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In October this year, the Flight Sim show returned to the UK, and was bigger and better than ever before. With over 1,800 attendees and nearly 40 exhibitors attending, it was the largest UK show of flight simulation ever, with Just Flight really breaking the scales of European shows.

In much the same way as last year's show, I was luckily enough to be able to interview some of the largest developers on the simulator scene, and so poised with the questions YOU in the community kindly contributed, I set about my task...

Without further adieu, let's get right into some of those!

Laminar Research

Laminar Research first, today we take a look at their in-Beta 11.30 update which aims to break the boundaries of their simulator through the use of a new particle effect system being implemented, as well as the backend for Vulkan to be added in the near future. This will give us a new scale of realism that we've never seen before. Over to Philipp for the interview.

Thank you very much for doing this with us Philipp from Laminar Research. So, last year you talked a lot about VR and your 11.20 update and what it would bring to the simulator. What have been the biggest changes to X-Plane 11 this past year since the last Flight Sim Show?

Well, we now have the VR system now out for everyone, people are using it, we support all the major headsets, the Vive, the Oculus, the Samsung headset which has really great resolution and people love using X-Plane in VR. But at the same time, of course, we have other people talking to us like "Oh you shouldn't focus on this VR fad, you should go down to the real basic features like better physics, better joystick support and stuff like that." So 11.30 which is in private beta right now will become public in I think within the week is very focused on physics and features. So we have a lot of flight model improvements from Austin with regards to prop wash, in regards to taildraggers, especially the prop complaining about the ground effect in 11.20, that has been vastly improved. We have some changes coming in systems and we have this whole new joystick UI where you can do the response curve for every single joystick axis, you can configure the dead zone, you can configure the response curve whether its linear or whether its like...interpolated curve, you can save the joystick axis so it's a setting per axis per aircraft so you can make a setting like for the 172 I want my joystick to react like this and if I'm in a helicopter I want to react it like this, you can save those profiles, you can share the profile with other people and, ja. And we got the new particle effect system in 11.30 so this is going to look great, it changes the heatburn, changes the water spray effects so I think 11.30 will be great from the visual perspective with the particle effect and I think the hardcore simmers will be very happy with the physics improvements.

Sounds good! So when it comes to the autogen library and your scenery, how do you guys plan to broaden and introduce specific sceneries such as South America, Asia and Africa? We've seen updates to London, you've updated to Las Vegas, how will you do the rest of the rest of the world in the long run?

Well, there are two different things. The updates for the cities, that's not autogen. This is specifically tailored city scenery and we continue doing that, we have more cities in the pipeline, not only in the US but also in Asia we have cities coming outside the US in the pipeline and the question of autogen is a little different because the autogen system of X-Plane 11 is very open and very flexible, so I think we at this point it's up to the add-on developer community to embrace the X-Plane autogen system and make more variety because X-Plane's not limited to two autogens, right now we have the US autogen and the European autogen, but it's really limited to that, you could have one tile running a completely different autogen library that an add-on maker could make. So you want more of the community integration rather than yourselves make everything? I don't think, so we will continue to make cities, yes, but right now I don't think we have our own effort on the way to make regionalised autogen for like South America or Asia, no that's not something we are working on right now.

So X-Plane system requirements, sometimes they can be quite high in comparison to other simulators. As such, do you see this as hindering some users from playing your simulator?

I don't see it as hindering because, with the X-Plane 11 UI, it's very simple to set the lower settings with your graphics. I know some people are upset that they don't have all the different sliders for all the different settings like they did in X-Plane 10 but what we made sure is that in X-Plane 11 is that when you put the quality slider in one position that it sets the settings in a way that makes sense for a slower computer or a faster computer, and with X-Plane 11.30 people are going to see big frame rate improvement already because X-Plane 11.30 is not Vulkan yet, but we are in the middle of rebuilding the stack for Vulkan and you're going to see the benefits of that with the new shader compiler and other improvements in the pipeline in X-Plane 11.30 already so even though it's not got Vulkan, X-Plane 11.30 runs at a higher framerate already than 20 and I think with Vulkan it's going to be even better than that.

And with that as well, the urban legend, is it true that if your sim is not running at 20 frames-per-second, the simulator slows down the backend?

Well, that's not a legend, that is exactly how it works and that comes from an FAA requirement so that came in X-Plane many many many many years ago for certification requirements from the Federal Aviation Administration.

Oh so it was not a thing you guys planned out, it's something that the FAA actually kind of made you implement into the simulator?

Exactly!

For our more technically gifted users, when it comes to developing aircraft, will we see N3 engines officially added to the simulator and in Plane-Maker? So modern jetliners like the A350 and the 787 both have N3 combustion...

The 3 spools.

Yes, so will this be something that is reflected in the simulator in the long run?

Alright! Let me into a secret, right...right now in X-Plane 11 prior to 11.20 we don't even have a real N1 and N2. They're kind of N1 and N2 up until 11.20 are kind of fake because they are coupled with a power function and only in X-Plane 11.30 they are physically coupled through the airflow that goes through the turbine blade so I think the question is when will N1 and N2 work perfectly, and the answer to that is X-Plane 11.30 because now the physics for the two spools actually work correctly, and now that Austin has this I think it should be pretty easy for Austin to add a third spool, an N3 spool to it which was not really possible previously. So I think the two spool jet engines are going to be much more realistic in certain situations like the drift down from altitude when the engine is coasting, windmilling, and behaves differently than when it's under power during climb. You are going to see that in 11.30 already and I think from there on adding an N3 spool shouldn't be too hard.

Sounds good! So is there also the possibility of WED incorporating the inclusion of sounds such as ground airports and nature?

