It's not MSFS but look at this!

[chrisal]

Sorry Garry - my mistake - I didn't spot that

Chris

[Garry Russell]

No problems

[Brian Franklin]

Not too keen on the exterior, smoothness and overall finish, but the inside.... the mans a god!

[gordon-in-aberdeen]

I tend to agree with you there Brian, the work thats been done on the inside is very impressive, certainly shows what can be achieved with a desire for high procedural accuracy in a model. The big question is, is it worth the effort? How many people that would follow the whole procedure through to the end to get the dam thing started

[Brian Franklin]

I suppose you're right, definitely one for the purest's

[DarrenL]

The big question is, is it worth the effort? How many people that would follow the whole procedure through to the end to get the dam thing started

10 minutes on the free demo certainly won't be long enough

[guym-p]

How many people that would follow the whole procedure through to the end to get the dam thing started

Ah, well. There are ways to cheat, you know ...

Gentlemen!

I am the developer of the Comet for X-Plane.

My father worked for de Havilland from 1946-56 and Bristol Aero Engines (on Olympus and Pegasus) from 1956-60. Five years ago, he and I made a tour of museums. I was astonished at the scale of de Havilland, the diversity and quality of the products they produced in the 1950s. To me the Comet was the peak of de Havilland's achievements. I went through my father's extensive archive, Gazettes, manuals and notes, boggled at the problems that the first jet airliner presented, and the solutions DH had to develop.

I hadn't owned a flight sim. since Aviator on the BBC Micro Computer (do any of you remember that?). I looked enviously at David Maltby's Comet, but I had a Mac, and (in those days) Macs would not run Windows properly. If they had, I would never have built one. I found X-Plane pretty quickly, but no Comet, so I decided to make one. I had no idea how I was going to do it, but I was determined to learn.

The Comet is my first effort, built in my spare time over the last five years. I learned each skill from scratch. It was a very silly thing to do, really, I should have started with something simpler, like a DH-104 Dove. It started on X-Plane v8, when we were limited to a fuselage and 20 miscellaneous bodies, each body 20 cross section "stations" along its length. Cross sections had 16 points, but they had to be symmetrical. We defined 8 points on one side and "Plane Maker" mirrored the other half. It meant people could bash out aircraft pretty fast, but it was a serious restriction for anything complex. The asymmetric engine nacelles on the Comet were impossible to reproduce that way and I never released it.

As X-Plane developed, so did the Comet. With v8.20, we were (at last) able to import 3D files and add animation, which has grown and grown in sophistication. Scenery and aircraft improved tenfold. v9.00 improved clicks and drags. starting a race to build the best 3D cockpit. The outside of the Comet is my very earliest work, and rough, being a development of the crude original. The cockpit panels, especially the Flight Engineer's panel, is my most recent. What I'm not going to do is to go back over old ground, or I'll always have an excuse not to release it. Instead, I have a list of improvements for future upgrades, and look forward to starting a brand new tube and wings at some point in the future.

Therefore I am delighted by criticism, however harsh. Even Garry Russell's. Membership of the X-Plane forum has quadrupled since the closure of the ACES studio. It's still tiny compared with MSFS/FSX, but gathering momentum. If circulation continues to grow, the commercial developers will turn to it as a source of income. Developers like me have a small window of opportunity to learn how to produce seriously polished work. If we're not good enough by then, they'll muscle us out. So please, criticism is good.

Guy.

[DaveB]

Welcome to the forum Guy and thanks VM for the introduction

ATB

DaveB

[Garry Russell]

Hello Guy

Welcome aboard

Thanks for the run down.........sorry if I seem harsh, but it's nothing personal

[guym-p]

No offence taken. I meant what I said – all criticism is welcome if it helps knock the Comet into shape.

Guy.