FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Columbia, SC. Laminar Research announced today that in a surprising board room coup, the company is terminating owner, CEO, president-for-life and benevolent dictator Austin Meyer’s employment, effective immediately.
Randy Witt, VP of marketing, stated: “We couldn’t actually fire him because he owns the company, so instead we locked him in the first floor bathroom of his house. As far as we know the bathroom doesn’t have net connectivity, so he should be out of our hair. We left him some magazines.”
While many long-time X-Plane users were surprised that Mr. Meyer, who has worked on every version of X-Plane since version 1 and was the only X-Plane developer for the first 7 versions of the product, would be terminated so swiftly, others saw it coming. “We knew we had a problem a year or two ago when Austin started talking about plausibility all the time,” recalls Alex Gifford, Laminar’s resident mad scientist and autogen developer. “I had a really wonderful pig with a camera mounted on its head, but we couldn’t use it because it isn’t ‘plausible’ that such a pig would walk down the streets of New York. I thought to myself: the X-Plane I knew and loved would never have shied at putting random animals, some perhaps heavily armed, all over the sim. Just look at X-Plane 9!”
Senior grumpy software engineer Chris Serio concurs. “He wanted to remove the deer that randomly run across the runway at major class B airports. We begged him not to. We just looked at each other and said ‘who is this guy and what happened to the Austin we once knew?'”
But the final straw was Mr. Meyer’s early April 1st prank, stating that X-Plane would become a casual flying game similar to Microsoft’s recently released “Flight” product.
Barista-in-chief Ben Supnik describes the scene: “We were just appalled. I mean, publicly mocking our competition, preferably without using their actual products, while our own product has serious known bugs is standard operating procedure for Laminar Research. But the early release of the announcement was just unacceptable. Laminar has always been about missing deadlines, sometimes by several years. The notion that such a statement would come out over a full week early was just too much for us to bear.”
When asked how X-Plane might change in Mr. Meyer’s absence, Mr. Supnik hinted that the company would move to a table-based flight model with “at least four or five data points”, and that, with plausibility no longer a necessary design goal, the company was looking to license Skyrim as its rendering engine.
Pretty bad day at the office, and first day of April too! Funny how things line up!
Enjoyable, thank you!
To be honest I got a little tired of him explaining blade element theory for the umpteenth time. It’s just better this way. I’m glad you guys did it today.
Haha, happy April Fools.
I believed it at first, then I realized you were playing a prank on me.
The worst part of this joke is the Skyrim engine… YUCK.
It was about time! Who does he think he is???? 😀
Uh….its april fools right? im getting comfused!
You couldn’t resist, could you? Oh well, back to to the salt mines!
Viva la revolution!
I presume this means you will be switching from OpenGL to DirectX.
It’s about time! Don’t let him out of that basement until he has rewritten X-plane’s user interface.
GOOD MOVE! I never liked that Apple fanboy. 🙂
Pity it’s April 1st. 😉
What is it with you guys and the restroom? First Javier locks Austin in on the 747 restroom, and now you lock him in his own restroom in his house!?
Too Funny!!! Happy 4/1
Gamebryo powering XP10? Uh-ho, time to work on unofficial patches! Although I can’t wait to see the new pathfinding AI in action… 😀
Skyrim? Heavily armed animals? Well, clearly this can only mean one thing! DRAGONS!!! I’d better modify my 747 so that I have missiles for my flights for SeaTac to San Fran, I refuse to get taken down by a horde of dragons!
Leaked screen shot from the new X-plane!
Oops, forgot the link (tried to post it inline with the last post…)
Just look at the shaders on that Dragon! Skyrim’s got a great engine, eh?
Lol that was fun !!
Hey Propsman ?! What about your Bell 47 and Huey ? I’m always really wanting this ones, they impressed me some years ago, hope to see them soon, hopefully before the XB-70..
You’re truly a 3D artist, I can’t be tired of contemplating Hughes 500 D rotorhead..
Laminar do have a sense of humour – Now that is really scary.
Hahaha.. nice. Totally forgot it was April Fool’s Day!
Haha, this was so good! And yes, DX10 for XP10 just sounds so much better!
April’s Fool doesn’t fool me! It is time someone develops a virtual toilet. Now i can stay behind the controls, making my landings more real without being afraid of wetting my pants all the time. 😉
Who can do better such a job than Austin.
Can you make a harrier for x-plane please?
Really funny, thanks.
By connecting the start and the end of the post, it is obvious to say that Austin developed 10 version of XP, then he took an arrow in the knee 🙂
Are you going to take Austin back anytime soon?
