Silent Hunter 
Join Date: Nov 2006
Location: Y'ha-Nthlei
Posts: 4,262
Downloads: 19
Uploads: 0
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Well they said it was supposed to be in stores for purchase. 'Course they also said a paint scheme utility would be out by now and that hasn't happened either.
The good news is that the Se5 will be out in a few more days (by the end of the month; no more delays according to Jason). Here's a vid of it:
That thing is a beast.
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Originally Posted by FIREWALL
My Prediction. Sadly THEY won't be around by the end of 2010.
Hopefully someone with more business sense will pickup the title.
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How do you figure that? The flightsim community has been responding extremely well to ROF's release. If such a judgment is based off the lack of content, that's already being solved with the release of the Albatros D.V, Nieuport 28 and 17, and the soon to be released Se5 (a Pfalz D.III is due out in a few weeks as well).
It certainly doesn't have the number of flyable planes that OFF has, but the OFF team didn't code an entire simulation engine up from scratch or spend tens of thousands of dollars on expensive game-making kits/programs to do it now did they? (Or pay a staff of coders, modelers, and artists for that matter. One of the most significant benefits of a modding collective team is that rarely is money an issue, save for things like keeping the website alive.)
Actually, Roman Ivanov (General Manager of Neoqb) released a statement a few days ago just about general things with the game:
http://simhq.com/forum/ubbthreads.ph...ml#Post2814975
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Dear Friends,
Greetings from Moscow! Albert and I would like to take a few minutes and say a few words to the Rise of Flight community about our recent launch and our vision for ROF’s future. First of all, everyone at neoqb and our publishing partners would like to say THANK YOU to all who have purchased Rise of Flight over the past few weeks. We appreciate all of your support and most of all your patience. Launching ROF in Russia and CIS and then North America was quite a challenge and each market presented different challenges. We eagerly await our release in Europe and we will do our best to make sure it goes smoothly with Aerosoft...
However, as you know, we hit some bumps in the road during launch, but thanks to the quick work of our team we were able to overcome these hiccups and solve these unforeseen technical issues. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused our customers. We also want to apologize for any miscommunication, delay or misunderstanding that as occurred due to our being distracted with technical issues or some of our staff not always understanding the English language very well or by simply making a misstatement. We will endeavor to improve our communication with the community about all things ROF.
We are a Russian company, and our country has always been a leader in aviation, but now we have become a leader in computer flight-simulation as well. We are very proud to be a part of this new Russian tradition and join other well know studios as makers of flight-sim products in Russia. However, thanks to all of you and our partners, ROF is now a global product and effort and we are very excited about what the future holds for our company and the world-wide ROF community!
We have been watching the comments and discussions of ROF on the internet in various places as well as reading the emails that have been sent to us and we appreciate your feedback and suggestions. We are listening and we do appreciate positive discussion and constructive suggestions from the community about ROF. We feel discussion is important to improving our product for the better over the short and long-term, all we ask is that each of you treat your fellow flight simmer with respect and tolerance in such discussions.
There comes a time during the development of a product like this where you must make a decision to release it to the public or further delay it. Such a decision is always hard and you have to balance your business concerns with your personal concerns, knowing that there is always going to be something about the product that will disappoint someone, somewhere. We eventually decided that the fun of flying ROF outweighed the bugs and we went to market. We fully realize that some of you were disappointed with some shortcomings or design decisions we made and we apologize of you were not happy with your purchase. We also know that a great many of you are very pleased with your purchase of ROF and we deeply appreciate your enthusiasm for the product and love to hear that you are having fun with it. To those that were disappointed, we want to assure you that we will do all we can to improve the product as fast as we can to hopefully change your mind at some point in the future.
As you are all aware, the ROF design includes a different way of activating, managing and launching (AML) your game than what most flight-simmers are used to. Again, we apologize to those that do not agree with our design, but we would like you to know that we chose this design as a solution to other less desirable options available to us as a developer. Although some in the community do not like our AML design, we hope that the way in which it is utilized in the coming months and years will demonstrate the positive and useful aspects of it and over time our AML design will become an almost transparent part of your ROF experience.
