Following a controversial major product announcement at FSExpo over the weekend, PMDG‘s Robert Randazzo has issued an unexpected, yet welcomed X-Plane development update on the AVSim forums.
Randazzo starts off by saying that although it has been a long time since the company has said or done anything in the X-Plane community, he assures users that the platform is not being intentionally ignored. With resources being freed up following the announcement of Global Flight Operations and the 747-8 entering beta for the Prepar3D platform, R.S.R. says that it is only now that the company can begin to look at their next move in the world of X-Plane.
As it stands, PMDG’s only product on the X-Plane platform is their DC-6 Cloudmaster that was released just over 2 years ago. This aircraft was designed for X-Plane 10, and since the release has not been updated for X-Plane 11 compatibility. Naturally, with X-Plane 11 well out of its infancy now, users have been screaming for an update to the classic airliner. Finally, the cries have been heard, and Randazzo says that they’re now beginning to look at what needs to be done to bring this aircraft into X-Plane 11.
While this is a promising sign, Randazzo says the amount of work required for this update is unknown at this point, though over the coming weeks and months they’ll be working out just how large this task may be and will insert the task of updating the aircraft into their development schedule for the remainder of 2018 accordingly. Once this is worked out, he promises to update the community accordingly.
Furthermore, Mr Randazzo discusses the possibility of expanding their X-Plane catalogue. He tells of meeting with Ben Supnik from Laminar Research over the weekend at FSExpo and discussing the possibility of their products on Laminar’s platform going forward, as well as the technical aspects involved in this. While nothing firm came out of this, he says that there is a plan for future meetings to be held with the Laminar, after the release of the 747-8, where they expect to clearly mark out the challenges and requirements that they would face should they expand further into the X-Plane world.
Check out the full post from Mr Randazzo here.
