NZFF

Gudday Rob.
Just being nosey and inqusitive (as you do), about whether you have made a decision on the contents for CD # 5 yet ??

Lawrie

Ardmore? **crosses fingers**

Hamilton maybe ?

Nelson??? Please????

Hmmm, good question...
It won't be Ardmore, I do have an almost-finished Ardmore but I cannot release it until I'm happy with it, and that ain't gonna happen until I get to fly up there again. I may not be able to spare the time until I get started on Auckland International.
Ardmore may be a freeware release, although designed for Real NZ Auckland City.

The next CD will include... scenery, hopefully for both FS2004 and FSX. For this reason it will take longer than others, as I need to a) get hold of some effective FSX design tools, and B) figure out how they work.

Until then I'm keeping this under wraps. I have noticed a trend towards undermining some of my releases, unintentionally, no doubt, but in the meantime I'll keep this a surprise.

Queenstown maybe????

I do have an almost-finished Ardmore but I cannot release it until I'm happy with it, and that ain't gonna happen until I get to fly up there again. I may not be able to spare the time until I get started on Auckland International.
Ardmore may be a freeware release, although designed for Real NZ Auckland City.

Best news I have heard all day

I have noticed a trend towards undermining some of my releases, unintentionally

what do mean by this statment ,do people make scenery and realease what you were going to do ?
just a thought if others where to know what scenerys ppls are making around NZ then ppl would know not to bother making it as you are doing the area ,
i came into this problem this week with a guy in the usa doing a repaint of helimed1 northland rescue ,well ive already done one but not realeased it ..
he had already started it and i just pointed him in the right direction of the photos and said go for it , ill keep mine if his one dont look that good


i would love to start hamilton airport one day but my reasons for not starting are that i dont know if you are doing it ,i would hate to put in all those hours ,just to be out shadow by yourself three weeks later with realNZhamilton etc...
lucky i didnt start ardmore then i had got lots of pics for that one ..

well i do go on abit
mike

Mike
You call that going on a bit? No, THIS is going on a bit....
First of all, I've always encouraged people to make their own scenery, that was the main focus of the Windowlight site when it turned to the dark side of the fs. The intention of the original GMAX tutorials was to get enough folk involved in scenery design to really make a difference to what was available locally, but back in those days it just didn't have any effect. (Overseas response was a bit different, non-English speaking people liked my tutorials because they were easy to translate.)
Another goal of the original site was to track current projects so that people would know what was in development, but again this didn't really work -- there were more releases 'out of the blue' than those that were pre-announced.

Up until the start of the NZFF site things hadn't changed much, so it is noteworthy that the interest we are seeing lately is a new and exciting direction.

HOWEVER...
Some of the decisions I make need to be based on business sense, something I have very little of. This is annoying, I'd much rather do what I like, it'd be a lot more fun, but the fact is that this is a very limited and fragile market, and I have yet to get to the stage where I can look at supporting myself long-term.
Wanaka was a valuable lesson -- I really wanted to do Wanaka, and had a lot of fun doing it, but it sold less than half of the number required to break even. I can't afford to have too many of these, although sometimes I will choose to do a project without expectation of profit. Just not too many in the first year of business:)
At this particular moment the release of FSX has pretty much stopped sales dead. I think that most developers expected this, and had made some sort of contingency plans to survive the transition, but I haven't been at this long enough to do anything but live day to day.

Ultimately I hope to release every airport in New Zealand. The order in which they are produced is the tricky bit. Those who have kept track of things I've mentioned in the forums and on my site will know that there is a very good chance that Hamilton will be on the next CD.
Incidentally, speaking of Hamilton, I have lost track of the number of people over the last 6 years who have told me they plan to release Hamilton Airport. I have given up working around other people's schedules. But as I said, the market is fragile, and would be further eroded by the release of an alternative quality airport.
That's not to say that I don't want to see some quality airports released. But stop-gap releases designed to plug the gaps until someone releases a 'proper' version are a lot less effective than just choosing one good airport and getting stuck in.
My advice -- choose one airport. Read my airport design tutorials if you need help getting started. Visit the airport. Take lots of photos. Take measurements. Practice the tricky bits -- making quality models and textures. Enlist help in the areas which you are not comfortable in. (This is not aimed at you, Mike, I'm speaking generally:)

The amount of cohesion brought about by this forum has really surprised me, I've always hoped that this would happen here, but had almost given up. Community-driven scenery projects have put some parts of the world well ahead of the rest. I'd love to see it happen here.

well thankyou for that Robin it has once again inspired me ,i did start out reading from your forums and i know you have had plans to do most if not all the airports in the country my projects are little and fill gaps and are designed for mainly myself in mind ,ive tryed alittle bit off everything in fs and find scenery /eye candy most rewarding ,one thing that stops me getting further is my abllitys to read tutorials and stick at one project at a time ,adhd ,but the learning process is slow and painful ,ive got a list as long as my arm of things that ive part learnt and given up till i need to learn that one again ,so ill ask more most proberly in the future
FSX well i dont think much of it anymore ive got to many addons that dont work that well in fsx and all my harden helipads dont work,sure i can still fly choppers but take away my heli pads some of my scenery tools /and all the things mostly ive learnt in fs9 ,well not very encoraging is it ...
i know ill be always getting scenery from youself because i know its not some half a** job that i did ...
im all in for whatever i can do for others to make our little old NZ the NO1 place to fly ,its dam better than flying across some desert looking for payware in the states ,
anywho i better start looking back through tutorials again on night mapping ,oh and how to concentrat on things

