Orbx released a roadmap in December last year for expanding its portfolio to emerging flight simulation platforms. One of these, dubbed Project-X, to mark the company’s entry into the X-Plane market has been cancelled.
Orbx CEO, John Venema explained:
“Just over two weeks ago I shared a rough outline of what 2017 and beyond could look like from an Orbx point of view:
I believe it’s important for a company to share its vision with customers and generate excitement around future plans, and do this without necessarily spelling out specific details in black and white. There are many reasons why we try to avoid showing pre-alpha screenshots and other works in progress; and probably the main reason is to avoid raising expectations too early.
So Project X, as most of you correctly guessed, was X-Plane. We showed you a screenshot from a 98% complete KCGX Meigs Field which we had contracted out to be ported. The only stuff not working were human animated characters, something I am sure we would have eventually solved. So in this instance we had a real product ready to ship for XP-10 and XP-11, but which in fact was really nothing more than an internal proof of concept.
We have a few such projects underway internally, trying various emerging sim platforms, different technology partners, new data sources, new development techniques, different engines, and so on. We’re constantly experimenting with ‘stuff’. That’s a vital part of any company’s future; the R&D side.
So we have to make calls as to which platforms are going to meet our goals that we measure across a whole bunch of criteria; much more than simple metrics about performance, SDKs, community, market etc – an internal measurement which is important to us as a business and team of passionate developers.
Rather than string the FS community along for many months I’d rather just be Occam’s Razor and nip it in the bud now. We won’t be doing any development for any version of X-Plane for the foreseeable future, if at all.
We WILL be releasing some beautiful products for Aerofly FS 2 that play into our decade of experience; expect more announcements in the coming months and some major releases by the time FlightSimCon 2017 comes around in mid-June.
We WILL continue to develop all our new products for FSX/P3D as our continued premiere platform. We WILL install the P3D 4.x SDK and see what it has in store for us. We WILL install the Dovetail SDK when it becomes available and explore options there as well.
And we will continue to play with new tech and emerging platforms and maybe surprise you all one day. Who knows?”
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