Hello, I am Austin Meyer, author of X-Plane, and I am announcing some major new improvements and pricing strategies for X-Plane 10.1, due out in a few weeks!
First of all, starting with X-Plane 10.1, we will be removing almost all of the world-wide dynamic scenery that X-Plane is known for. It is simply too much work for us to create, maintain, and improve this kind of massive database, so we are cutting the Global Scenery out of X-Plane starting with version 10.1.
Of course, we still need to have some scenery to fly over, so, to keep our jobs simple, we will be cutting the scenery down to the smallest and most geographically isolated area we can imagine: Hawaii. We chose Hawaii because that is such a small area that we can very easily create and distribute it.
As well, this tiny flying area will be totally static. There will be no moving cars, no dynamic lighting, and no living cities. No immersive 3-D world loaded with AI cars and planes to fly in. There is simply no need for this complex and dynamic environment and it is actually a very difficult job for us to continue to provide this stuff for you.
And heer some interesting parts.
We will be changing our pricing structure. Version 10.1 will be free, but by the time you have bought the tiniest quantity of add-ons, you will have paid us a notable amount and never be able to expand upon that without paying us more.
And … we have decided to remove support for Mac and Linux and just provide X-Plane on Microsoft Windows.
We here at Laminar Research believe that the success of Apple is just a fad, and that Microsoft will be the future of computing, since we all love Microsoft Windows so much, just like we know you do.
So, hopefully this will make X-Plane have more “mass market appeal,” and therefore be a better sim for all of us!
To the future!
Oops …. we did it again …. Happy April Fools Day, everyone! You want to read more … here you are.