Captains,
A few of us on the PMDG team have spent the past two weeks thoroughly absorbed in moving the DC-3 from Washington, DC to Duxford, England over the fabled Blue Spruce Route. It has been quite an adventure and when I have a few moments I will post some photos and thoughts about the journey thus far. The DC-3 is currently resting on the lawn at the Imperial War Museum at Duxford and those of us involved in moving the airplane are alternately taking a bit of time off with family or (in the case of me an Kyle) dashing back to the office to spend a week working on GFO, NG3 and various other tasks that need doing before we return to fly the airplane in support of the 75th anniversary of D-Day and the 70th anniversary of the Berlin Airlift.
The interesting thing about working as we do, it is possible to keep plugging progress on various topics even while we aren't physically behind the desk. It takes some getting used to- but if you work at it, it is more rewarding than being indoors all the time. During the down time between flights, and even during one phase of crew rest, we had some key planning meetings to map out a few details and work through technical issues that are pending in PMDG Global Flight Operations.
All in all- sort of amazing to be mapping out the things we are mapping out while out moving an airplane across the ocean.
So here is a bit of a road map to help you see where things are going in the near term. I am being very careful not to put marks on the calendar here because those never seem to hold for one reason or another. All of these things move a bit relative to one another- but this will give you a general idea what we are looking at:
PMDG 737NG3:
The PMDG 737NG3 Base Package for Prepar3D v4.5 is being prepared for the initial push into testing. I'm not quite ready to say that the major development push is completed, as we are still sifting through the 777 and 747 technology and finding things that we can improve and add. The amount of stuff that we have created in the eight years since the NGX release is just astounding- and moving all of it into the NG3 has been a ton of fun developmentally. We are bringing you new fluid and thermal models for pneumatic, hydraulic, pressurization, engine oil and fuel systems. Dramatically improved accuracy on the electrical system along with greater complexity in all of the aircraft systems. The autoflight system has been improved significantly, and will get another round of improvements once we finish rebuilding our core LNAV logic, but that will take place sometime after the initial product release as we have discussed earlier.
We have a full fledged EFB in this build now, along with a ton of other goodies we haven't shared yet... Suffice to say this is definitely a decade of improvement over the older NGX and we are really looking forward to pushing her out of the hangar for you to work with.
We are going to keep the testing team muzzled initially when we push this product to them, mostly because they will be seeing some features that haven't been debuted in any PMDG product to date and we want to keep them under wraps until we are ready for The Big Reveal...
I'm very much looking forward to getting this into beta testing.
PMDG Global Flight Operations:
We spent a day weathered-in up at Goose Bay, Canada- and that gave us an afternoon to hold a very productive team discussion to finish mapping out some technical hurdles on a very very cool feature set that has never been seen before in simming. (No, i won't tell you yet... We would rather show you once we have it working as desired...) We also mapped out how we are going to bring Global Flight Operations online for users- which is something that we have been fretting a bit because we want to be sure to ramp up the server capacity appropriately to handle user load without creating any issues for users accidentally.
Our plan currently is to conduct a staged release, beginning shortly after our new shopping cart comes online, with an initial tranche of users followed by phased growth in the user community at least for the first couple of weeks to make sure we have a good idea that things will be smooth for everyone involved. We will give you a bit more information on how you can participate in this process once we are prepared to actually open the doors to the first group of users. Shouldn't be too much longer now.
PMDG eCommerce Overhaul:
The past six months have seen a huge amount of effort going into replacing our existing eCommerce system with a modern, robust design that will serve us for the decades ahead. The shopping cart currently in use at PMDG has been with us since 2004 and it very much needs to be replaced with modern technology. This is a very expensive endeavor primarily because we have insisted that all user order history and data be moved forward into the new shopping cart in order to keep your account management relationship with PMDG completely seamless and in one place.
We are hoping to have the new system online in the next few weeks, and while we anticipate a slight service disruption during the final stage of the transition- it should be mostly painless for everyone involved.
I will start saying this now- just because it is important- but when the new shopping cart system comes online, you will wind up being forced to generate a new password the first time you attempt to log in. We are doing this because it is best for the security of customer data and because our new system will have much higher standards for security than the old system- so we want to leverage as much of that new capability as possible.
Next Updates for 747 and 777:
There have been quite a few questions on when to expect the next round of updates for the 747 and 777 product lines. Current guidance (always subject to change!) is that we will update both of these products in preparation for the release of PMDG Global Flight Operations. The 747 will be a largely technical release designed to install some changes required specifically for Global Flight Operations compatibility- but the 777 update will carry quite a bit of payload since we haven't published a new update for that product line since July.
Okay- i think that is about all I have for you this evening! I am going to go back to working on the first NG3 installer buildout... Shout if you need anything.