This is something...so basically you want FMOD sound triggers in the scenery like when you taxi by something, you taxi by the machine shop and you hear people working in it or you fly by a wind turbine and you hear the wind turbine. It's not something we have in 11.30 right now but it's definitely something we can do with FMOD. So it's not on the short term, you're not going to get it next week but it's definitely something we are aware of and want to give to scenery developers.

FSX famously used SimConnect which allows modders to interact directly with the simulator at all levels from weather to aircraft. While XUPIC is available as a freeware, is there anything that will be built into the simulator, if not already available?

Well I think the SDK that is in the simulator already is far more comfortable to use than FSUIPC ever was because, what you needed to do with FSUPIC you would need to go look in the big table, find the thing you were looking for like landing light, switch, gear lever, whatever and then it came up with a pointer with a long number, and you had to remember that number, figure out the offset and use that, and I think X-Plane's much more straightforward, much more simple in that you don't have to look up a number, but everything is named. The landing lights level is something like sim cockpit switches landing lights, its a string you can remember you can read and X-Plane has about three or four thousand of those data refs that you can just look up by name, search by name and get the variable and so the X-Plane SDK I think is much easier to program than FSUIPC ever was because its more intuitive and people like from FlyWithLua have put something on top of that SDK because not every person can program C but its very easy to write LUA and I think that this is something FlyWithLua makes that very accessible to non programmers.

Can we see the adoption of seasons and whether improvements in the X-Plane release cycle? So currently we're only flying in the summer across the world, will we see snow, will we see weather updates in the future?

So you are asking about this X-Plane release cycle and I think the answer for this X-Plane release cycle is no. I think the focus for X-Plane 11 right now is to get Vulkan to you, so Vulkan will definitely be in X-Plane 11, its not going to be a 12 feature, this is going to be in the X-Plane 11 run and I think with Vulkan and X-Plane 11 we will get the room to grow to add more features, more graphical features and we will get the experience running Vulkan on user's machines with Nvidia cards, AMD cards and Intel Graphics and so on. So sorry to disappoint you for X-Plane 11, I don't think seasons will come from us for X-Plane 11, but I think with the Vulkan we get the room to grow and to implement weather features and season features better than you could do with textures only because right now you would have to like quadruple all the textures for the four seasons and I don't this that is really feasible, I think the modern way to do it shader based is the proper way to do it and that's the road we're going down.

And the most important final question of all, will we ever see a change in the aircraft contrails? Surely two years on, you guys will know how to change the thick black smoke spewing out of the aircraft engines into small white puffy clouds of water vapour clouds.

Alright, this ever! I can replace the ever question with next week because as of X-Plane 11.30 the contrails are no longer handled by the old puff code but they are handled by the particle system so with X-Plane 11.30 you can get the contrails out of the particle system, you can configure them with the data refs like they can be different when it's cold or when the troposphere is colder or warmer, the contrails can get bigger, more fluffy, or smaller and I think the X-Plane 11.30 particle system is going to make much better contrails than we've ever seen.

So it's finally happening?

Ah, ja!

Thank you very much!

Alright, a pleasure to meet you!

Flying Development Studio/Infinite Flight

Newcomers Flying Development Studio are showcasing their ever-popular mobile flight simulator, Infinite Flight. This was their first show in the UK, meaning they had lots to talk about when it came to their community and the history of their program, so we decided to speak to their founder Laura for more on this platform.

Laura, thank you very much for doing this with us today.

Well, thank you for being here!

So where did the idea of Infinite Flight come about and who decided to start development for the mobile flight simulator?

So it's a multi-stage process which started back in 2004 when I went to engineering school in Paris, France. I started working on projects that turned into a simulation for aeroplanes. After that I then moved to California to work for Nvidia, I worked for the founder who was working there at the time and we kind together joined forces to make a product out of it.

So this goes all the way down to 2004?

So this wasn't 2000...So I moved to California in 2006 for about two years and in 2010 we decided to join forces. I always developed for PC initially so we had a PC version internally working for developing still, that we have the power to work on a PC version. Microsoft then sent us sent us sample phone for the Windows Phone operating system which was not out yet and we figured that for phones, there is nobody there, and it's easier to get to market with better features so we got it there, and then iOS and Android is how it got started.

So what would you say is the biggest reason to choose Infinite Flight over other mobile sims such as X-Plane Mobile?

If you compare to other mobile sims, I would say our community, multiplayer system and the diversity of aircraft we have. Multiplayer, something we have a big emphasis on in the project. We got people playing together over here. They got here to the show and they're here just playing what we call a flash flight and together they have a controller somewhere over here or over there somewhere else. And that is a key point as you're not flying alone but with other people and it's super exciting.

What would you say to the traditional PC flight simmers who may not have given a mobile sim a chance, what reason could you give to tempt them into Infinite Flight and mobile flight simulators?

Well, I would say two things. One is I used to be a PC flight simmer, I played Flight Unlimited, I played FSX, I was a beta tester for FSX for a while. I got interviewed with Microsoft actually before I entered this, but it's about the flying fix, you know, as when I started development I stopped playing FSX because all I needed was not to be in the cockpit but just the feeling of flying I got even from a low poly model and basic terrain. It was enough for me to get that flying thing going and the second thing is we're not really competitors to the other PC sims, it's more targeted for when you're not in front of your PC. So, for example, you're going away with your family or have some time for yourself, just open your phone and get connected. Alternatively, when you're in your house, you're on your couch the movies over and you have 10 to 15 minutes before you go to bed, instead of going to your room and starting your PC which could take 10 minutes to get it all up, just open your phone and start playing.

So it's a lot more handheld and compact and is with you all the time.

Yeah! I think people will realise that when you give them this, like a craving for flying, you get it satisfied by flying whatever it is.

So what feature are you most proud of in Infinite Flight and is there anything that really differentiates you from the rest of the market as well? What is the biggest feature of Infinite Flight would really get people into the sim?

