Just Flight & Just Trains blogs

Location: Chez Scotty – Oxford – UK.

Welcome back! It’s been around five months since my last Blog (time does fly!) so Christmas and New Year have been and gone and Easter is just about to land – sorry, I left out Mothers Day! Anyway soon be time for summer holidays and then back to Christmas again!

What else has happened in the world – well tons of things of course and many a lot more important that Flight Sims and gaming in general but I will restrict my comments in general to the simming world. Play Station 3 has arrived in Europe as well as the ‘healthy to use’ Wii not that there will be serious flight sims on them, but I am sure there will be flight sims of some description. B.T.W. no thanks to the very nice guy in Wales who I paid to buy a Wii from on an auction site who never sent it to me – I hope something really nasty happens to him if it has not already. Auction sites – very happy to take your money – utterly useless when something goes wrong. They seem quite an easy way for thieves and conmen to rip honest people off. B.T.W. 2 First prize for the worst promotion of the PS3 goes to Curries (an electrical retailer in the UK) who had a big High Definition flat screen display at the front entrance to the store and a big sign saying “Play Station 3 available now” on top of the screen. Well I looked at the screen and thought ugh! – that’s not very good, all the game objects are really jagged around the edges – they must have set up the wrong resolution. I then twigged what was going on – they were running a PS2! thus giving a totally wrong impression.

Microsoft have announced they are working on a new version of Train Simulator and that it will be based on the Flight Simulator X ‘engine’ which should be good news for those wishing to develop any add-ons for it, fingers crossed it is more usable and stable than the first MS Train sim birth, meanwhile Kuju Rail Simulator is yet to appear but is still in development. Microsoft have also put into beta the next update/patch for FSX promising performance enhancements along with other bits and bobs.

I can’t believe that it’s April already – only eight weeks away from being mid-year! We always start off the year with a list of products that we are going to release in each of the years quarters thinking that we have plenty of time to get out all this stuff, but this being the world of software everything slips and so looking back at the list of prospective products planned versus what has actually come out tends to kick reality back in! Things are still pretty busy at Just Flight Towers, but maybe a little less hectic than that I wrote in my last blog posting…I think we must be getting more organised(!) as the amount of work going on is still pretty high for all the crew.

Of course I had forgotten about the world-wide launch of Vista – “Wow!”. Needless to say that I will be staying on Win XP for a while I think though…Now, how has this “Wow” affected and continue to affect the FS world and the World of Just Flight (same-ish thing really!)? Well ally this to the launch of FSX at the end of 2006 and we are working under a double whammy on two fronts. 1) FSX compatibility and 2) Vista compatibility, and all at around the same time. FSX compatibility revolves around trying to make existing FS2004 and new build products work in FSX and Vista compatibility revolves around making existing and new build products work in Vista, and they are not the same thing – its an ongoing battle but one which we are fighting and slowly but surely winning, although I think it is fair to say that it definitely slows down the production process – you can check the status of compatibility for both FSX and Vista for our products on our website. B.T.W. Just Flight is now in the world of RSS – you can subscribe to our news feed and also to our support feed – full details are available by pressing the “What is RSS” link on our site.

Other things happened since my last blog posting:

Airfix, or to be more accurate its parent company in France went bust : -( but glad to say that Airfix has been brought and is now back in business. I was very pleased to talk to Trevor Snowden, the public face of Airfix for many years at the IPMS Telford show back at the end of last year which Scott, Simon and I attended and JF exhibited at.

A show not to be missed, (but I did!) was the IFC Europe show at the NEC at Birmingham in early December. I was really looking forward to this but on the Saturday of the show I was checking into hospital with some kind of nasty stomach virus that laid me low for several days, so hopefully this will not befall me in 2007 and I will personally be able to attend what I was told was a very good show, and many thanks for all those who asked after me as well!

Our payable download sales are becoming very popular. It’s very interesting to see the ratio between the DVD and PD sales of products.

We have a new full time staff member – Martyn Northall – welcome on board – It’s all getting very confusing Martin-wise. We have Simon Martin, Martin Wright and Martyn Northall and when you get to my age it easy to call them by the wrong name – we call it the ‘everybody is called Martin’ syndrome. You can see all of JF’s staff mini-bios on the crew page on our site.

Products – tons have been released since my last posting but of note are:

VFR Real Scenery Volume 1 is released covering South-East England – this was much delayed but we wanted to be sure that it was correct and had all the features in it that we advertised that would be in it If you only want Photo realistic scenery of London then that is available as a payable download now and hot on its heels is the area of Birmingham and its immediate surrounds that will be available shortly as a payable download. They are quite a few free demos and videos of the VFR Real Scenery range available on or website.

