NZFF

Via their FB page:

https://www.facebook.com/FlightbeamStud ... =1&theater

It's official!

Holy crap that's exciting. The gold star treatment for little ol us!

OH boy Auckland as well .. must be something in the New Zealand water other than goldfish

Great news for sure.

Wasn't ORBX rumoured to be working on NZAA for some time now?

Agent X20 wrote:Great news for sure.

Wasn't ORBX rumoured to be working on NZAA for some time now?

Yeah I though so too. Although I heard it was turbulent design so I'm not too worried.
Turbulent's latest melbourne was apparently causing OOMs. Not surprising when the ATC tower is make of about 4 2k texture sheets. Totally over the top for something you see from a great distance.

Very happy with FlightBeam.

It will be interesting to see and to find out if they follow these forums ... best thing with a newbie scenery is bring the real McCoy airline drivers and regulars from in around the region to get it right ... with all that is going on currently specific Auckland to Christchurch makes for a great route.

I noticed Christchurch is on the horizon too... my interest of course is to convince these guys that 90% of the work is getting it all together, and platform-specific stuff can follow.
UK 2000 sceneries are like this, and we FS9ers of course benefit from that approach.
Nobody will make us an FS2004 NZAA I s'pose.

Charl wrote:Nobody will make us an FS2004 NZAA I s'pose.

Hey, of course someone could, I'd do it myself, I'd deliver it complete to you, and you can do what you want with it. Which would probably mean selling it, to recoup the $30,000 contract price...

Cheque's in the mail... before Christmas, please

I do wonder about a freeware double whammy .. a scenery that dose FS-9 an can plop into FSX , old days one could not get terminal photos, now we may now have that .. Now ... if I had a real time job maybe

Charl wrote:Cheque's in the mail... before Christmas, please

My post was really to put this in perspective, converting it to dollars -- incidentally, I've quoted the mates-rates price for 3 months work, so in an ideal world you'd get it by Christmas...

it would be great if someone did beautiful freeware airports like NZAA, but that isn't really the way things are done these days. When I started out simming, I 'discovered' local addons, and that's when my interest really piqued. I went searching, and found some gems -- Christian Stock's 150 metre mesh, Ian Warren's NZCH, and then FS2002 came along, and people like Savern Rewiti released lots of great little sceneries. So I found dozens of addons in my first few weeks of looking, and assumed that these were being released quickly and often. Them things went quiet, nothing happening for months. I hadn't realised that the scenery I'd found had been completed and released over a long time, and that a new release was a rarity. That's when I starting thinking about what I could do to speed things up.

Cut a long story short, when I had the chance to go full-time ('chance?' More like redundancy...) I was aware that it still took a long time per project, and I've always encouraged people to give it a go. However not many takers.

So, how would a 'modern' developer look at FS9 NZAA? I chose a development figure -- $30,000 -- but really for a business you'd need to double this if you wanted to develop and sell a scenery, and that's a small scenery (or a FS9 scenery, which amounts to the same thing.)

To recoup the minimum of $30,000, but really this figure represents a 'contract' price, and doesn't involve selling it over time -- which would need to be double:
30 x $1,000
100 x $300
300 x $100
1000 x $30

(In reality, for FSX/prepared, you'd need to sell 2000 of anything at $30 nett of distribution costs.)

For FSX/Prepar3d, the last one would work, but FS9? Bearing in mind the price per quantity, what's the likelihood of getting close to any of these, Best bet would be finding 30 really, really keen FS9ers who would contribute $1000 each. The others, I think would never eventuate. (I am assuming, from experience, that FS9ers don't spend as much money as FSXers, otherwise they would've upgraded:)

What's the answer, then? Well, you really need to do it yourself. When I started I had no modelling skills and no intention of ever release anything, I only wanted to show real developers how it worked for FS2002. So anyone can start from scratch, it just takes time, patience and more time. Did I mention patience?

Weird thing, I seemed to achieve more when I was working, all sort NZCH, NZNS, NZWN, NZWG, NZNV , help with Hamilton and Taupo and with updates and and other little strips as well for Mike not to mention the AGN for you Rob, yet today I don't seem to have any time ... were are the others, so it will be interesting to see what happen's in the next few years.

Delayed:

http://flightbeam.net/forums/viewtopic.php?f=25&t=2930

That's sad. If memory serves me right, they had a demo version on display at FSCon, no, not in the last year but in 2016. That's 1 1/2 years ago. Not some screenshots but an executable version.

I understand quality development takes time, but NZAA isn't EGLL. They still can produce updates after a couple of years, as they do for their other airports as well. Or is the airport completely demolished and rebuilt from the ground up...?

Kind regards, Michael

No not a complete rebuild but there is significant work that will make modelling difficult. The other is that with so much work (and traffic growth) getting airfield access is difficult. A real shame as we really do need a quality NZAA representation.