Hey Mike, your not the only one with concentration problems.
Me toooooooooooooo. Always getting sidetracked into something else, and got far toooooo many unfinished projects lying around. Like you, the reason i started this thread with the question to Robin, is because i was working on an NZHN scenery, and didnt want to spend countless hours on it, and then Rob releases an incredibly beautiful RealNZ Hamilton. I dont have time for NZHN at the moment anyway, between the RETRO AI project, and a couple of other requests i am working on. I spent 4 months working on an NZTG scenery, because it was an ignored airport in the FS community,(and i live there), and then Rob announced his NZTG. No point in releasing my one, it just paled by comparison to Robin's.
I will always be lining up to purchase Robin's work, it just DOESN'T come any better than RealNZ !!

Robin,.............. if you do make NZHN for CD-5, can you please, please, please, include the the Pacific Aerospace (old James Aviation) hanger area in the scenery.

Lawrie.

when you do an Auckland International give me a pm - I can get hands on all sorts of charts, photos,pictures,apron layouts and am happy to test drive and provide info on correcting parking and taxi routes and lighting layouts etc -
cheers

toprob wrote: Incidentally, speaking of Hamilton, I have lost track of the number of people over the last 6 years who have told me they plan to release Hamilton Airport. I have given up working around other people's schedules. But as I said, the market is fragile, and would be further eroded by the release of an alternative quality airport.
That's not to say that I don't want to see some quality airports released. But stop-gap releases designed to plug the gaps until someone releases a 'proper' version are a lot less effective than just choosing one good airport and getting stuck in.
My advice -- choose one airport. Read my airport design tutorials if you need help getting started. Visit the airport. Take lots of photos. Take measurements. Practice the tricky bits -- making quality models and textures. Enlist help in the areas which you are not comfortable in. (This is not aimed at you, Mike, I'm speaking generally:)

True, not aimed at Mike, but likely aimed at me since that "stop-gap" line is straight from my readme. I've released a lot of these over the past year (Hamilton, Taupo, Darwin, Fort Myers; updates on Auckland; and working on Belleville and Rockford, IL).

Robin, I apologise if I have been undermining your efforts. It was never my intent to do so. I would love to work with GMAX and all that, and I may in the days ahead start learning it in detail as I go back on the road. Until then, I will refrain from doing anything in NZ until I find out what is already being done.

I'd like to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem.

Rob D.
Proud Subscriber of Real NZ sceneries...

Rob
I certainly wouldn't want you to stop working on NZ, and frankly I didn't get 'stop-gap' from your readme -- I thought that up all by my own self:) My intention here wasn't to stop anyone from doing what they want, it was just to point out that I need to take any other designer's releases, whether current or future, into account when I decide on a project. And if the timing of a project was changed because of a freeware release in the pipeline, I certainly wouldn't resent the release.
Cash-flow is an ongoing problem in this business, and it makes sense for me to delay a project which may not generate sufficient cash-flow on release because some folk may be happy with their recently-released freebie. However further down the track I may be in a better position to release something as a long-term catalogue item, rather than something which needs to support me short-term.
Any quality release will affect my direction if I was considering the same release -- not only because it would affect my sales, but also because I too need to look at where the gaps are.
However, having said that, everyone needs to be aware that every airport is fair game, and the existence of a quality freeware scenery wouldn't stop me from releasing my own. I wouldn't expect any different from anyone else.

I'm just glad the South Island is pretty well taken care of and we all just await Peter Lohr's Milford Sound. Going by his previous work it will be 'The Goods'
His Queentown, Mt Cook and Robins' Wanaka and Te Anau and Manapouri and Tekapo etc... and Warrens Nelson and all his others, and the Invercargill and Timaru and the Dunedin and Robins soon to be updated Taieri(Remember Robin)
As for Hamilton Savern Reweti is sorting that out for you! and Natas Hamilton is pretty damn good I reckon. But mostly I fly Helo's and Twin Props around the Mountainous regons of the South Island and I mustn't forget some great work people have done down the West Coast there too. That's where I have found the 20m to really shine.
A big thank you to all you developers, Pay and Freeware, I am in awe of you all and your work is appreciated, no matter how small or big your contributions are to the NZ FS scenery scene. That goes for the AI developers too, as that is scenery too!
Cheers, and good on you all! Stephen

Thanks Robin!

The fact that you used "stop-gap" just shows great minds think alike, My words from both Taupo and Hamilton: "This is just a stop-gap until Robin Corn comes out with something more definitive."



So, now, where are those pictures of New Plymouth?

Natas did a great job with Hamilton City, and I'm looking forward to Savern's scenery when he finally gets a chance to get it out.

And here's to all NZ simmers. I'm glad I could give a bit of life to some neglected spaces.