With the recent release of Meigs Field by Orbx for X-Plane, there has been a lot of excitement and speculation about what is coming next.
Luckily for us, they have detailed their plans for 2018 on their forum!
You can check out the post here, but I’ll detail what they said right here.
John Venema, Orbx CEO, stated in the post that
“We don’t yet have a formal roadmap to announce yet but here is the rough plan:
Hire more XP experienced developers to add to those already recently joined
Port our most popular small to medium airports to XP11
Potentially port some of our larger more complex airports and their attached ‘micro-regions’
Develop a photoreal Pacific Northwest region
Port the PNW airports across to establish a bush-flyer’s paradise
Work with Ben Supnik and the guys at Laminar to try and add bone animations to the sim so we can add some Flow technologies
Release more ‘first-for-XPlane’ titles (yes, we may end up porting XP airports back to FSX/P3D/AFS2, how about that eh?)
Port across our Netherlands photoreal region
Investigate further US regions
Investigate a UK photoreal region with ported and brand new airports”
All of this is extremely thrilling, and prospect that even more might be added is making my wallet tremble, honestly.
It is particularly exciting that they will be making airports with X-Plane in mind. Venema adds that he hopes “this post will be welcomed by the XP community as a sign of our commitment to the platform.”
I know that I welcome them with open arms, despite the drama that has occurred in the past.
The post also stated that Orbx does not plan (in 2018) to:
“Create an Orbx Global, openLC or Vector product; for now this is too ambitious in scope for the platform
Create land class based regions; XP doesn’t have seasons and we are not yet up to speed with the XP internals just yet”
You can catch some pre-alpha shots of their work in the UK below
