No more British aircraft from AlphaSim!

[Trev Clark]

And they blame US, I am afraid


http://www.alphasim3.com/forums/index.php?topic=5567.0

All i can say is, what a pity and thanks for all the stuff that you have made in the past. I look forward to loads of Russian and American heavy metal :o :roll: . It seems the payware British Aviation industry has gone the same way that the real thing did

Lets hope Skysim can 'pick up the baton'

[Garry Russell]

Hi Trev

This came up on the thread the other day.

Garry

[DaveB]

This is pretty much old hat now Trev

My understanding of the situation is that it was a knee-jerk reaction said in anger rather than a 'considered' statement of fact ;-) Some pretty harsh words were said over there about us, most of it by the party faithful but it was, in reality, no more than was happening here. I wasn't particularly happy to see CBFS being bandied around as a place Alpha should send their models for testing before release even though I'm sure the offer was made in good faith by the person concerned.

We do tend to be rather critical of models here and this is in no small part due to the excellent models produced by our modellers and team. It can be argued (and rightly so IMHO) that almost without exception.. I can't think of one.. the quality of what is produced here exceeds much of that released from the payware world but we are not driven by market forces and it is not our guys sole source of income so the pursuit of perfection comes without any overhead. Alphasim's market is in itself a niche market and they couldn't afford to exist if they only produced as many aircraft per year as our guys do here. It's horses for courses. While they don't 'bang em out' as fast as Ito San, they don't suffer the same drawbacks either

While everyone who's bought the Scimitar (which is in many ways, the straw that broke the camels back) is frustrated.. not so much by it requiring an instant patch but generally, for the trivial nature of the patch.. I doubt few are as frustrated as Alpha as yet another one slipped through. Having spoken to Dan, I know he's at his wits end!

So.. while I honestly don't think this see's the end of Brit models, the Tornado may be the last for a while. Bottom line is that even without the flak tooing and froing.. Brit models don't generate enough units sold for them to be viable all the time. We had a lean patch a couple of years ago.. up until quite recently I suppose, where few Brit models were released so we've not done bad over the last few months. If there is to be another 'lean' time.. then sobeit. My buying habits will change as they will for many of us from this fair isle but I'd like to think we'll get the odd surprise every now and again ;-)

ATB

DaveB :tab:

[Techy111]

Hmmmm..........

Tony

[John]

I'm obviously very late to this discussion... but it'll be a great shame if they stop building classic british airframes. All I'll say is this, my personal experience of AlphaSim has been of a manufacturer who I can talk to about the any (very rare) problems and one who has fixed them extremely quickly (IMHO)

Firstly let me state this anything less than 100% of the specified performance is unacceptable.

But...

Having worked for many years for a car maufacturer that I beleive had exceptional engineering quality, even we had problems 'post customer release' and our R&D budget, as a proportion of turnover, was higher than any other manufacturer. So mistakes (call them what you will) do happen.

Laterly I was responsible for a Pan European CGi modelling programme that, even with talent drawn from all over the world, still experienced unforseen 'glitches' on varying operating systems of the hi-resolution models.

I for one given AlphaSim's history, genuinely beleive that they strive for delivered an appropriate quailty of interesting subjects time after time.

Kind regards as always

John

[Chris Sykes]

can i just ask where on earth (here) would those posts be??? i dont think ive ever seen those kind of style postings here, just good old constructive critisims and views of the models... well its a shame as i do buy some of their british stuff and forien stuff too, such as the likes of the merlin pair, the tu-160 and the only good gripen available!!!

[Imperator]

If it is about not having to take criticism then what are they saying about the US customers? - "We keep on selling you shoddy product as long as you want to buy it, because you poor dumb schmos dont know any better"? Charming!

Ist that what Phil is thinking? :o

[AndyG]

Dave hit it right on the head, this Forum (if I can use it as a collective noun for a moment) can be critical, largely because we have been spoilt rotten by some superb freeware. Chris, you may not have read some posts as negative criticism because you were used the individuals in question and made allowances accordingly - for example, my role here is to be the pinko liberal.

Take the recent discussion of Itos 177, some pretty harsh things were said, but the overall tone was positive.

I made much the same point as Dave over on the forum (and in a couple of PM's!!). There were destructive comments being made both there and here and, by the time Phil and Dan surfaced from hibernation, things had already snowballed out of control. In both places toys were thrown out of prams and things better left unsaid weren't!

I suspect the sensible thing would be for all parties to walk away from things for a while and let the dust settle. Lest we all forget, it's only a game!

Andy

[TSR2]

Where's Tonks when you need him......

It's NOT real

Coolio

[Chris Trott]

As a guy who's been on both sides of this issue, I have to say that while the criticism here has been mainly constructive, there are a few who continue to be very forceful about the quality of the AlphaSim products and I can see how Phil and Dan would get fed up with it - they deal with it daily and they are only a small group, not a massive corporation with customer service personnel to go through and sift out all the chaff for the good information and suggestions. Some of the comments being made about AlphaSim were getting to the level of the M$ bashing that goes on over FSX, and that's sad to see because none of it is really warranted. Many of you look upon both situations with a jaded eye and when it's pointed out, some of you come back with a very sour response instead of taking that constructive feedback being pointed out just as you try to give constructive feedback to the developers.

AlphaSim will return to British aircraft in the future, I'm sure of it. But they are right - proportional to unit sales, they get a lot more flak over UK releases than any other release. They are correct that there is not much market for UK aircraft versus US and Russian (hundreds of units vice thousands of units in each of the other two), so please stop trying to tell them that they don't know their own sales figures. It's exactly the kind of thing that brought us to this junction with AlphaSim.

BTW, just as a test to see how bad it's gotten, I challenge any of you to go into the Payware section and look at the fact that most of the AlphaSim threads are LOCKED because they got out of hand for one reason or another.