Thursday, January 5, 2012

Infinite Flight for iOS Beta - Call for Testers

Happy New Year!

As the new year starts, we're taxiing for take off, and are approaching the launch of our beta program.
We won't be accepting everyone, the beta will be limited to reduce the burden on our small team. We've already selected a few people from our top users, and we have more room for about 10 more people.

To apply for the beta, we'll need to judge who can get in by evaluating the commitment that the applicants intend to show. If the only reason you wants access is to get an early preview, you might want to reconsider applying. A user playing the beta and leaving no feedback on bugs isn't useful to us, and to the community.

Here is a quick list of things we'd like to see (those are not definite required)
  •  Experience with flight simulation in general. (played most flight sims, and knows how to fly)
  •  Being a developers is a plus (general programming or sceneries, airplanes...)
  •  Testers have to own one or more of these iOS devices: Last generation iPod Touch, iPhone 4/4S, iPad 1/2. (Older devices will not be compatible. We only support A4 and A5 devices)
  •  Experience with prior beta programs is a also a plus
  •  Write us a few lines explaining why you'd like to be a tester :)

Send us your requests at contact@flyingdevelopmentstudio.com

We'll notify the selected applicants when the beta starts in a few days!




Thursday, December 29, 2011

2011 round up and what's coming in 2012

2011 has been an exciting year for us with the release of our first product, Infinite Flight last April. The response from the community has been tremendous, we couldn't be happier about it!
Who would have thought that a niche game like a Flight Simulator could maintain itself in the top spots of paid indie games on Windows Phone 7?
During those 8 months, we've had thousands of people try the game on their Windows Phone 7 devices. We've made the totals today, more than 10'500 hours of flight and close to 150'000 landings have been logged on our servers!
Our top users have reached levels we didn't think anyone would come up to before years...

Here's the top 5 for Flight Time:
Kenneth: 382.0h
Welltool: 172.7h
Hardwoodcrawler: 113.8h
Garza: 110.3h
Rico: 108.8h

And the top 5 for Landing Count:
Hardwoodcrawler: 2014
Matt: 1827 <- that's one of us ;)
Garza: 1319
Roodi: 1197
Misterjaz: 1170

Now, what's coming next...

We're going to be moving our flight database to a new server and will use this occasion to clean up the entries. We will only be transferring the users that have logged more than 3 flights, and those who aren't named "anonymous". The reason behind clearing the anonymous users is that we think those who care about their ranking want to see their actual name on the leaderboards. So if you are still using this name, note that your flights won't be transferred to the new database unless you update your username to something else.
We won't be transferring the database in a single shot, we'll perform daily transfers as some users will still be using the old system for a little while.
This will be part of our upcoming 2.2 update coming in the next few weeks. It will also bring a login/pass system to make sure users who fly on multiple platforms can retrieve and update their personal data (flights, etc...)

iOS
We're still heads down on the port from Windows Phone 7 to iOS. Since the video we posted at the beginning of this month, more progress has been done with the rendering and performance. We don't have a firm release date to announce at this time as there is still some work to be done and bugs to fix but we're still on track for an early 2012 release.
One of the things that we really pay attention to in this port is the performance. We've made a significant amount of tweaks and optimizations to reach a playable frame rate on iOS, and since the code is shared with Windows Phone 7, those optimizations impacted this platform as well. Users can expect smoother frame rate on 1st generation Windows Phones when 2.2 comes out.

Android
We've had numerous requests for an Android port. This is something we're actively considering. All the work we did to port to iOS will certainly make the transition much easier.

Sceneries
We're aware that there is a lack of new sceneries in Infinite Flight. We're confident that we'll be able to bring new sceneries in 2012. The iOS port is taking a lot of our energy at this point, but once it will be available, we'll have more cycles to work on the scenery.

Airplanes
We have more airplanes on the way, as some of our Facebook fans have seen, the next one will be an Airbus A321 in US Airways livery. We've been flying it for while internally and it's a joy to fly. The 3D model is one of the best we've had to far.

Stay tuned for an exciting year 2012 and thanks for your support!
The Infinite Flight Team!

Monday, December 5, 2011

Infinite Flight for iOS hands on !

