Flying Development Studio

Update on Infinite Flight for iOS

2012-03-02T01:35:00.003-08:00

As some of you have heard, Infinite Flight has reached the RTM stage. We sent a build last week, unfortunately, it was rejected by Apple due to a mystery crash that none of our great beta testers could reproduce at all.

We're not sure what is the cause of the crash yet, we had some guesses and tried to address the potential issues in a new build that we posted this morning.

Keep an eye on our Facebook or Twitter feeds for updates on the release.

In the meantime, since we have a week until the verdict, we'll go ahead and start the beta testing period of Infinite Flight 2.2 for Windows Phone.

Infinite Flight at AltDevConf

2012-03-02T01:32:00.000-08:00

The organizers of AltDevConf have posted the recording of our talk on Cross Platform Development in C# presented in collaboration with Miguel de Icaza.

The talk is divided in two parts, the first about Mono and Mono Touch by Miguel and the second about the port of Infinite Flight from Windows Phone 7 to iOS using the libraries and tools presented by Miguel.

Here is the video:

Infinite Flight RC1

2012-02-16T06:28:00.000-08:00

Infinite Flight for iOS RC1 has been pushed to Test Flight yesterday, our beta testers are hard at work and have reported a few issues that we've worked already.

About Windows Phone 7, we haven't forgotten you guys :) We'll start beta testing the WP7 version as soon as we ship the iOS bits. Beta should be quick as we have been playing with our Mango Phones during all this time, so we don't expect any major issues.

Thanks your patience as we work through the last remaining issues!

AltDevConf Session about Infinite Flight

2012-02-09T13:31:00.000-08:00

We will be talking about the development of Infinite Flight at AltDevConf this coming Saturday!

Make sure you tune in if you'd like to know more about how we develop Infinite Flight and our experience porting the simulator from Windows Phone 7 to iOS. Registration is free!

There is also a Q&A at the end, it would be the perfect opportunity to ask technical questions related to the development of the simulator.

This will be a joint session with Miguel de Icaza, the CTO of Xamarin.

You can read all about the session, and sign up to attend here.

Infinite Flight for iOS Beta - Call for Testers [Closed]

2012-01-05T15:01:00.000-08:00

Update Feb 16th 2012: We've closed the beta.

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!

2011 round up and what's coming in 2012

2011-12-29T09:54:00.000-08:00

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.

Aircrafts
We have more aircrafts 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!

Infinite Flight for iOS hands on !

2011-12-05T19:32:00.001-08:00

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 !

Infinite Flight 2.1, available in a Marketplace near you

2011-11-14T14:20:00.001-08:00

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

Feedback

2011-11-08T20:25:00.000-08:00

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 !

Announcing Infinite Flight for iOS! (iPad/iPhone)

2011-11-03T09:24:00.000-07:00

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

2011-11-03T09:23:00.000-07:00

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: contact@flyingdevelopmentstudio.com

Website: www.flyingdevelopmentstudio.com

Twitter: twitter.com/flyingdevstudio

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:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Infinite-Flight/125847247491558

Videos are available on youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/user/flyingdevstudio

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

F/A 18 Demo Flight in the Mountains

2011-10-31T10:48:00.000-07:00

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 ;-)

Infinite Flight 2.0 is finally here!

2011-10-10T03:52:00.000-07:00

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

What's next?

2011-09-12T08:00:00.000-07:00

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)

Welcome Home Atlantis

2011-07-21T03:37:00.000-07:00

Hello fellow pilots,

We are proud to announce Infinite Flight 1.8 ! As an homage to the return of the very last Shuttle mission, we are dedicating this release to the extraordinary people who over the years made this incredible technical challenge a reality.

Infinite Flight now includes the Shuttle Atlantis as well as a brand new mission system to put you in the cockpit and try to score a perfect landing !

Note that trial users can also enjoy this new addition to our fleet, we want everyone to be able to say goodbye in their own way :) The trial is only limited to the "easy" shuttle mission and doesn't upload scores to our servers.

Here is the detailed list of new features and fixes:

Added the legendary Shuttle Atlantis

New Mission System with ranking

Usual performance and UI tweaks

Happy Landings :)

Edit: We noticed that in some occurrences that the Shuttle Mission doesn't display the score once the shuttle is idle on the ground. We haven't been able to clearly reproduce this bug in house but re-installing the game seems to solve the issue. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Update

2011-07-19T05:06:00.000-07:00

Last week was big for us, we released an update to Infinite Flight that ads an Airbus A380 and we got a review by Best WP7 Games with a 4/5 star rating!

