In a post back in January, I mentioned discussing my take on the whole piracy issue that faces the FS payware community in an ever so painful way. Since the topic seems to have died down a bit in the forums lately, I'll rekindle the flame a bit with a bit of perspective on my end.

It is piracy that ultimately caused my leaving FSD. Why? I'll get to that in a bit but first a brief history of how I came about as a team member at FSD in the first place.

FSD's history as 3rd party content creators goes back before my time as a developer. It was in the late 90s that Jim Goldman (still an FSD team member) along with Yannick Lavigne, Marco Rensen, Fred Banting, and Steve Small (also still with FSD) started creating amazing content such as the original Turbo Porter for FS 2000.

During my first freeware adventure with the creation of the Project Open-Sky C-17, I sought out the very best people I knew of to help me develop it.  For the flight model, I asked Steve Small and he happily agreed (at that time, he was still doing some freeware work). Well, time passed and the C-17 was put out and then I decided to take a hiatus from development. Maybe a year or so later, Steve and the rest of FSD (who, along with Steve, was Tim Dickens and Jim Goldman) asked me to come on board as a professional modeler. They had several projects in the works that needed some modeling help and they felt that I fit the build - plus they were working on transitioning from FSDS to Gmax and I had already been learning it on my own. Also, I had been secretly working on a T-38 that would become (to my amazement) a great contribution to FSD's hangar.

So it began in 2002, I was officially on board with FSD. We utilized the Flight1 installer to distribute product. With the release of the Seneca V, we noticed a dramatic problem. We were getting support inquiries in our forums from people not showing up in the product database. In an experiment, we released the service package as a download at FlightSim.com. To our amazement, the download count was nearly 33% greater than the number of aircraft originally sold. That told us that we were losing nearly 33% revenue to piracy.

That was enough motivation for us to develop or seek another distribution method that allowed better control of piracy. At first I thought that this was a good thing, but ultimately caused my leaving the group. Let me first say that in no way am I criticizing work done by the team members at FSD - I still think the work done there is great. But I was getting the feeling that more time was being placed on protecting the product than creating quality content of the overall product. Support for the product really became an ugly issue, especially when we were accusing a user of having pirated wares on his/her PC. FSD's reputation was sinking like a ship, so I felt my time there was done.

Then I moved to a short stint with Dreamfleet. I came to realize that Lou and I didn't see eye-to-eye on a lot of issues - namely placing authentic avionics in the Twin Comanche I was developing, so I joined Eaglesoft with whom I currently develop. Yes, Eaglesoft product is shared on bittorrent and warez sites. Am I happy about that? You bet I am not. Will piracy ever go away? I do not think there will ever be a vehicle for distribution that will not be susceptible to hackers.

I prefer to look at the whole situation like this. If people are willing to steal my work, I would rather not have them as a paying customer. Period. To those who do believe in rewarding people such as myself for the time and effort to created authentic and highly realistic works for FS, I applaude you for your contribution. You help sustain and prolong our existence in the FS market.

While doing research on some of the other schemes that I've recreated, I ran across this very nice scheme and thought it would look great on the new FSX Citation X 2.0. I made sure to zoom in a bit on the antennae in the last shot to illustrate the chrome leading edge. Yeah baby! 

Below is a classic Citation X scheme being flown by the NetJets organization. As early adopters of the CX, they have one of the largest fleets of CX's in the US and Europe. It may be hard to notice, but I have created FSX-style chrome along the leading edges of the major antennae, just as they are in real life. More improvements and schemes to come! 

From the memorial of the previous post, I thought that a more upbeat commemorative edition of the CX was in order. May I present a recreation of the 5000th Citation! This aircraft is operated in the real world by XOJET and took delivery in December of 2007. XOJET currently flies 15 Citation X aircraft, and has agreed to purchase 30 more! The Citation X has been sold since 1996 and continues to be very successful as the fastest business aircraft available.

This is a recreation of the late Steve Fossett's Citation X, N377SF to honor his life as an aviator and adventurer. Though his remains have yet to be found, may his soul forever fly high.

Many thanks to Bobby for a phenomenal job on the shadow enhancements to the master texture templates! Here are a couple of shots showing his work.

While I await Bobby's work on the shadow enhancements, I've been busy painting up a couple of new liveries. I also created my very own global environment map for chrome. What do you think?

It is with great pleasure to present the very first in-game renders of the FSX Citation X! Of course these are very early development shots and I'm certain much will change in regards to the paint. Bobby still has some enhancing to do. However, I hope these illustrate the high detail that is now capable of paint schemes for the FSX CX 2.0 - all curvy lines are nearly jaggie free! This platform should become a repainter's dream come true!