Wednesday, April 23, 2008

We've got a pulse...

From a blank screen to an actual functioning aircraft in FSX in a little over two weeks, I must be nuts. :)

I'm also quite tired haha.

She's alive and kickin' though, and has working (and quite detailed) undercarriage, ailerons, rudder, elevators and a very rudimentary placeholder flight model. Have a look...




I'll also add that recording my own aircraft with FS-Recorder is a truly bizarre experience hahaha.

Cheers!

-lotus out.

26 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nice work Lotus. I oficially hate You now! lol ;) You make great FSX Videos and now Your making planes for FSX too!!!!!?? :D Where do Your skills end?! hehe Looking forward to fly that L-39 sometime in the future!

Lotus / Ramasurinen said...

My skills end at my monitor bevels hahaha.

Thanks Scenium, glad you approve of the 'career' departure hehe. I made 3d art for games for many years actually, for console and PC titles while working at EA and Namco, so this stuff is really second nature to me, most of it anyway. I still have much to learn, but it's just mad fun to work on.

The L-39 will be a very long project, but I'm putting my heart and soul into this one and won't release it until it's killer.

I'm going primarily for the civilian versions of the plane, but I will have ones with weapons and likely a ZA version with a hud as well. The L-39 comes in a lot of flavours.

Cheers man,

-mike

Anonymous said...

This plane looks so nice!

Anonymous said...

Wow, Lotus, that looks awesome! We're going to have a lot of fun with that...kind of makes me feel like a guy who's sitting on the couch...no, lying on the couch watching TV while his wife works very hard in the kitchen preparing a wonderful meal. All I have to do is wait until it's ready :)

P.S. Must...have...HUD :P

Anonymous said...

haha, I bet the people who make freeware planes would call it a wrap and put it on simviation with the amount of progress you've done

Lotus / Ramasurinen said...

Haha, yeah, that's good enough I guees, ship it! ;)

If one of the versions does end up having a hud it'll probably just be the one from Accel's F-18, but we'll see.

d0ugi3 said...

I dare you to make it payware just to see how long it takes to be uploaded onto TPB

haha

Lotus / Ramasurinen said...

It will be payware Dougie. And yes, I'll probably start foaming at the mouth when I see it land on TPB in ten months time.

Or I'll seed it there myself and attach a virus to it, one of the two. ;)

Anonymous said...

haha, that would be hilarious!
...if only I knew what seeding is...

Vlad said...

Do the virus thing. Soo much more fun!(From your point of view)

Make their PCs delete the System32 Folder. That might teach them ;)

d0ugi3 said...

Rama, from everyone who buys it make it personal. Take all their details down because that might scare them into not uploading to PB.

Lotus / Ramasurinen said...

Nothing stops pirates mate, nothing. If it's something that'll be popular enough then someone will crack it somehow. Most do it just for the challenge and bragging rights. In FS circles Cloud9 put up a good fight, basically made it so difficult for people to crack their addons that they didn't bother, especially considering the size of the audience for their aircraft (the same audience I'm shooting for). Their protection system however was invasive to legitimate users unfortunately, and it put some of them off purchasing Cloud9 planes.

When it comes to the RIAA I say pirate your heart out, I'd love to see those record company suits lose their free ride on the backs of great artists. They don't deserve a single cent of the money they make and haven't for 50 years. I'm also seriously tired of the talentless fluff they prop up and bombard the media with. Britney Spears anyone? Good fucking riddance.

But for a self publishing cottage industry like FS planes the result is disheartening, financially disastrous, and will eventually lead to the end of addons entirely.

Like I always say, if you like a plane or scenery buy it. Support the good developers, let the poor ones fail and quietly exit stage left.

d0ugi3 said...

You totally changed my views on pirating a few months ago.
It did play on my concience as never realised how serious the planes were to the developers.
You opened my eyes and thank you for it. It feels better flying a plane which was mine. Used up all leftover B-Day money but I feel better now.

And as for the pop people, yeh it's all about relationships and cheating and sex. It really is annoying. As for Britney Spears, she doesn't deserve all the abuse and the name calling. I wouldn't chuck her out of bed for farting anyway ;)

Lotus / Ramasurinen said...

Haha, chuck her out of bed!

I would, but I'm not really a fan of blondes. I'll take a smart and bitchy redhead anyday.

As for the piracy thing, good for you. My hands are far from clean in that department, but every plane I fly I actually own. I want to see this industry survive and grow, and not simply for my own sake. :)

Sundowner said...