We've been working hard on 1.8, which brings a very special feature, something that is time sensitive, linked to current events, and that can't really take off, only land... Any guesses?

We were scheduled to release this update today but an update to the submission process has prevented us from doing so... We'll have to delay the update until this gets fixed on Microsoft's side... Hopefully, this can be done before Thursday (wink, wink ;)

Edit: It's been submitted! Hopefully, things will go fine!

We've heard the news that this update of the marketplace also brings a new beta testing feature. If anyone is interested in beta testing for us, send us a shout (contact@flyingdevelopmentstudio.com), you'll be able to impact the development of Infinite Flight and test features before we release them to the public! It's your chance to make a difference :)

Flying Development Studio on FSBreak

2011-07-11T02:12:00.000-07:00

Greetings !

In case you missed it, we were interviewed last week by the guys at FSBreak. If you are interested to learn a bit more about the team, development on the Windows Phone platform and the future of Infinite Flight, you can watch/listen to the interview here :

http://www.fsbreak.net/podcast/2011/7/7/fsbreak-94-infinite-flight-for-windows-phone-7.html

Thanks again to Eric, Chis and Nick for letting us share our passion.

Happy landings !

Infinite Flight 1.6 is out, fixes performance issues

2011-06-22T10:00:00.000-07:00

Infinite Flight 1.6 was just published to the marketplace. It fixes the performance issues that were reported by pilots last week. The update should start propagating in the next few hours.

This update should make the performance even better than in 1.4. In our search for the source of the stutters, we found a piece of code that wasn't really optimized, we cleaned it up, and the simulator now runs even better!

Let us know what you think in the comments :)

We're hard at work on 1.7 now, bringing you more features, and perhaps new airplanes... stay tuned!

Performance Issues

2011-06-18T02:40:00.000-07:00

We've received a couple of emails from pilots about the increased choppiness of Infinite Flight since updating to 1.5.

Rest assured that we're working on it, the issue might have been located already, and once we're sure of what the problem is, we will publish an update as soon as possible.

The problem seems to be in the code that creates the ground tiles, so flying at lower speeds helps keep the stutters to a minimum.

We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience and thank the pilots that reached out to us about the issue :)

Happy Landings!

Infinite Flight 1.5 with new scenery and ILS

2011-06-17T07:34:00.000-07:00

We are proud to release Infinite Flight 1.5 which includes new scenery data covering a very large portion of the LA area as well as the first iteration of our brand new ILS. We also added a few tweaks to the UI as well as a new mini-map directly visible from the HUD.

This release makes navigating and landing with poor visibility very fun !

Here is the detailed changelog:

New scenery area: Southern California

Instrument Landing System (ILS). Enabled for all runways for now.

Mini-Map for the HUD view

Adjustable sensitivity

Fixed flight model issues

Redesigned Airport Page

Misc UI Changes (new options, menus...)

As always we are actively working on adding more planes and sceneries while trying to improve the quality and fidelity of our simulator.

Don't hesitate to send us feedback or comments. We are always open to suggestions in order to make Infinite Flight a better flight simulator.

Happy landings :)

Issues

2011-06-13T05:01:00.000-07:00

Fellow pilots,

We received a couple reports about issues with the accelerometer not responding on some devices. In all the cases we assisted so far, a simple reboot of the phone solved the problem.

Another issue we heard about was about not being able to update the game. This seems to be an issue with the marketplace update system and a simple uninstall and re-install of the game will get you the most recent version of Infinite Flight.

Happy landings :)

Infinite Flight 1.4 for Windows Phone 7

2011-06-02T04:51:00.000-07:00

Infinite Flight 1.4 brings 2 additional airplanes and new features!

Demand has been high for jet aircrafts, we’re listening, which is why we’re bringing a Southwest Airlines Boeing 737-800! It comes with flaps, spoilers, retractable landing gear, sounds...

Our second airplane is a Super Decathlon, an aerobatic tail-dragger aircraft with a 180HP engine.

We uploaded two videos showing the new airplanes in action:

Also, after having received numerous requests for a trial version, we’re enabling trial mode with this release.

Here is the full list of changes:
- Added Boeing 737-800 (Southwest Airlines)
- Added Super Decathlon (180HP aerobatic tail-dragger)
- Added Rudder Control
- Support for retractable landing gear and spoilers
- Airplane wheels animation
- Added Pinch-to-Zoom for External Cameras
- Added Propeller wash
- Added Trial Mode
- Other performance improvements and bug fixes

Download now

More info at our blog: http://blog.flyingdevelopmentstudio.com

You can also follow us on twitter at @FlyingDevStudio for latest updates and hints about the new features we’re working on.

