverser test to whet your appetite.

We might be coerced into putting together a small promo video before too long if anyone is interested. Until then, enjoy these PW previews!

PW4077 Spoolup

PW4077 Thrust Reverser Test

It’s been a while since I wrote an email to Dhruv related to the 777 project asking for possible interests in a working partnership. I was really happy about the fact I got a positive answer, so here I am!

Oh, you don’t know who I am? I’m sorry. My name is Sven Goericke, and I’m from Leipzig, Germany. What am I doing on the XP Jets team? In short, I’m hard at work on a plugin for the XP Jets 777. That’s it. Expanding on that, in 2007 I started with a 777 for MSFS (FS X). But I was dissatisfied with some its limitations. Maybe you know some successful aircraft addons for FS X and might ask: which limitations? I’ve only one answer: Fly-By-Wire. Hah, FSX has an A321 with FBW by default. There are some very interesting Airbus-Simulations for MSFS 9/X in progress so why is FBW a limitation in MSFS? Well, we’re interested in the 777, not Airbuses. The FBW of the 777 is completely different than the Airbus logic. Also, what about the Aerodynamics? Just Google for differences in the flight model used by X-Plane and MSFS and you’ll know what I mean…

So, what’s the status of the plugin now? Over the last few weeks I have worked on the “basics”. The plugin is written in C++ so i had to setup some nice classes to use. As the 777 has a modern glass cockpit I decided to use a vector-graphics library called “cairo”. The reasoning behind using cairo is that it works on Linux, MacOS and Windows. You can see an early (and incomplete) preview of the PFD here:

Currently I am working on the electrical system. Yes, the 777 will have almost exclusively custom systems. I have also a “minimum required equipment list” (systems that will be done) for a first release which are almost the major-systems:

• Electrical System
• Hydraulic System
• Fuel and Air Systems
• Fly-by-wire System
• Air Data/Inertial Reference System (ADIRU)
• AFDS (Automatic Flight Director System) and Autopilot(s)
• Flight Management System
• Electronic Checklists

It’s still a long way so I don’t want to give any timeline for the development (of course I have a personal one). But from time to time I’ll post some news about the progress here so it’s a good idea to come back here frequently.

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.