A Milestone...

Well I guess it's time to post something kinda major here... and that is that the L-39 itself is now complete! Woot. All versions finished, all bugs accounted for and squashed. Man I'm tired!

However, before anyone gets excited or anything, I still have a TON of work to do on all the stuff that has to go with the plane, such as the manual, developer website, paint kit, promo video, and some tutorial videos. In a few weeks I will hopefully be able to let you know at least where it will be available for purchase from (not finalized as of yet). Don't ask me for a release date though please because I simply can't give you one, nor can I give you a price, that is still under consideration. I don't know yet how long the items above are going to take but I will post again when the major ones are complete and sorted.

Anyway, here's the final roster of what will be included in the package:

- 9 Full featured Dual Cockpit aircraft (100% shared cockpit compatible). 5 of them are military models, 4 are civilian registered.

- 3 Single Cockpit versions of the aircraft above. They have the same features minus the rear cockpit. Two are military, one civilian. The single seaters knock about 28% of the render load off the VC, so probably better for marginal systems or big multiplayer hops.

- 1 Reno Racing model (Pipsqueak), single seat only, again full featured, and with mad performance compared to a stock L-39.

- 1 Special multiplayer formation team model (in Vjazma Rus Team colours). This one is completely stripped down for pure framerate performance. It has very little extra fun stuff in it, and does not have bump maps, but its external model will likely outperform the default Extra-300 in multiplayer. That means you can get a rather enormous pile of them on screen before your fps starts to tank.

- 1 very complete and hopefully entertaining manual.

The Breitling Team paints will not be included in the package I'm sorry to say, simply because I can't get an answer out of them on permission at all. Five emails and three phone calls later without a response and I officially give up. :) It's airshow season now and they're probably too busy actually flying their L-39s to care, haha. All power to them I guess. I doubt I'd have time for a virtual L-39 if I had access to seven real ones. ;)

Therefore I will make both Breitling paints available for free download, probably on the day of the L-39's release.

The manual will be available for download prior to a purchase if you want to read it, and the paintkit will be available for download as well. The paint kit is not included in the package itself in order to save bandwidth. The L-39 download will be approximately 200 mb in size, around 450 mb installed. Not sure yet on the size of the paint kit, but it will include at least 3 complete paints to use as guides, so it won't be small, that much is certain.

There will be a small manual included with the paint kit as well to guide potential repainters, and I'm not kidding when I say it *needs* to be read first before grabbing your paint brush. Everything in this plane is built for performance first, which means there are some non-standard repainting considerations. It's not a plane for beginners, put it that way. :) I must also mention that the paint kit makes extensive use of Photoshop specific features such as layer styles, and layer groups for organization, which means Photoshop is absolutely required to effectively repaint the plane. GIMP is simply not up to the task.

Anyway, that's all the news, back to the trenches!

-lotus