[UPDATE] TFDi Design Announces PACX

TFDi Design has announced PACX, a dynamic passenger simulation tool compatible with any aircraft of your choosing. This tool will finally bring your passengers to life. Each decision you make will individually impact your passengers’ mood based on their personality.

PACX also allows you to make various announcements to your passengers specific to your current flight. Whether it’s a safety briefing or notifying the passengers of a delay, this tool will add a new layer of immersion to your flights.

If you would like to learn more, visit the official PACX announcement page.

[UPDATE 0805z] Click through to the full article to read about our follow-up with Joshua from TFDi.

[UPDATE 0805z] FSElite contacted Joshua M from TFDi to ask a few questions following this announcement.

On the product announcement page linked above, TFDi mention compatibility with X-Plane. We asked Joshua if this was expected to be available alongside the ESP platform compatibility at release. Unfortunately for X-Plane users, it seems as if this is primarily just an idea at this point in time – he said “One of the many challenges we’ll begin to face have to do with interfacing with the simulator itself. We’d rather not use middle man interfaces so we would need to develop our own for this program.”

Naturally, the prospect of the company developing anything for the X-Plane platform will always raise the question of their 717 product being ported to Laminar’s simulator. While that idea isn’t off the table entirely, he said: “that isn’t something we are planning at this moment, but we will never rule anything out in the future.”

On a slightly more niche aspect, the prospect of PACX being using in a full-size sim cockpit was discussed. Naturally, owners of these simulators are always striving for the pinnacle of realism in the simulations, so one would expect that this product would appeal to them. Usually, with these simulator setups, external applications like this are run via the network for ease of interfacing (ie: SimConnect). For example, most full-size simulator owners and operators will run applications such as ActiveSky from an instructor’s station. We asked if this was something that they had considered for the product, with Joshua saying “…we would need to discuss this as a team for feasibility for initial release. Our main focus to have a working core program, and then we can start to add extra features over time.”

So in all, some good news for those who would not ordinarily have considered themselves to be the target market for products from TFDi.