Infinite Flight 1.3 - New Airplane - Cirrus SR22 G3 Turbo

2011-05-05T04:38:00.000-07:00

We are proud to announce that our 1.3 update has been approved by Microsoft. It brings a new airplane, the High Performance Cirrus SR22 G3 Turbo as well as a handful of bug fixes.
We shot a video of the new airplane in action check it out

Our next update is almost ready, we’ve got one new plane confirmed for it, and perhaps another one if time permits.

Download now

Infinite Flight Update

2011-04-29T06:12:00.000-07:00

We published an update to Infinite Flight yesterday following comments from users about issues with the sky color.

You should have been notified by your phone by now to update to version 1.2.

We're working on the next update that will bring a new airplane and some other things that we'll announce later.

Stay tuned!

Infinite Flight hands on video

2011-04-27T08:52:00.000-07:00

As promised here is an hands on video of Infinite Flight. Enjoy :)

Cleared for take off...

2011-04-27T03:18:00.000-07:00

Hello fellow Pilots !

We are really excited that we successfully launched Infinite Flight for Windows Phone 7.
We worked hard in order to bring the best flight simulation experience whether you are a novice or an expert pilot.

You already sent many Aircraft requests and we will make sure to honor the most popular ones. There is already a few that are in the process of being added and that will be released in future updates.

Many people asked for a trial version of the game. Trial versions are tricky, especially for such a niche market. That being said, we are listening and are actively debating the possibility to add a trial version. For the time being, we are focused on the next update that will bring a new plane and a few more goodies. We are also preparing a video capture of the game running on a device in order to give future pilots a better insight on the gameplay.

Stay tuned !

Fun fact: pilots have flown more than 20hrs on the first day (more about this in a another post)

Infinite Flight - The first Flight Simulator for Windows Phone 7

2011-04-25T16:56:00.000-07:00

We're proud to announce we've finally shipped our second and biggest game for Windows Phone 7!

“Infinite Flight” is the first Flight Simulator for Windows Phone 7 and it is now available in the marketplace!

Here’s a list of what version 1.0 has to offer:

Cessna 172SP Trainer Aircraft (More to come!)

15 Airports in the San Francisco Bay Area

Realistic Flight Model

Interactive Flight Lessons

Autopilot (Altitude and Heading)

4 time presets (Sunrise, Day, Sunset and Night)

Weather settings: Wind direction and intensity, visibility...

Yoke helper for easy handling of the airplane

Final Approach Path Display to help with landings

Realistic sounds

5 Camera Modes

Runway lights

Automatic Logbook (entries added for each flight)

Leaderboards

Achievements

We’re eager for feedback so do not hesitate to contact us with comments, ideas, feature requests...

If you want to stay updated, follow us on twitter at @flyingdevstudio for more updates, or “Like” the Infinite Flight’s Facebook Page!

We can also be reached at contact@flyingdevelopmentstudio.com

Download now

Update on the phone lockup

2011-04-03T04:50:00.000-07:00

As some of you are aware, Final Approach has been having issues with phone lockups for quite some time. We've never been able to repro the problem in house. Microsoft has been helping us but couldn't repro the hang as well.

Well, we've got a bit of a good news this morning, some users are reporting that after installing the newest update of Windows Phone 7 (Nodo) on their device, they could run the game just fine!

I guess the damage is done now in terms of bad reviews though... The game has been going down in the rankings. Let's hope that this fixed issue will bring in better reviews!

Next game is coming close to feature complete!

2011-03-28T03:21:00.000-07:00

Just a quick status update to let our readers know that our next game is coming close to being feature complete!

I can't talk about it yet, we want to keep it a surprise, but stay tuned, we'll definitely post stuff on here very soon!

If you're really curious, you can browse my personal website to find out what it can be ;)

New Maps for Final Approach Lite

2011-01-01T08:02:00.000-08:00

[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="400" caption="Oakland"]
[/caption]

We're happy to announce that we'll be releasing an update to Final Approach Lite that will add 2 new maps.

These maps are based on satellite images this time. One for the airport of Oakland in California and another one for Los Angeles International.

We're hoping for a publication sometime this week... stay tuned!

New Flying Development Studio Blog!

2010-10-21T16:07:00.000-07:00

This blog will be used to post about the development of Final Approach and Infinite Runway for Windows Phone 7.

Stay tuned!