It has been about a month since we have announced the development of Infinite Flight for iOS. It is now time to show you the result of our labor with a little video of the simulator running on an iPad 2.




Bear in mind that this is still work in progress and there might be a few glitches here and there, but overall we are very pleased with the results.

We're going to start accepting beta testing applications soon, if you are interested, follow us on twitter or facebook.

Happy Landings !

Monday, November 14, 2011

Infinite Flight 2.1, available in a Marketplace near you

Flying Development Studio is proud to announce the release of Infinite Flight 2.1.

This release includes 2 new airplanes, more airports, better physics and more!

We’ve added two very popular airplanes, the first one is a F/A-18 Hornet, a fighter airplane that had been requested quite a lot by our users, and the second is a Boeing 787-900 aka Dreamliner, which is the latest model coming from Boeing. As we have a pretty extensive UK user base, our choice of livery for the 787 went to Virgin Atlantic.

Features:
- Added the F/A-18 Hornet
- Added the Boeing 787-900 Dreamliner
- Added virtual cockpit camera for new airplanes
- Added more airports in both regions (137 total airports)
- Reworked HUD readability
- Improved physics of jets at high altitude (flight up to FL40+ is now possible)
- Added airport beacon at night, visible from afar.
- Updated airport database (up to date frequencies, runways...)
- Runways surfaces now supported (asphalt, concrete, dirt, mud, dry lakebed...)
- Fixed aircraft shadow issues
- Cleaned up UI to select airport by region
- Tweaked physics of the B747, C17 and A380

Video:


We also announced last week that Infinite Flight is coming to iOS devices in the near future as development of our iPhone/iPad version has already started. We have no specific pricing or availability to communicate at this time, but we have setup a newsletter page where users interested in the iOS version can subscribe to get updates. (http://flyingdevstudio.blogspot.com/p/newsletter.html)

Follow us on the usual social networks for up-to-date information:
facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Infinite-Flight/125847247491558
twitter: http://www.twitter.com/flyingdevstudio

Tuesday, November 8, 2011

Feedback

With Infinite Flight 2.1 around the corner, we wanted to remind all our fellow pilots that we have a uservoice page for feedback.

 Uservoice makes it easy for you to request/comment on features and let others vote for it.

As a matter of fact, the in-game feedback and aircraft request options will now point directly to our uservoice page which will make it a lot easier for us to manage all your requests.
Of course, our email is still a good way to contact us; it is always great to hear from our users and how they enjoy Infinite Flight.

Happy Landings !

Thursday, November 3, 2011

Announcing Infinite Flight for iOS! (iPad/iPhone)

Fellow Pilots !

We are proud to officially announce Infinite Flight for iOS !

In the next few months, anybody with an iPod, iPhone or iPad will be able to experience Infinite Flight.
Multiplatform support is one of the most requested feature and after weeks of hard work this is finally something that will soon become a reality.

What does this mean for existing Windows Phone users ? Both versions are in fact from the same code base (see bellow for details), that means that we will have feature parity at all time. More users also means more feedback which will help us making Infinite Flight an even better flight simulator.

For those interested in the details of how this was made possible in such a short time, continue reading after the break.

Infinite Flight on iOS


Porting to iOS from Windows Phone is not an easy task. Both platforms have fundamental differences and require use of their own development tools.
Thanks to the great work from the guys at Xamarin with MonoTouch and Monodevelop, we were able to quickly have something up and running with minimum code changes. The biggest challenge was indeed the 2D (UI) and 3D (terrain + plane) rendering since XNA is obviously not available on iOS.
Enters Monogame. Monogame is a port of XNA to Mono/MonoTouch/MonoDroid using OpenTK (C# toolkit including OpenGL ES, OpenAL ... etc). When we first started to evaluate Monogame, only 2D was working; we still decided to give it a go and add the missing functionality ourselves to also have 3D support.
There is still lots of work to be done but the result we've achieved so far is beyond our wildest expectations.

We have no pricing and availability details to share at this time but expect more news from us soon via twitter, facebook or this blog.

Official press release available here.

