I first got into the X-Plane community back around early 2002. I had just acquired my own computer and being a big flight sim enthusiast, I wanted to get a copy of the latest version of the Microsoft Flight Simulator. Yup, you read that right, I was looking for the Microsoft Flight Simulator. At the time I wasn't aware that there were flight sims other than MFS out there, the retailer where I was shopping had no more copies of MFS in stock and only a copy of X-Plane, a flight sim I had never heard of was available. You could say I joined the X-Plane community by accident!
One of the first things that I noticed about X-Plane was that the included scenery was, how to describe it... non-existent! There was plenty of terrain, but not much else. That didn't really bother me too much, I wasn't really interested in the scenery as much as I was interested in the simple feeling of flight. It took a while before I got into the sim enough to really want to customize the scenery by putting in some custom objects and stuff. I had learned to handle World-Maker, designed some custom terrain of my own, and even designed and built a personal airport.
After a few months of flying around this personal airport of mine, and other airports near it, I started to feel like something was missing. As of yet, I had neither put in any custom objects, nore aquired any yet. After looking at the selection availiable at XP.org and other X-Plane related sites, I had chosen afew. Downloading and adding some custom objects made the scenery experiance better, but something was still missing. The objects I had put in where mostly control towers, hangers and terminal buildings. I as of yet hadn't found any static aircraft that I liked. There were a handful, but none really met my quality standards.
I have strict standards when it comes to visual realism. Most of the static aircraft I had found looked to me like they were made from loosely assembled boxes. They simply weren't realistic enough. At that particular time, X-Plane had progressed to around version 6.10/6.20, however I was still using X-Plane 5.54. I did eventually buy an X-Plane 6.00 CD, and after getting everything set-up in XP 6.xx as I had it in X-Plane 5.54, I still hadn't downloaded any static aircraft. I don't like using older files in a newer versions of X-Plane, I will not conscider using X-Plane 5.xx files with X-Plane 6.xx or XP 6.xx files with XP 7.xx.
I just don't want to deal with backward compatibility issues, especially with Austin's habbit of suddenly dropping support for older file formats. It was a while before someone had built and posted static aircraft that looked realistic enough to be worth downloading. Adel Habib had built and posted six static aircraft, three A340s and three 737s. I didn't hesitate to download copies of them and place them in the scenery. After placing the static planes in and around a handful of airports, things did seem better. However, that was only for a while, the six planes posted by Adel were all based on just two object files, with three liveries availiable for each.
It wasn't long before I found myself searching for more. My searches of X-Plane.org and other sites turned up no more. This may be difficult to believe, but there was a over-abundance of control towers, hangers, teminal buildings, and other misc. buildings... but very few static aircraft availiable. Over a period spanning several months, I mentioned in the forums several times that more static aircraft were needed, but it always seemed that everyone thought that building static aircraft was too difficult. Now that I think about it, perhaps they were right. At that time, there was only one program out there designed for construction of custom objects.
Christian Franz' Object Maker was the only program out there that could be used for construction of custom objects. Object Maker was a Mac only utility which meant that only people on the Mac could make full use of it. That also meant that I being on a Windows PC, couldn't use OM. There were no scripts or third party plug-ins that allowed import of acf files and such, so all objects had to be built from scratch and textured manually. That's probably why people thought that static aircraft were too difficult to build. Also Blender wasn't all that well known yet and not many X-Plane users were using it.
You know how I said that Austin has a habit suddenly dropping support for older file formats? Well apparently, he also has a habbit of suddenly changing file formats with little or no warning. This always left many people frustrated, and eventually Chris Franz got frustrated enough to decide that it was time he halted development on Object Maker. Mr. Franz' halting of development on OM ended up deing a blessing in disguise. It caused people to start looking for alternatives that could be used on both Macs and Windows based computers. I myself had briefly fiddled around with Blender, but never really had any serious interest in it.
Yes, you read that last line right. I had spent some time fiddling around with Blender, but at that time there were no import/export scripts. There was X-sky's JObjecttool Converter which was availiable for both Windows and Mac, but it wouldn't export directly from Blender. To convert Blender files into X-Plane objects using JObjecttool Converter required a wopping three seperate steps. You first had to use a Python script to convert the Blender file into a VRML file, then use JObjecttool to covert that VRML file into an XPXGL file. Finally, use JObjecttool to convert the XPXGL file into an X-Plane 7.xx object file.
If you ask me, that's three steps too many! Unfortunatly, we had no other alternatives. Johnathon Harris hadn't yet released the first of his python scripts for Blender. When John did release the first scripts, I was amoung the first people to try them. John originally had developed two Python scripts for Blender, one script that could import X-Plane 6.xx and 7.xx objects into Blender, and one that could export blender files as X-Plane 7.xx object files. He hadn't developed his ACF import script yet, and when he did eventually release ACF import script version 1.0, I jumped at the chance to convert an aircraft into a static model.
I spent some time experimenting with the ACF import script. I built a handful of test models, but none of them were intended for release. I was only playing around to see what could be done with the script at first. After experiment for about a week, I finally felt like I was ready to convert a plane for release. The first model I converted was X-Plane's stock 747. When I posted screenshots of the static 747 in the screenshots forum, I joked that I had no intention of releasing it, and was surprised to learn that some people actually thought that I was serious! I fully intented to release the 747, and did.
Since releasing the 747, I have planned and built many more models. Some were built following requests from my peers, while others I chose by just browsing around. These days I try to cycle between aircraft types. Maybe do some airliners, then some GA planes, then some military aircraft. I try not to let fans of different plane types feel ignored, and when someone sends me a "peer request", I usually assign it a high priority. To me peer requests take priority over my own planned projects, even if the plane requested is off a different type than what I am currently working on.
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