I'd say that it's multiplayer, definitely, when you have thousands of people playing together on the same server with the different controllers vectoring people, it's pretty exciting. It exists on other platforms, not on mobile, and we have 24/7 activity on our servers which is pretty amazing. I would say the second thing is the rendering itself. We've had airlines re-tweet our pictures and featured posts because they think its real pictures, so it's a good testimony to the quality of the graphics.

Would you ever consider implementing a Virtual Reality element into Infinite Flight thanks to the availability of platforms like Google Cardboard and similar and the numerous features on iPhone as well?

So we have talked about this, I mean, the issue is that we need to render the game a very high frame rate, and now mobile phones today even going 60 frames per second, it just kills the phone. It gets really hot, the battery dies quickly and especially, the framerate's gonna drop because it's gonna overheat and will throttle down the speed of the CPU and GPU, there's nothing you can do about that and for iOS there is not much possible at this point, what we are hoping for is for Apple to come to this market with something that's slick, as that's just what Apple would do. You know it would work just right away. Unless they do that, we're kinda stuck and we've tried going on PC and just trying it on PC versions, just the setup to make things work. I've looked into Windows 10 latest edition, like setting up drivers and...yeah it's too problematic, too much of a...

With Infinite Flight, about a year ago you released the whole world available on the flight simulator, and so a lot of changes have happened to the simulator from where it was two years ago which just had small regions to the whole world, big jets, multiplayer flying, so what could we see in Infinite Flight in the next 6 and 12 months? What is the future for your simulator?

You know we really don't talk about future at events because it's, I recently made a post on our forum about that, the reason why we don't say when things come out, mostly because things can happen, but I just said in the presentation a couple of hours ago an important point is that anything that's missing from the sim that people say is missing like instruments, like buildings, clouds, we're working on them. There are different stages of development, features coming at some point so we're not just not doing them purposely, it's just that it's on mobile so there are additional constraints we have to abide by. So, yeah, all the things that are "missing" will be here at some point.

Thank you very much!

Thanks for your time!

REMEX Software/Deadstick

REMEX Software is next with their soon to be released Deadstick Bush Flight Simulator. With nearly two years of development behind it and the game itself revealed at last year's show, today we speak to Chris again who takes us through the simulator since we last saw it and gives us an update on its progression.

Thank you very much for doing this today with us Chris.

You're welcome.

For those who don't know what Deadstick is or where it came about, give us a brief history of the simulator and what the main focus of it will be.

Okay so the big thing about Deadstick is that we're trying to simulate the experience of being a pilot rather than just simulate the aircraft, so the way we've done that is its all first person, so you can get out, you can walk around the aircraft, do your pre-flight checks and then with that we've got a whole career mode built in around it so the idea is that you're trying to earn money delivering cargo from A to B, and then you can use that to upgrade the aircraft and maintain it along the way. So it's almost like its fly real experience, trying to keep the plane alive rather than yourself alive.

So bush flight is by and large VFR. Given that flight sims struggle with true pilotage because of limited time and processing power that's needed to create landmarks and identifying features, what does your game do to overcome this, that an obstacle for most flight simulators has in order to make it necessary to create a bush flight simulator with any degree of realism?

The big thing for us is that we're not trying to simulate the whole world, we're trying to do a small area...relatively small area...because we're doing a small area we can focus on the graphical fidelity so we're not using photo tech, just everything is mesh, everything is modelled, every blade of grass and every rock and that really allows us to drill into the detail for adding those landmarks are piloted, and things like flight dynamic effects and using full volumetric clouds to make it fully immersive.

So how big will the map be when it comes into its final release?

The current version as you see it here today is southern island its 2,500 square miles and we'll be adding another northern island the same size into the platform, so that's what we'll be taking into early access and from that case it's expanding it from there, as well as looking into completely different locations, places like Papua New Guinea and packs beyond that.

Sounds good! It looks like you're trying to make a game with a lot more personality than the traditional flight simulator and a huge part of a plane's unique "temperament" in real life is quirks and undocumented oddities means that these aircraft don't control in the same way as you would find in your commercial aircraft other light aircraft as well. To what extent will this "personality" be present in Deadstick?

I think just that topic generally is a big thing that inspired me to make this, you know when you, when you do your pilot's licence I learnt that just flying the plane is kinda the easy bit, but there's a lot that goes on around that as when you're doing your pre-flight checks and also how you plan your routes to ensure that you fly safely, so a big part of that was we really wanted to get that personality into the aircraft down to like the keyring moving and the aerials wobbling, down to all the avionics and how does that simulate. So a big part of the process is making it...I keep saying today because I make it feel like a living and breathing aircraft, not that they live or breathe, but you know what I mean yeah, so that's really important and we wanted it to feel like it's your aircraft and that it's your job to look after it and maintain it as you go along the way.

Obviously, there will also be a map for navigation, but how close will it be to a real-life sectional map and how do you plan on emulating this within the simulator?

An interesting question, we've got our own development version we use and it looks a lot like a US sectional map, but obviously wherever you go in the world there are different chart styles, so I think we still have to...some artwork on our side to figure out exactly how we want it to look, we certainly want it to feel like a sectional chart and feel like the icon overlay and the UI we use makes sense, so yeah.

To add to that last question, flying in advance generally means planning, like getting your routing sorted out, and getting your direction sorted. Given that your map is fictional, how do you plan to give players the resources necessary to plan a flight in terms of landing areas, routes, weather, and emergency preparation?

So we've got a map screen which we haven't shown off yet, partially because we still need to figure out exactly the chart style, but essentially that is your, that's where you go from selecting your jobs to planning your route, so you go onto your map screen, there will be airfields on there and each one had got a list of jobs available, and when you click on it, you can drag it out routes which creates a PLOG for you, that transfers to the PLOG inside the aircraft which you can pull up on your lap at any time to see your waypoints, so it's all done through one map screen and you've got all your weather and everything on there so yeah, we try to integrate it, if you're familiar using flight planning software for VFR flying, then its very similar to that kind of thing.