The S300CBi helicopter is a gem and has been very well received as has the Tiger Moth – this has had fantastic reviews – we are currently in the process of creating Float and Ski add-on packs for it as well!

Next up on the Heli front is a great looking R44 and GA-wise we are working on a Archer III.

For heavy metal fans we are readying a DC10 and its tanker variant to go in our very popular F-Lite range. All the great looks of superb models but without the need for a degree just to get the engines started, and, taking advantage of the fantastic mission feature in FSX we have Rescue Pilot – Mission pack currently in advanced development – that will be excellent – I am really looking forward to that – a great reason to fly in FSX. We are also due to be publishing Space Shuttle –that really is out of this world!

That nice man Derek Davis from Key Publishing has kindly taken the time to interview me and this is due to be in the next issue of PC Pilot magazine, issue 46 that is on sale 19th April.

Is it real or is it Second Life? Not sure really –there is a Flight Sim presence in Second Life www.secondlife.com of which JF are a part, but it’s a strange world – well its not really, it’s a pile of code on a hard drive but you have to behave like it is real and that makes it quite complicated – you end up discussing things like they are real but they are not! It’s quite difficult to get your head around sometimes!

Rant-ish of the Blog:

Can you please any of the people any of the time?

There has virtually (pun intended) always been a call for “more realism” from flight simmers around the world and in general most (not all!) developers and publishers have responded with ever more detailed and complex add-ons but I think in the last year or so there has been a demand for less complex products and this is why last year we launched our F-Lite range – great looking and performing aircraft but without ultra-complex systems that you have to have a college degree in to operate, but that allows you to go fly easily. F-Lite has been a great success and we will continue to expand the range this year, (even though some reviewers totally miss the point of F-Lite!), sorry slightly sidetracked there. When we developed Airliner Pilot we wanted it to be a realistic experience, I.E. you felt like you were flying for a real airline, so we put elements in there that mimicked real life so I was surprised (was I? No, not really thinking about it) to read this the other day:

“Airliner Pilot definitely added something to FS instead just flying around with no goal or aim. It had a good number of areas to fly in and interesting flights.

So you would arrive for duty as a real airline pilot would, and are assigned destinations, timings, weather conditions and so on and while this was enjoyable it seemed to take large amounts of free time to advance through the various pilot grades and aircraft types. You needed to wait for 10 minutes before push-back (or you lost points) you were not allowed to use time, even on long flights (or you lost points).”

So it seems you can’t win – you make it realistic and you get complaints and if you dumb it down and make it less realistic you get complaints.

And then we have people who complain about degrees of colours and the incorrect number of ribs in a wing and even the wrong number of rivets on some part or another.

Please give us a break here! It’s a simulation, Microsoft even officially calls it a ‘game’ (heaven forbid!) and life or death does not depend on it. We do our very best but we can never achieve perfection however hard we try and there will always be something that is not quite right or is wrong and if you see something then please tell us, but also please be realistic. If the model has got three engines and the real one has only got two then it’s something we will correct, but please bear in mind that we never knowingly release a product that we know has an issue in it but inevitably when thousands more pairs of eyes look in great detail at any product they are bound to spot something and if we can fix it then we will, but it takes time and please forgive us when we have to draw the line somewhere and ultimately if you are still unhappy you can have your money back – check out our fair deal policy on our website. Who else in the FS world offers that?

So.. the answer to the question is - maybe..

Domestic appliance sitrep: All appliances currently operational although the oven heating element needed replacement in February and currently the oven is giving the occasional error code ‘F8ED’ which apparently means the thermostat is on its way out. Also hade to dismantle the carpet cleaner the other day to free up a sticking valve which allowed cleaning fluid to run all over the floor. More domestic appliance news in the next blog….Bet you can’t wait!

B.T.W.. Writing and publishing a blog is a bit of a solitary experience. You write away, publish it on the WWW and then normally you hear nothing – zippo. You have absolutely no idea if anybody has read it or not, it’s a bit disappointing I guess really. If you read my blog and feel moved to make a comment then you are more than welcome to by making a posting here. Just click on the “Comments” link at the bottom right of this post.

If you want to have a RSS feed to your RSS reader from my Blog the link is: http://blogs.justflight.info/blogs/musings_of_scotty/feed

Anyway back to the plate spinning.

‘til the next time.

Keep safe.

Scotty.