Happy iLandings,

Announcing Infinite Flight for iPhone/iPad


FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE




Flying Development Studio LLC is announcing Infinite Flight for iPhone/iPad




San Jose, CA November - 3rd 2011 - Flying Development Studio LLC, the company behind Infinite Flight, the flight simulator for Windows Phone 7 is pleased to announce Infinite Flight for iOS

Infinite Flight for iOS will bring support to the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch devices in the next few months. All the features that are already present in Infinite Flight 2.0 will make it into this new release. These include 10 aircrafts, realistic physics simulation, heads up display, autopilot, 2 regions with 140+ airports, time of day, configurable weather settings, tutorials, leaderboards, online logbook and more.

To accomplish this port to iOS, Flying Development Studio is using MonoTouch and a custom branch of the open source project MonoGame to which they added OpenGL ES 3D support.

Below is a link to a preview screenshot of the main menu on the iPad2

Infinite Flight running on iPad


Infinite Flight was released in April 2011 for the Windows Phone 7 platform and has been well received by the community. It is used by thousands of pilots around the world every day and is ranked in the top 50 paid games. Regular updates have been released adding features, airplanes and regions. The last release, 2.0, brought Windows Phone Mango support.

Screenshots of Windows Phone 7 version can be found on the Infinite Flight facebook page:
Videos are available on youtube:

Flying Development Studio’s blog [www.flyingdevelopmentstudio.com] and twitter feed [http://twitter.com/#!/flyingdevstudio] will contain regular updates about the progress of the iOS release.

Flying Development Studio LLC is an independent game developer company based in California that specializes in high quality flight simulation products for mobile platforms. For more information, they can be reached at contact@flyingdevelopmentstudio.com

Monday, October 31, 2011

F/A 18 Demo Flight in the Mountains

Yesterday, we posted a new video of Infinite Flight 2.1 in action.
It shows the F/A-18 flying around in the mountains north of Ontario International Airport in Southern California. This airplane is a pure joy to fly, you guys are going to love it!

We're scheduled to release the beta of 2.1 in the next few days, and if everything goes well, we'll release it to the marketplace soon after.

Here's the video:

Oh, and stay tuned, we've got more news coming ;-)

Monday, October 10, 2011

Infinite Flight 2.0 is finally here!

This update brings 2 airplanes, numerous new features that were requested by our users, and Windows Phone 7.5 Mango support!
The two new airplanes are the C-17 Globemaster III, a popular military transport aircraft and the Supermarine Spitfire, a WWII warbird.
We’ve made improvements to the scenery with the addition of taxiways at major airports, and enabled multi-sampling for better rendering on the more powerful generation 2 WP7 phones.

Screenshots

List of features:
- Added the C-17 Globemaster III
- Added the Supermarine Spitfire
- Added airport taxiways
- Added HUD Decluttering Levels
- Added Zoom for Fly By and Tower Cameras
- Added Auto Throttle to the Autopilot
- Mango Enabled (fast app switching)
- Touch Vibration can now be disabled
- Anti Aliasing can be turned on. (Recommended only for fast mango phones)
- Fixed crash/freeze when navigating between pages too quickly
- Fixed issues with calibration when phone is held upside down

We're already at work on version 2.1 which will add more airports and the Boeing 787!

Also, we've got something big to announce in a short while, check back with us soon ;)

For more information about Infinite Flight, check out our Facebook page:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Infinite-Flight/125847247491558
or twitter:
http://www.twitter.com/flyingdevstudio

Monday, September 12, 2011

What's next?

Infinite Flight 1.9 was released a couple of weeks ago and feedback has been very positive so far. Seems like our users have enjoyed flying with our new A-10 as well as the Boeing 747. The flight planning features has been well received also.

For our next release, we have two airplanes that are ready to go!
One is a popular WWII airplane and the other one is a heavy lift military transport aircraft.

We're not sure if this release is going to be our first Mango-Enabled update. Seeing how the update to Nodo went out, we're thinking of delaying as much as we can until we can see how carriers are handling the Mango roll out.
The issue with releasing a Mango version is that it will keep us from updating Infinite Flight for Nodo and we're not sure we're ready to do that.

We'd like to thank every one that contacted us with requests, feedback, etc... for participating in the building of this flight simulator. Keep the feedback coming folks!

We've got great news coming in the next few weeks, so stay tuned and don't forget to follow us on twitter and facebook! (links in the top section of the site)