How in-depth and defined will the collision detection and damage modelling be, so will the aircraft be soft body and likewise when it comes to wear and tear, how does this work within the simulator?

It's not...I wouldn't call it soft body so it's all rigid body, but at a point of a collision we use a semi-soft body system is the best way to describe it to deform specific areas. So areas know about their structure and their integrity, and then based around that we use a dynamic mesh deformation system which will deform and crumple the aircraft around it, so it's not like we're taking one model and then swapping it out for, say, you damage you wing we swap it out for a damaged one, but we're actually calculating the damage of the wing around you, we're not using full soft body physics for that because there are stability issues there when you go fast they might start to become like jelly and not feel...

It's like fluttering but at the extreme levels.

Exactly, exactly, so we tried to find a nice level trade-off there between what's realistic and what looks nice.

So when would you say we could see the simulator on our screens for us to play in the long run?

Well we were obviously intending to have it out about now, we've had to do a lot more work than we anticipated in the terrain system, the streaming system to do the fidelity we've got to the size of the world so we've solved those problems now, its set us back a little bit so we're looking at the early part of next year now.

In terms of modding, what kind of modding process will we see, so will you guys be releasing an SDK and whatnot and likewise will modding be solely on the Steam Workshop or will we maybe see like other web sites with modding capabilities get add-ons for Deadstick?

It's a bit too early to say yet. Modding is going to be hugely important so we do want to open it up in Steam Workshop, that will certainly be the first thing we'll look at and trying to create a toolset which we'll allow people to do interesting things, you know, we certainly want to create it flexible so people so can create different vehicle types and have fun with it, at the same time we want to look at a more formal API for third-party developers, so they are all things we need to explore, but we don't have answers for them yet so definitely something we'll look at after Early Access.

Sounds good, thank you very much!

You're welcome!

Flight Sim Labs

Flight Sim Labs again, and a bit of a rollercoaster year for them at that. They have however seen some redemption within the flight simulator community, with some rather fantastic Airbus aircraft now released, as well as some more in the works. We got a chance to speak to our favourite Greek developer today, Lefteris Kalamaras, with a scoop of what's to come.

So Lefteris, thank you very much for doing this with me today!

The pleasure is all mine.

So a year of redeeming for Flight Sim Labs, one year ago when we last interviewed you, you guys were in the process of finalising your A319 as well as getting your aircraft ready for Prepar3D v4.

That's right.

So what else has happened in the last year of FSLabs in terms of development, and nothing else in particular...

Well, we've developed an update for the 320 and then the 319 came out and we're very happy with the response, lots of, thousands of customers bought it so you know, the response is overwhelming, we're very happy with it and we're now developing a new product for the A321 so...

Sounds good! So when will we see the A321 arrive for flight simulators and potentially other variations for the aircraft as well so the sharklets, neo's, engine types, what timeline do you have in the future for your A320x?

The A321 will come out we hope in the next few months, we're working on it as you can see, I don't know if you took pictures or videos of our monitors over there, the computer we have on the desk, it's coming out within the next few months so it's still in development and our early beta testing is showing very promising results. It has new features that we have talked about in our forum and some new features that we haven't talked about so we're very excited to have those come out as well.

Any sneak peeks on the new features?

I'm sorry?

Any idea on new features? Anything that you've not said yet which you might be inclined to say?

Ohh, you're looking for exclusives here.

Of course.

Well, I can tell you that there's something ATSU stuff coming out and we're working with some online providers to do some work for online flying.

Okay! So when you guys have finished the A320 series, what will you be doing next? Will we see an A350 or even an A340 coming from you guys?

Err, I'm gonna tell you this, it's gonna be an A3 something. So I hope that answers your question.

And also like how long do you think you'll be developing the A320 series for, so when do you think will be like the endline for this? How many years would you say you'll be doing this?

I don't see an end of life for that product because the aircraft is so much in development and we have so much to do still with it, there are sharklets, there's the neo's, there are the new FMGC versions that are come out so you know, we have a lot of work still to do. We have the cockpit version, we have the professional versions, so still, lots to come.

And at the very least could you at least say that if you could one day incorporate an Airbus widebody in the future rather than these narrowbody jets?

Aha! Very interesting question! I think that falls back to the A3XX product that we talked about before.

Sounds good! And I guess the next one is what was the reason to including a Tomatoshade preset in your aircraft? This is something we've not seen any other developer do, what inclined you to add Tomatoshade built into the aircraft?

I think it adds to the immersion, so whenever people look at it and realise that we have involved this and included it with our product, they're very happy that we've preset it into the product and so they appreciate that we're put it in rather than them having to do it themselves.

Okay, so very community oriented and guided, kind of like not away keeping yourself from the customers but actually bringing their ideas into what they want to see in the simulator.

Yes, exactly, we listen to our customers so yeah, we hope that everything that we added is gonna excite them even more.

Sounds good, thank you very much!

Thank you I appreciate the interview!

ORBX

ORBX is back and better than ever before. Announcing their X-Plane TrueEarth Great Britain South add-on at the show, we got a couple of minutes to speak to John Venema about the progress of this scenery, as well as a couple of other products in the pipeline yet to be announced.

Right so thank you very much again for doing this with us, John.

That's alright!

So last time I interviewed you a year ago, you talked about your latest releases coming to ORBX as well as some X-Plane developments that were in the progress of being made. What have been the biggest changes these last 365 days?

