I landed in Amsterdam yesterday afternoon. We have a few X-Aviation people here, so it should be a good time!

I’ll have more info as the FSWeekend X-Plane presentation goes on, so stay tuned!

In the meantime, here’s a few photo’s to kick some stuff off…

Todays blog post is going to be slightly different than the previous one’s here, and I plan to make posts like this one a staple to this blog. There’s a lot that goes on at X-Aviation daily, weekly, and monthly. We have a dedicated team, and all of us pour our hearts into making the add-ons we do, as well as providing top notch support for each and every product we offer.

As you can imagine it’s a busy time for us at X-Aviation. We are preparing for the X-Plane 10 release, and we’re on a feverish schedule to do it! I have been testing all of our products to ensure compatibility with X-Plane 10. When an issue arises I immediately report it over to Laminar and work as long as needed to make sure the fixes are put in place so your experience and transition as a customer is a pleasant one. X-Plane is all about fun for many of us, so why make it harder on our customers? We’re working hard for you!

With the above said, X-Plane 10 is a beautiful application. The amount of detail and hard work that has gone into making this product a reality is at astronomical levels. The team works countless hours, and having been a part of the long term development phases and a first hand witness I can tell you there’s not a moment that goes by that the people assigned to X-Plane 10 aren’t working their tail’s off (with the exception of sleep, of course)! From the new lighting, shading, atmospheric scattering, default aircraft, to the new default airport…it’s all there, and in style. It is without doubt that X-Plane 10 is above anything the X-Plane fans of today were expecting, and the Microsoft people will get their socks knocked off (finally)! This is only affirmed with the alliance of companies like Aerosoft joining the fray. I’ll post some new screenshots of X-Plane 10 here very soon, so stay tuned!

Another ongoing project at X-Aviation is a collaborative effort with ICON Aircraft. I flew out to Los Angeles, CA this week to work at the ICON corporate offices and work towards our next iteration of the motion flight simulator we have developed for them. ICON generally uses this simulator in showcasing the aircraft to potential investors and buyers, so you can understand the importance of this product to their company. That said, the simulator really shines when people at the Oshkosh Airventure get a chance to sit in and fly it for themselves. We have now gone to Oshkosh the past two years with this motion platform and each year the popularity grows. It’s not uncommon to be walking around the various displays at the show only to overhear some people talking about what a fun experience they had in the sim. My objective this week was to iron out some new flight model requests, and discuss the future of the simulator experience itself. Needless to say, the future of the ICON motion simulator is exciting and I’m overjoyed with X-Aviation’s involvement in this project. We have many contracts with big name companies, but this one is unique and a standout among our contract projects! It doesn’t take much to see why…

The ICON A5

The last project I wanted to discuss that is receiving a lot of internal attention is the upcoming new release from RealScenery. Which one? Norther California, of course! This has been a big project, both for X-Aviation and RealScenery. We have worked collaboratively on this project now for multiple years, as we believe this will be a product that many will purchase over any of the others. California is a very popular place, so it’s only natural we have such an assumption!

One of the things many of our users are aware of is our RealScenery Downloader. We host these sceneries on premium bandwidth servers in order to better serve you, so our delivery platform for these products differs from our aircraft products. As you can imagine, serving up single orders that can now get up to 30GB of a download is no small task. The infrastructure needs to be well planned, and over the years we’ve tried to emerge as a leading tech company on many fronts. This is not to say we have been trouble free. I have listened to every customer complaint and compliment that has come through over the years. I am happy to say that thanks to your feedback we are releasing a brand new RealScenery downloader. I have just completed compiling a new version of the application for testing, and it’s safe to say this one is the most robust and customer friendly yet. The interface is intuitive, and I have now wrapped it into our installer platform. This means when you download your RealScenery purchases your downloads will auto install on the fly for you! There is no documentation to read prior to install, no manually unzipping files, and we provide this service with improved, ultra fast download speeds.

There are also two new items that are worth mentioning with this announcement. The first item is that today I am working on the launch of our new Asia Pacific server. This will ensure our customers in that region get the best download we can offer. As it stands now we have a few United States based servers, and last year we introduced a new server in Europe based in Ireland. The second is that with this new platform we will now support Linux for RealScenery product downloads! Prior to this, the only method of delivery was DVDs for Linux users.

So that’s the happenings at X-Aviation this week! As you can see, we have our work cut out for us, and we rarely slow down. The most important thing is that we’re working hard to earn your trust and business, and we appreciate you being supportive of our efforts.

Thanks for reading!

-Cameron

I’ve been doing some testing this week on the latest build of X-Plane 10 to ensure compatibility with our products in the X-Aviation catalog.

I’ll make another post later with more details, but for now you can just enjoy these screenshots from when I was testing RealScenery Oahu.

Clicking the images will lead to a larger size.

All images are copyright © X-Aviation and may not be posted on any other website.

Blue Skies!

-Cameron