The Tale of the E-Jets
My goal here is to give you a glimpse of the everyday life of X-Plane developers and tell you about some of the problems that we are solving. Furthermore, I’d like to share info about new features, updates, and just anything that’s happening here at X-Crafts.
These posts will be informal because I want you to understand that we are not a corporation of robots. We are humans, just like you, with an obsession for flight simulators, just like you.
I will try to keep them short because we are all busy, and I respect your time :)
THE TALE OF THE E-JETS
Probably everyone on this earth has been wondering, what the hell happened to the E175 and E195. Well, as a thank you for subscribing, you will be the first to find out!
If you are not interested in how we got there, just skip to the picture below. :)
Since the initial release of the ERJ Family, we’ve been working a lot on improving the ERJs based on user feedback and what the community was asking for. We also had many features that we wanted to include, which didn’t make it in the initial release. And since the X-Crafts team consists of only two people, we haven’t had much time to work on updating the EJets.
It took several months until I finally found time to do something about the E-Jets. Initially, my idea was to improve the avionics and some systems to the level of the ERJs. That would have been v3.0 and would have been a paid update (for $5 or so). However, looking at the cockpit, I realized that the modeling and texturing really deserved a lot more love. I thought that the exterior was still holding up and did not require remaking.
In September 2019, I started working on remodeling the cockpit. At that point, I already had a large group of real E-Jet pilots helping me to get the exact specifications of the cockpit.
Previously, I was working with a lot fewer pictures (still hundreds), mostly what I could find online, so the views of the cockpit I had were very limited. Therefore, many times I had to fill in the gaps by simply eye-balling some parts of the models. This time, however, I was able to recreate the cockpit exactly as the real counterpart.
Once I got to remodeling the windows from the inside, I realized that the exterior window openings in the fuselage now do not fit the newly modeled (and accurate) size of the windows in the cockpit.
While I was examining this problem, I realized that the entire fuselage’s shape was slightly off, and therefore the windows did not fit! So I suddenly found out that I would also have to remodel the fuselages. But if I did that, I would also have to remodel the belly, the wing base, flaps, landing gear… you see where this is going.
Long story short, I decided that the best thing to do would be to simply scrap everything, and recreate the E-Jets completely from scratch. This decision ultimately freed me to go all out and make sure that every aspect of these planes is brought to a completely different level of simulation.
Over twelve hundred hours in development, I am extremely excited and proud that I can finally introduce the new main characters in this story:
The E-JETS FAMILY by X-Crafts
This will be a brand new product line, which will feature new highly detailed, cutting edge models of the interior and exterior, authentic FMS, enhanced systems - at or above ERJ Family level of quality all across the board.
This product line will include all variants of the E-Jets:
E170 | E175 | E190 | E195 | Lineage 1000
I’d like to stress again that these are completely new add-ons, not updates of the current E175 v2.4 and E195 v2.4. Therefore this will not be an upgrade. However all existing customers of the E175 v2.4 and E195 v2.4 will receive a discount to purchase the new products.
The level of discount has not yet been determined, and will most likely depend on the package initially bought.
I will be sharing more information as we progress through the development. In the meantime, I would like to share with you a page with some exclusive work in progress pictures. This page is not yet linked on my website, but you can already access it.
As I said, this is the world premiere, and you are the first to find out about it. So I encourage you to share the page and spread the word!
NOTE: Due to the ongoing pandemic on our planet and the uncertain future, we will not be announcing any ETA. It will not be in 2020, however, rest assured that this is now our main project and we cannot wait to bring this to you.
That’s about it for the first Not-A-Newsletter! Please let me know your thoughts on this! Are you excited about these jets?
If you have ANY questions, whether it is about the new E-JETS, or what I had for breakfast this morning, please do not hesitate to reach out! I’d love to hear back from you.
Marko | X-Crafts Director