A few of us on the PMDG team have spent the past two weeks thoroughly absorbed in moving the DC-3 from Washington, DC to Duxford, England over the fabled Blue Spruce Route. It has been quite an adventure and when I have a few moments I will post some photos and thoughts about the journey thus far. The DC-3 is currently resting on the lawn at the Imperial War Museum at Duxford and those of us involved in moving the airplane are alternately taking a bit of time off with family or (in the case of me an Kyle) dashing back to the office to spend a week working on GFO, NG3 and various other tasks that need doing before we return to fly the airplane in support of the 75th anniversary of D-Day and the 70th anniversary of the Berlin Airlift.
The interesting thing about working as we do, it is possible to keep plugging progress on various topics even while we aren't physically behind the desk. It takes some getting used to- but if you work at it, it is more rewarding than being indoors all the time. During the down time between flights, and even during one phase of crew rest, we had some key planning meetings to map out a few details and work through technical issues that are pending in PMDG Global Flight Operations.
All in all- sort of amazing to be mapping out the things we are mapping out while out moving an airplane across the ocean.
So here is a bit of a road map to help you see where things are going in the near term. I am being very careful not to put marks on the calendar here because those never seem to hold for one reason or another. All of these things move a bit relative to one another- but this will give you a general idea what we are looking at:
PMDG 737NG3:
The PMDG 737NG3 Base Package for Prepar3D v4.5 is being prepared for the initial push into testing. I'm not quite ready to say that the major development push is completed, as we are still sifting through the 777 and 747 technology and finding things that we can improve and add. The amount of stuff that we have created in the eight years since the NGX release is just astounding- and moving all of it into the NG3 has been a ton of fun developmentally. We are bringing you new fluid and thermal models for pneumatic, hydraulic, pressurization, engine oil and fuel systems. Dramatically improved accuracy on the electrical system along with greater complexity in all of the aircraft systems. The autoflight system has been improved significantly, and will get another round of improvements once we finish rebuilding our core LNAV logic, but that will take place sometime after the initial product release as we have discussed earlier.
We have a full fledged EFB in this build now, along with a ton of other goodies we haven't shared yet... Suffice to say this is definitely a decade of improvement over the older NGX and we are really looking forward to pushing her out of the hangar for you to work with.
We are going to keep the testing team muzzled initially when we push this product to them, mostly because they will be seeing some features that haven't been debuted in any PMDG product to date and we want to keep them under wraps until we are ready for The Big Reveal...
I'm very much looking forward to getting this into beta testing.
PMDG Global Flight Operations:
We spent a day weathered-in up at Goose Bay, Canada- and that gave us an afternoon to hold a very productive team discussion to finish mapping out some technical hurdles on a very very cool feature set that has never been seen before in simming. (No, i won't tell you yet... We would rather show you once we have it working as desired...) We also mapped out how we are going to bring Global Flight Operations online for users- which is something that we have been fretting a bit because we want to be sure to ramp up the server capacity appropriately to handle user load without creating any issues for users accidentally.
Our plan currently is to conduct a staged release, beginning shortly after our new shopping cart comes online, with an initial tranche of users followed by phased growth in the user community at least for the first couple of weeks to make sure we have a good idea that things will be smooth for everyone involved. We will give you a bit more information on how you can participate in this process once we are prepared to actually open the doors to the first group of users. Shouldn't be too much longer now.
PMDG eCommerce Overhaul:
The past six months have seen a huge amount of effort going into replacing our existing eCommerce system with a modern, robust design that will serve us for the decades ahead. The shopping cart currently in use at PMDG has been with us since 2004 and it very much needs to be replaced with modern technology. This is a very expensive endeavor primarily because we have insisted that all user order history and data be moved forward into the new shopping cart in order to keep your account management relationship with PMDG completely seamless and in one place.
We are hoping to have the new system online in the next few weeks, and while we anticipate a slight service disruption during the final stage of the transition- it should be mostly painless for everyone involved.
I will start saying this now- just because it is important- but when the new shopping cart system comes online, you will wind up being forced to generate a new password the first time you attempt to log in. We are doing this because it is best for the security of customer data and because our new system will have much higher standards for security than the old system- so we want to leverage as much of that new capability as possible.
Next Updates for 747 and 777:
There have been quite a few questions on when to expect the next round of updates for the 747 and 777 product lines. Current guidance (always subject to change!) is that we will update both of these products in preparation for the release of PMDG Global Flight Operations. The 747 will be a largely technical release designed to install some changes required specifically for Global Flight Operations compatibility- but the 777 update will carry quite a bit of payload since we haven't published a new update for that product line since July.
Okay- i think that is about all I have for you this evening! I am going to go back to working on the first NG3 installer buildout... Shout if you need anything.
Danny Z. Cebis
(Iโm just a dreamer 
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