We’re already on the 3. rd of March, and I’d love to read more about your continouing progress.
thanks anders, you meant 3rd of April, but I get your frustration and inquiry. i wish they went back to version 10 tuesdays or something similar where each week we get status updates on fixes, enhancements and eta of a given patch or feature. it is hard to go from daily to bi weekly updates, feels like were in the dark until the day something posts.
when exactly should we be expecting the next major patch, 1, 2 or 3 weeks? will it be 10.1 or another .xx beta problematic stage. i seem to have fixed the carrier issue, i did everything i did before, again. However, now xplane keeps crashing after I’m in flight or change views. I am not maxing my memory either. I am getting very frustrated with this sim as is. Until this sim is very stable, when bugs don’t re appear, new features start becoming the norm vs bugs bug bugs and or I have a high end iMac or Mac Pro , I see my xplane time decreasing unfortunately. having frame rates of only 19-29 all the dang time on runways at large airports blows, + no chance for HDR, any lower settings then the sim begins to look bland and aesthetically un appealing.
Don’t report bugs here. We are going to delete comments that report bugs. You have been warned.
i reported on the bug form too, but the bugs keep coming back again and again, then when i re report them I’m told not to. whats the deal very frustrating
your reply proves to me there is little to no interest in helping the issues or acknowledging them, let alone good customer relations. deletion will all but confirm. i am simply looking for help so i can best use this great work and know that you guys are fixing stuff , what is being fixed and when.
¿Is this the same Chris that got banned some time ago?.
Because 5 messages in less than 15 minutes, all of them complaining, sure sounds like him… and like another ban is coming.
LoreLai, maybe I wouldn’t need to complain or repeat issues if people took them seriously and acknowledged them/ fix them and or not leave us users in the dark about eta’s for fixes and features. never mind sarcastic remarks, non addressing replies and such. This is ridiculous.
You are an irritating little guy, arn’t you?
I hope these issues get fixed and plane becomes more and more of a awesome flight sim. obviously to please all you guys/ save further issues, I am done for good commenting and following this blog. I am simply going to check the wiki beta and file a bug report if something is not fixed/ deal with not seeing whats being done on this blog.
thank you
by the way, i took my macbook pro to apple and they called their engineers to see about the ati gnu issue. i.e. with new orleans roads and some in NYC. i gave them a pdf of email transcript between me and randy/ jack citing the drivers and such hoping to hear back
Ben/art team, on a completely different note: does the announcement that the lego brick system is already complete (from //developer.x-plane.com/2011/12/the-plan-for-airports) still stand? I’m asking because I couldn’t find a single hangar *facade* while toying around a bit yesterday. There are a couple of objects, of course (all of which look quite nice, by the way). But hangars, like terminals, tend to come in so many different sizes, and even shapes, while having mostly similar “architecture”, that I think facades would be better suited for the job. Moreover, at smaller airports hangars are often completely on the “air side”, where a row of parking lots attached to a hangar might interfere with a taxiway.
Case in point: I’m looking at two octagonal hangars right now, at Tacoma Narrows. Of the two dozen other, more conventionally shaped ones there, some 20 have unique sizes, and only a very few have sizes similar to one of the lego brick objects. The situation at Bremerton Nat’l, another typical busy GA airport a couple miles NW, is similar. These two examples also illustrate that hangars are often the most important buildings (in terms of numbers) at smaller airports.
Judith
The plan still stands. I can’t guarantee that every library element will be exactly like what you see in real life; the library is meant to be plausible, but not accurate. For accurate, use a 3-d modeler. The library will become more ‘rich’ in shapes over time.
Ah, I see. I got the impression the lego bricks were meant to enable us to accurately trace building footprints, which X-Plane would turn into plausible-looking buildings, just like we accurately trace the taxiway layouts, while leaving the visual representation to X-Plane. Hence my surprise to find only a handful of facades. My bad.
So I set out to create a plausible layout for KTIW that, while not accurate, is still somewhat representative of the place. Which is a surprisingly quick process, at least for a first rough draft. But of course I ran into another problem: half my buildings float or are buried on one side, because the whole apron is aslope, slowly descending towards the edge of the cliff the airport sits on. Which looks especially funny for .agps, with the attached accessories sitting on the ground, but the main building’s wall suspended a few feet above. For ordinary .obs, I can partially correct that by manually (and painstakingly) setting the elevation, but the .agps seem to ignore that. Now what? Can I somehow tilt the buildings (which is completely unrealistic, but would probably look more plausible nevertheless)? Should I file an art asset bug report (“hangars have no basements”)?
Judith
You have the general idea right but we only support tracing right now for some asset types – we did major terminals and parking garages that way first because they are amenable to facades and the shape often is quite important.
Please do file a bug re: ground elevation and we’ll take a look…there are a number of ways to finesse slopes, but I’d have to see the pack to pick the right one.
When are you going to implement skeletal animation and softskinning, so a dragon could actually be realized as x-plane model?
Actually skeletal animation _is_ on the long-term road map….not for dragons but just because it’s the logical next step.
When we first coded OBJ animation, most GPUs were not programmable; we chose non-skinnable rigid body animation for performance reasons. These days skeletal animation can be done 100% on the card and is probably more CPU efficient for some cases. I’ve been meaning to write up an RFC for a future “OBJ10” (whether OBJ10 makes it into XP10 or 11, who knows, but I figure it’s good to give people a sense of where we’re going.)
+1
April Fools right?