Well we've introduced a new technology called TrueEarth, and you've no doubt seen that once which we've released for P3D and Aerofly FS2, soon some out for X-Plane, so that's where the company are making a shift to photoreal regions, incredible detail, hundreds new models..and we're this.., today we're announcing TrueEarth Great Britain South so we're going to continue that TrueEarth series all the way through the UK and again that's going to be for all three platforms as well.

So you'll be doing FSX as well as P3D and X-Plane...

We won't be doing FSX because 32-bit sims can't handle the sheer amount of data that are being processed.

So it's just going to be 64-bit simulators in the future?

That is correct.

Okay, so, you also mentioned last year as well that you had teams developing OpenLC for both the African and Asian regions. So what update do you have on that and when will we ever see them release?

Africa is about 80% done and is out before Christmas. So all the textures are being finished, that is hundreds of new unique landclass textures, which is, basically we're finishing up the actual landclass itself which is being done by hand. It's quite a long process but will be out before Christmas. And then we start on Asia after that.

Will we see and new airport releases for P3D and X-Plane and even FSX or will there be a focus on regions the next coming months?

On no, we're seeing a lot of new airports. We just released Kiruna in Sweden which is a triple pack, that was released three days ago, we have about, in terms of new airports being worked and run down is probably about 24.

24?

Yeah, we've got a...there's plenty of stuff happening across all platforms, porting a lot of our P3D airports to X-Plane so Greg from Turbulent Design is here, he's been porting Southampton, Shoreham, Cardiff, they're all going to be available in the next few weeks as well.

Sounds good! So whatever happened to Australia? Your first FTX Region pack was Australia, and you also released the freeware AI aircraft pack mainly to go with it as well, but other than those two it's been very quiet for that part of the world.

Well we have released, we released Gold Coast airport only a few months ago, we have a few other Australian airports in the works that we can't talk about yet, we've just release Gisborne in New Zealand only a few weeks ago, so we're certainly still in the southern hemisphere and we're about to break cover on Australia v2 which is gonna be absolutely phenomenal.

Ah, so you've got a new update for it...

That's right, a completely new re-build of Australia, it puts the Great Barrier Reef, Cityscape Melbourne, incredible coastlines, lots of really new...great textures, so we're hoping to get that out by Christmas or New Year time.

So Australia is coming and it sounds like it's going to be big.

It's going to be amazing! Yep, Holger Sandman is leading that project.

So will we also see scenery packs for more Central American cities as well such as Minneapolis and Tennessee? We see a lot of cities on the coast and major cities in the US and Worldwide, but no love for the smaller US cities and airports.

We're doing CityScenes all over the world and also the US. We're working on a CityScene right now, it hasn't been announced yet, but it's going to be quite impressive, people will be very excited about that one. We'll continue to do those all over the US, we're also going to release TrueEarth Regions in the US starting next year and what we want to do is cover the entire US with regions and cities and things like that.

When it comes to support from developers, how good is it from Lockheed Martin and Laminar Research when developing products, and who has better tools when it comes to developing?

Well, we have a very good relationship with Lockheed, I talk to Adam Breed on a regular basis and being a part of the BETA testing program, so that's a very solid relationship. I can also talk to Laminar guys when we need to, Ben Supnik and Marty are always very helpful, so you know we tried them and I was at Germany last week visiting IPACS so I talk to those guys as well, so we've got a pretty healthy relationship with the three sim makers at this stage.

With the loss of Flight Sim World and the Dovetail Game flight team essentially now non-existent, does this affect your stance on 32-bit simulator platforms such as FSX?

I think 32-bit simulators, we've seen a migration of people away from 32-bit to 64-bit. We've seen FSX numbers decline, and our own sales go down, so it's less than 20% now, it's around about 18% customer base as whereas a year ago it was about 28% so, that's been a 10% migration to P3D 64-bit in the last year alone.

So, in that case, is it still worth developing for the 32-bit platforms or is it now time for a sole focus for 64-bit X-Plane 11 and P3D?

When we do an airport and it's not a lot of work to make it FSX compatible, of course, we'll make it FSX compatible because you know, 18% of our customers are still using that platform. So we want to look after them and we also, we're releasing region products that will still be compatible with FSX so, you know, the landclass based regions, OpenLC, Australia, all of those will still work in FSX.

So for the last couple of months, you have definitely seen the community move towards the 64-bit platforms, so I think that covers the next question as well so you now see that the simulator is now moving towards 64-bit platforms and you see a lot less going towards FSX.

That's true. It's a natural progression you know, it's just we're dealing with a lot more data here, we're talking about products that are 30 to 90 Gb in size and you need that extra bandwidth to process that.

So big important question, are you and Laminar Research, or more specifically Austin Meyer, the best of friends yet or do you both still have your mutual disrespect for each other?

I bumped into Marty last night over drinks and he said "Greetings from Austin" so you know, roundabout sort of way, we are talking to each other, look, we're working with them, they're important to us, I think they enjoy the fact that ORBX has embraced their platform so there's no need for an ongoing tit for tat type of scenario to continue.

And the other question from last year, did PayPal ever give you your money back?

They did.

They did!

It took 11 months.

11 months between the final purchase and the money getting to you?!

Correct. So for 11 months, there were about 30,000 customers that we weren't paid for their purchases.

30,000?!

So...That was a big chunk out of our business and that is why...

I can imagine for a small company like yours as well, that is a lot of...

It is. That's why we won't use them again, I just don't respect their company whatsoever after this. They had no reason to hold our money and so, we won't do business with them again, it's as simple as that.

Yeah, thank you very much for your time!

My pleasure! No problem at all.

Just Flight

Show hosts Just Flight are here with their plethora of general aviation and historic jetliner add-ons. Today they talk to us about their upcoming work in X-Plane, as well as where the balance of the community is heading to in terms of simulator usage. Let's see what Martin and Richard have to say.

Right so thank you very much for doing this with us today.