Rise of Flight has come a long way over the past few years while in development and sometimes it felt that we would never get to market, but the past 45 days or so have been an absolute blur for our team with long days and nights for all involved. With the Russian, North American and soon to be European launch, we’d like to tell you about what the immediate and long-term future holds for ROF and the community.
Our vision for ROF, its engine, known as “Digital Nature” and the community is one where continuous improvements and innovations are developed and deployed to our customers quickly and efficiently, where a sense of community brings people together as friends and where new content is constantly generated ensuring no one gets bored. This includes contributions from community members. Obviously we have not fully realized our ultimate vision yet, but with hard work and the help and support of the flight-sim community we can.
As most of you know, we are about to begin the second phase of our launch plans and that includes the debut of our web store and additional content. Our plans have always included selling additional flyable aircraft to the community as way to increase the content for ROF, keep our business secure and keep the community interested in our product line. We understand this is a new twist to the accepted flight-sim add-on model, but we feel that over time it will allow ROF to thrive in the long-term.
Honestly speaking, developing this product has cost us millions of rubles, dollars and Euros and we need to have a strategy for sustaining ourselves over the next few years if we are to continue our work. Even though we are a “small” developer we still have a good size staff full of coders, modelers, artists and support staff. To be able to continue to develop our engine and produce more quality products for the community we require a steady revenue stream. We concluded that for our niche product to survive we needed a new approach. Flight-simulations are a dying genre in PC gaming and the reasons are pretty obvious to the community. Our approach is not meant to offend, nor is it rooted in greed, it is simply a survival strategy. We hope you understand, even if you disagree with this approach.
Our plan is to offer our customers quality aircraft and other content for a reasonable price and design it as such so no content is mandatory. We want to offer you the option of purchasing new, high-quality, flyable airplanes, without requiring you to pay a huge sum of money. Over time you may end up investing a moderate amount of money in ROF, but maybe not as much as other flight-sim products that are currently on the market or on your hard-drive. In the end, we hope that whatever content you decide to purchase from us or our partners provides you with thousands of hours of fun.
We also want to mention that our team is very organized and compartmentalized with new content development and code fixes being conducted in parallel by separate teams. When there is a need for these departments to work together they do so, to ensure new content does not interfere with new fixes. This allows us to fix bugs and offer new content simultaneously. This strategy will lead to a highly polished and deep simulation experience. Also, we have a dedicated beta test team that thoroughly tests our code before release the public. They do a great job for us and their work is very much appreciated. A very big thank you to them for their great work!
With your support we can continue to produce quality content for our customers and realize our vision for ROF. We are committed to this effort in every way and if we have not yet earned your business we hope to do so some day.
So, without further delay, here is what we have planned for ROF in the coming weeks.
- On Friday July 10th we will give all North American and European customers the Albatros D5 and Nieuport 28 for free. We see that a misunderstanding about these aircraft has developed in the community. We would like to clear that up by making these planes available and we believe this decision will make several of our customers very happy. We value our reputation and the reputation of our publishers 777 Studios and Aerosoft, both now and in the future and do not want it to be tarnished by a misunderstanding.
- The Nieuport 17 can be purchased as a flyable aircraft at a rate of $7.62 (5.45 Euro) from our web-store beginning next week. We are testing the payment system now and we want to be sure the store functions correctly and our secure credit card purchasing system works as planned.
- The SE.5 and Pfalz D3 are currently in beta testing and are looking very sharp. They will be available in our web-store at the end of July.
- Earlier this week we released our first patch through our AML system for North American customers, which automatically downloaded and updated all Rise of Flight users. The system worked exactly as planned which made us and many users very happy. Further patches to fix bugs and introduce new or missing features are in development and testing now. As soon as we know when we can release them we will announce it on the ROF forum.
Again, before we go, we deeply appreciate everyone’s support, suggestions and purchase of Rise of Flight. And we apologize to anyone we have disappointed. We will continue to work hard to support our customers and earn your business.
Warmest Regards,
Roman Ivanov
neoqb General Manager
Albert Zhiltzov
Rise of Flight producer
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Originally Posted by FIREWALL
I'll bet even money the sim isn't modable either.
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You can mod it. There's already been about a dozen people messing around with the campaign and missions on SimHQ.
And nice shots of the Nieuport 17, SimFreak. 
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