The payware concept was something i also stumbled upon while currently doing the S61... it is a hard work, and would be nice have something back, so Payware it will be (if I'll do it right) but...

What I'm kinda sick off, is, as the prices may be high for some people *cough* me */cough*, there is no way to test those products, you can see some videos, you can see screenshot, read the review, but have no idea how it will look like on your computer - I had a problem with the Aerosoft Seahawk & Jayhawk, everything looked fine, payed those damn 40 Euro... but it kills the framerate, no fun flying those at all!

So I figured out that releasing a freeware "demo" version will be a must - lets say one visual model, without the advanced avionics suite (autopilots etc) will be the best way to do it.

d0ugi3 said...

Petite and blonde lotus. :)

Not that britney has any hair anyway....

Vlad said...

She can change her wig colors, can't she?

Lotus / Ramasurinen said...

Sundowner, yeah I understand where you're coming from and I agree completely. You can't really tell how something will actually run without trying it, you can only learn from experience with a particular developer's previous planes, for better or worse, but even then it can be hit and miss depending on the developer, whether its the same people working on each plane or a hodgepodge. The Alphasim F-5 and Gripen are good cases in point. The F-5 is great on frames and very efficient, the Gripen is a very good looking disaster. ;)

And of course there's often no way to get your money back if you don't like something.

Only problem with releasing a basic version of the plane minus the functioning avionics is that those same gauges are often what's killing the fps in the final product.

The only system that really works is the cloud9 one I mentioned before, where you can try the full product for 10 minutes at a time to see if you like it. I think that's brilliant, though it does cause problems with the DLL they use for that protection. That's the invasive part I mentioned before. I'm not really sure there's a solution to this problem unfortunately, other than relying on the goodwill of end users, but most of them have no idea how much work it actually takes to make a plane or scenery addon from scratch, let alone a good one. If everyone had to do it once then I think you'd see FS piracy drop off quite a bit.

Lotus / Ramasurinen said...

Sundowner, btw, lets see some screenies of your S61 so far. :)

Sundowner said...

You'll see it when he 3D model will be complete... that will take a while :P

Lotus / Ramasurinen said...

Rockin, can't wait. Back at namco we called it "pushing polys". Enjoy. :)

Vlad said...

Would "dropping the polys" mean the same?

Anonymous said...

Wow Lotus I only used tpb to test planes to see how thew will be on my system(saved me from blowing a couple hundred dollars)But what about for the poor simmers who can only afford at most 30 dollar planes and most envey the people who have every single add on in exsitence.Take the Iris F-14 for example.I almost bought it and then tryed it out from tpb and found out it sucks on my system.If the plane is good I keep it until I get enough money to buy it myself or just leave it there and save my money for other addons that aren't on there.SO what do you think of using tpb to demo planes???
(P.S one day when I was on their and serched FSX to try out the alphalism F-5 and I saw some one had uploaded FSX its self.Gave me a very long laugh.)P.S.S(The people who get their planes from tpb must realize that you might lose extra features,Extra Fps on your gae,And textures with guages and effects.

Lotus / Ramasurinen said...

F35, what you do is your own business, and I personally have no issue with people pirating planes to try them out, as long as they actually buy the ones they enjoy. Problem is it doesn't work that way. As the old saying goes, if you're getting the milk for free why buy the cow?

As for the cost, $30 for a plane is seriously dirt cheap considering the amount of work it takes to make one and the relatively small size of the market. Keep in mind that only about 40% of FS users are even aware of addons at all, of those maybe half actually purchase one addon per year, and half of those will purchase several.

As an indicator only half the installed base of FSX users actually downloaded SP1 and SP2, that shows how out to lunch most are about the industry that surrounds the sim.

The market is much much smaller than people think and so every pirate hurts addon developers quite badly. When I was working at EA and we were selliing 2-3 MILLION copies of NBA Live per year it didn't matter if a couple thousand people stole it. This is quite the opposite.

Break it down if you like by the number of hours of enjoyment you get out of something like the RealAir Spitfire. I already have around 35 hours flying time in it, so now I've paid $1 per hour or so. Over the course of a year? Pennies. ;)

Anonymous said...

Yo ram I love your style of music man it's alpha! Share playlists sometime ehhh!

I’m doing my instrument rating at the moment man FUck its crazy ha-ha love the shit!

Yeah names Craig btw BIG fan of the work.

I’m in the old liberty XL2.... mad piece of machinery!!!!

larueferguson said...

Alright I've been dying to know. Whats the song name???