Pleasure.

So since the last Flight Sim Show, you guys talked mainly about your transition from FSX to X-Plane 11 and how you're starting to like release more towards that genre. So what have been the biggest changes to Just Flight in the last year?

Yeah, I suppose that X-Plane 11 is the biggest I suppose. It's been nearly a year since we released the Arch...Arrow III, so our first X-Plane release, since then we've done maybe five or six new aircraft, that's been very popular, very well received I think.

Yep!

So yeah, much like the industry in general, I think X-Plane 11 is the biggest change.

Yeah so you mentioned it's been about a year you did the Arrow III as your first release, and you've now got maybe around 10, 15 products now ported over to X-Plane 11. How different is the development process between FSX, P3D and X-Plane 11?

Very different really, we have an external team that does most of the X-Plane stuff, so we tend to do the FSX and Prepar3D version, and once that's been completed we release bug fixes and everything else, then it tends to go to the team that's dedicated to X-Plane versions. They make use of the model, the textures, but a lot of the coding is stuff from fresh so it's quite a different simulator

When will we start to see some of your more advanced jetliners such as the BAC 1-11 or even the VC-10 make its way onto X-Plane 11, or will you guys be sticking with general aviation in the meantime?

We are trying to get bigger stuff. 2019 I reckon there'll be an airliner for, with some of the scripts that are coming. Yeah so the next are probably gonna be the Dutchess, and then maybe Archer III because they're both fairly simple to get them out of the way, but yeah we are intending to get to the bigger stuff like the DC-10, 747, so yeah, it's certainly coming.

You guys are basically the only developers at this time who are still working with AeroflyFS, so what do you guy see in that platform that others may have missed, and how much of your development do you put towards Aerofly?

Currently not so much at the moment, but it's something we're getting to get back into, its ORBX also supporting Aerofly, so it's a good solid sim, it's not as detailed or as complex as others but you know, it's easily satisfying and fun to use. So it's a slightly different market as well. And it's also yeah, its a way of accessing the mobile market as you obviously got tablets and we sold ourselves through Aerofly onto the tablet. Yeah, we saw good sales when we released content for FS Aerofly, the original, obviously, it's grown since then so it's certainly a good platform I think but yeah, slightly different market to the current. Certainly, there will be more Aerofly content to come to some point.

Sounds good! With the loss of Flight Sim World and Dovetail Games now essentially not having a flight sim team anymore, how does this affect your stance on FSX and 32-bit platforms and is this may be something you'll start losing in the future and start focusing on P3D and X-Plane?

Yes, I think in time FSX, like previous ones will start to dwindle off, people moving to Prepar3D and X-Plane, some people moving to both, some people toward the other so I think hopefully in time yeah, we'd like to get to the point where we don't have to develop for FSX anymore. Also, the more the P3D v4 technology moves on, the harder it then becomes to port back to FSX so at some point the rewards of doing that will just be too small and we'll move on from FSX and be 64-bit platforms only.

You might find some aircraft we release are available for FSX but maybe not the full feature set you get in P3D version, I think that may be true of other developers because things will become impossible, and FSX one will not be as good anymore.

And so where do you feel that the community is going as a whole? So you've released products onto both FSX, P3D and X-Plane 11, so how does that between the different genres, the different sales, how do sales impact with each one, where do you kind of like...where do you see the community going, where are they heading to as the main simulator?

Well I mean for the first time in maybe ever, X-Plane seems to be neck and neck with the other platforms out there. There has definitely been a big shift towards X-Plane, I think the shows we go to and obviously we can see it in our own sales, I mean we've only been on X-Plane for a year, so we don't really have any past data to go on but it's certainly healthy sales in X-Plane, we've seen as good if not better sales for some of our GA aircraft in X-Plane that we have in Prepar3D, so it's certainly not niche simulator anymore, it's definitely a strong best. X-Plane 11 was a turning point for us and Laminar. Yeah so I think, I think P3D and X-Plane will carry on in parallel for the foreseeable, I don't see one will take over the other or..No, and that's certainly the biggest two platforms for me. A focus on those. Yeah and there's a lot of crossover and people will be flying both, plenty of people seem to fly both so.

Thank you very much!

Thank you!

A pleasure.

ProjectFLY

Prominent face of the community Matt Davies is next. Today he talks to us about ProjectFLY and POSCON, as well as their new project SimMarket currently in the works, and also some hints on where their A380 is currently headed. Let's see what he has to say.

(Note: Since the show, Matt Davies has unfortunately stepped down from ProjectFLY, but the projects themselves are very much still on-going.)

So yes thank you very much for doing this with us today.

Okay, no problem.

So for those who don't quite know what ProjectFLY is or only know the name, what is ProjectFLY and what does it bring to the flight simulator?

ProjectFLY is a fancy Logbook with a bunch of features that enhance the logbook experience.

Sounds good! So on ProjectFLY...You're the head of ProjectFLY, you're the lead of POSCON and it will be integrating with everything else. So these programs integrate with one another, so how will they integrate, how will they like, compatible as well?

So POSCON will use data from ProjectFLY to tailor make your POSCON experience, and it will also allow us to understand the levels of competence to which you have as a POSCON user by using the way you fly with ProjectFLY.

It will also integrate with the A380, SimStore, so like all together so you've got the distribution channels of SimStore, you've got the flying modification experience of ProjectFLY and then POSCON is the network we use to get, you know, controllers and flying with other people.

Sounds good. So regarding your A380 in development, what is the current progress of it and what stage is it at?

So modelling is into what they call late refinement. So they got all the bulks done, and now they're going through I guess finesse and they're figuring it all out. Systems are pretty early on but it's a modular based system so, in terms of completion it's hard to say but the model is definitely ahead of the systems, but not by much.

When will we likely see a release of the A380 if you have the timeframe for that right now?

