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?