Impossible to say. I mean I reckon if we get it out in 2019 I would be impressed, but it's more like maybe 2020 because we still got other projects to do, it's a side project. If it was a full-time project then maybe next year, but it's not.

And so you talked about the A380 being modular based and your interview..your seminar earlier on talked about how it will be done with the same model in FSX, X-Plane...Sorry, P3D, X-Plane and potentially Aerofly model in the future, so how will that system work within the simulator?

So each platform has its own specific model requirements, animation requirements, so as long as the modeller in question knows what to do, then essentially it's just a port from one to the other, and because we code it from sort of, an emulation of a 7...was gonna say 787 there...an emulation of an A380, we just gotta move it around, there's really no issue.

So it's like you have your one platform, you port it to another, you port it to another.

Yeah, you just create a bridge, then it will know that the variables all match up, the flight model's important and you know, all this stuff that you would necessarily think of, and then it works! Surprisingly very simple.

So from the sound of things like shared cockpit could be like a massive thing in its future.

Yep.

So could it potentially be the case where you're in X-Plane, and you share a cockpit with like a P3D user, or would that be too difficult to integrate with the flight model?

So we're using a web-based client to share the flight model, right, and because of that I mean, to be able to share a plane with someone that's in X-Plane versus someone that's in P3D, we could compensate for that using the server, using the web-based geotracking so it should, in theory, be possible to fly, me fly in X-Plane and you fly in P3D and still share the same cockpit.

Sounds good, thank you for doing that with us!

No problem, thanks.

VATSIM

VATSIM has finally revealed a new voice codec at the show, so it no longer sounds like you're talking through a paper bag over comms. We speak to Simon and Gary about this change, as well as a little on the history of VATSIM voice codecs.

So thank you very much for doing this with us today. First question, finally we seen or even heard evidence of a new voice codec coming onto VATSIM. How different is this to the current codec to the previous version and how long will it be until this is implemented full simulator?

So if you want to give it a go we've got it on our laptop, you can give it a go in a minute, that's alright, as that will answer most of your question.

But how different is it? Everyone doesn't sound like they are in a paper bag anymore and you don't have a one-second delay between talking to each other, that's our main gain. So what actually goes into developing a codec for voice?

Well our one actually started off as a cabin interphone simulation for our simulator that we built, we wanted to be able to call the galley, so we actually started off like that and then we figured oh "How can we actually write a VHF...Why don't we turn this into a VHF simulation?" so one thing led to another and to be honest, what mostly goes into it is a guy called Mark Barne who is an absolute genius who before I knew it designed a terrain model, a VHF simulation model and basically all of the working behind it. So we do actually use a standard, modern stuff so basically, a lot of our stuff that you've heard is based on something called OMQ which basically solves half of our problems for us.

So what actually prompted you to make this new voice codec after seven, eight years of using the current one?

Oh, so I sat there thinking well if I want to sound...Basically, what happened as I said with the cabin interphone, one thing led to another and we thought you know what, why don't we try and make this a codec for VATSIM and you know, here we are!

So are there any plans to open the API for third-party users, so for example who's online, what data you can put through that, so is it possible to open up an API to allow other developers to work with VATSIM within the simulator or is this something you want to kind of control?

Oh I...actually as you are more qualified for VATSIM but, it's a part of why we actually develop it, we're all up for opening it up to modern technologies so.

I suppose VATSIM, yeah, we come up with the idea to do that then definitely we want people to get involved. So we've, actually what's happened is we've ended up working with the guys from VATSIM who are in the FSD part of the service and voice service and data feeds, so between us we've managed to write a new data of working with VATSIM is actually working really well, everyone's working with everybody and we all have a shared Git Hub, it's all very open.

Oh yeah, so I was going to say one question we got was do you have any timelines on when there would be a public repository such as a Github link, so like how public is this? How open is it for support?

So actually, what we've got is called GOVR, what we've got for it which is the virtual radio system. The bits that are non-VATSIM specific are actually public and out there now so it is very wide open. Obviously there is some stuff in the legacy VATSIM network side of things that we do have to keep in a separate repository, just because the new technology with the new data server and that isn't quite there yet, so that's got to stay prone because you can't really just shovel that on the internet and hope for the best.

And so last question, what would you do to encourage more users to become flight controllers? It can be a fairly tough process to join, and as a result, too few people shy away from this. What could you do to bring more controllers to the community?

Over to Simon for this!

Well, I think the new voice architecture's gonna help us. We get...you can hear the new voice codec now, how clear it is you can hear that there, so I think that's gonna be a game changer. There are a lot of...the biggest things we get is that people will come to us because they say the voice isn't very good so I think this is gonna be a real game changer for us. It's certainly going to help.

And the funniest thing actually coming out of all of the voice codec testing as we said, everyone's being really friendly to each other when they're controlling, I think you don't have people sapping on each other and you know, really struggling to hear people, and people are cracking jokes to each other, they know what's happened so hopefully this is the way forward! And the frequencies are really calm. It's a really calm place to be.

Very calm.

So yeah, thank you very much!

Okay, thanks very much.

Cheers.

Cheers, Gary.

No problem.

FSElite

We also got a chance to speak to FSElite about their own new site. Today we learn a little history about where they came from, where they are currently going and the upcoming release of DCTRY. Let's interview the interviewee, we have the head of FSE, Calum Martin.

Calum from FSElite, thank you very much for doing this for us.

You're very welcome.

First question, FSElite have been very much a rising star in the flight simulator community, recently making a big name for yourself just over a year ago. Where did it all start and what was the site's big breakthrough moment?

Good question. So it all started as you said two and a half years ago and I think the idea was we just wanted to something a little bit different, I've always been quite passionate about the PDS side of things, I used to run like, really amateur gaming blogs when I was a kid and flight sim was always something that held my interest so I kinda wanted to combine the two, made some cool friends with both Jordan and Greg and we had similar ideas about what kind of news media site we wanted and then we kind of just put this really basic blog together, did it for a bit of fun, and then when people started to take note of what we were doing, we had lots of people ask to join the team, so some of the original guys like Dan and Mungo are still with us today, they really helped to grow that team and for me the important element was to try and get that worldwide coverage and so we kind of put out some feelers and managed to get a team of 20 people. You ask about that kind of big moment. I think when we went to Flight Sim Con in Connecticut in 2017, we made a big point in kinda having a representation there because people hadn't really heard of us or hadn't met us in person and for us that was the real pushing point to say hey this is what we do, this is who we are and I think people appreciated that interaction and that stuff we did and for us it is important that community felt part of the event as well and I think that was the moment where people took us a lot more seriously because they could finally put the web site to an actual personality with it as well.

How do you say FSElite compares itself with some of the other flight simulator news sites out there, that have built themselves up over the last 10 to 20 years? What makes you like the standout, different to the others?

So I think the important thing for me with that is we've always wanted to challenge what happened in the past because we know as you said, 10, 20 years there have been countless news sites, all trying to do the same sort of thing and yeah, some elements we do similar to other sites, but what I think what makes us stand out more is because we have a really universal global team, who have very much different passions, very much different skill sets and we like to kind of bring all that together to make a, firstly a strong brand, I like how we are kind of a bit more visual compared to some other sites and the engagement thing is the most important thing for us, we do a lot of stuff on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, even today we've got a Snapchat filter for the entire community around, so just that kind of small different engagement things and just pushing the boundaries, and even things like organising events on behalf of developers and stuff, we just wanna be a little bit more different and kinda just be a little more on the same level as the community rather than think we're above them and telling them everything and stuff.

So what are the current plans for your web site and do you have any major expansions and plans for the future?

The first thing for the site and it's been a much-featured request is the speed, so we are working in the background and we are now in the next iteration of FSElite. Haven't got anything to show on that one but speed is like the dominating driving force for that, but I think the next expansion for us is DCTRY so we announce that in Flight Sim Expo in Vegas and basically if you haven't seen it or heard of it, DCTRY is just gonna be global map for you to find any add-ons from X-Plane, Prepar3D or Aerofly and it will literally host everything from freeware to all the top-tier payware as well so you can type into the search function, say, SODE Jetways, and it will show you show you every single airport that uses SODE Jetways in it as well.

Ah okay so it's not just going to be like the ICAO code and the airport name, but include any feature the airport includes as well.

Feature, so if you were like I want a dynamic lighted airport with SODE Jetways that's under $10, you can literally search to that detail and it will ping you all of those results, so country, region, you know, you name it, we've found a way to kind of get you that airport and I think what we really like about it is it supports the community because you are hopefully gonna find airports you've never heard of, I certainly did when we were compiling the database, also for the development side of things as well they're gonna be able to release an airport but know it's not gonna get lost in the massive mix of news because people will be searching for it or searching for similar airports and actually they may discover that really cool unique airport that...I dunno that just that is kind of our next big thing and hopefully we'll gonna release that in the next couple of weeks for the community to enjoy.

Sounds good! So when it comes to the video content on your web site, how are these made in comparison to other flight sim news sites, for example, the one this interview will be uploaded to? What's the process that goes into the video editing?

So I'm no video editor. Many of our team don't have the skill and the capability to do that, however what we do is we look for other YouTubers who have a real passion and enthusiasm for developing videos and we ask them to join our team as kind of like content editors and stuff, so we've got a couple of guys, we've got Flight Sim Deck, we've got Aus Flight Simmer, we've got Q8Pilot, we've got a new guy named Ronnie and all of them kind of have their speciality or you know, their favourite type of flying and they will produce kind of videos on whatever they think is cool or they think will be beneficial for the community and then they upload it to our channel and then we promote them and they promote us and it's like a really cool crossover between what we do and the way we see it, and the reason we like it very much is because you get different personalities in the video and also different experiences as well.

So how does this differ from the Featured YouTube Community guys started last year, but I don't think really took off as much as much as you guys expected it.

So the idea behind that, and it's still something that I want to do more of, is it was, so these guys were flight simmer, Flight Sim Deck, blah blah blah, they produce content for the FSElite Channel. The Featured YouTube Community was purely a new platform for video makers to use us to share out to the community. So they were never going to produce for us, but we wanted to say "Hey you produce some cool stuff, actually a lot of your stuff doesn't really rank that high in YouTube because maybe you're not a huge 80k subscriber kind of guy but it was just that way to promote because we know Facebook Groups, they don't necessarily allow this kind of self-promotion side of things, but actually, I very much believe that if we self-promote to an extent some good quality stuff, then the community gets to experience a much wider girth of awesome content and that is what Featured YouTube Community was about. We're gonna develop that and you asked about the site earlier about what we're going to do, and that is going to become, instead of it currently being here it's going to become much more integrated with what we do and also with DCTRY in the future.

So you guys will bring it back in the future.

In a big way.

Sounds good man thank you very much.

Thank you, thank you for your time, enjoy the show.

Conclusion

And finally, we can bring our little interview saga to an end for another year. The Flight Sim Show was an extremely fun day out with those in the flight simulator community, as well as a great way to preview products that are soon to be released. If you ever get a chance to visit one of these events, I do very much recommend it, as it gives you an opportunity to really mingle with those in the community.

For those interested in upcoming shows, Laminar Research will be at the Aerosoft booth during the Friedrichshafen Germany Show, which is at Bodensee in southern Germany, April 2019, and the Flight Sim Expo, which takes place in June in Orlando Florida. Here they will be showcasing X-Plane, as well as flying in VR.