Планы по релизу PMDG 747-8 Queen of the Skies II Expansion Package

Captains,

During the weekend ahead, we are planning to release the PMDG 747-8 Expansion for our PMDG 747-400 Queen of the Skies II product line.  (Finally! woooooooot! 😋) [Disclaimer: Release is expected- but not guaranteed…stay tuned!]

A few things we want you to know, **before** we get into the drama of the release weekend:

Massive PMDG 747-400 Update:  Our original plan (circa 2012, when the 747 project was launched) was that the PMDG 747-8 Queen of the Skies II would overlay the PMDG 747-400 Queen of the Skies II with the same ease as the PMDG 777-300ER overlaid the PMDG 777-200LR.  Oh how wrong we were…

We were so, so wrong…

From a technology, the 747-400 and 747-8 are entirely different machines.  Most of this is related to the data and processing functions inherent to the 747-8, and this caused us to have to do a massive amount of reconstruction on the 747-400.  What probably SHOULD have happened, is that we SHOULD have simply announced that the PMDG 747-8 was going to become a stand-alone product and called it a wrap.

We wrestled with this, since we had already told you that the PMDG 747-8 was to be an expansion, so we stuck to that plan and probably absorbed an extra 7-9 months of development time on account of it.

So we are going to publish a full new installer for the PMDG 747-400 Queen of the Skies II and this will be a required installation if you wish to use the PMDG 747-8.  The changes *could* be delivered by micro-updater, but in this instance prefer to draw a bold line to make certain all users wind up in the same version.

What is included?:  We are very much focusing our development on the top-end.  Prepar3D v4 gives us the flexibility to include some great functionality that simply doesn’t play well on other platforms- and for that reason we are adding PMDG RainMaker to the 747-8 (and soon the 747-400 as well) but we will not be adding RainMaker to Prepar3D v3, FSX or FSX-SE because we do not think those platforms adequately support it.

Here is the matrix for what you can expect:

Prepar3D v4.3+ Users

• PMDG 747-400 Queen of the Skies II Product Update (estimating Build 3.00.9004)
  • PMDG RainMaker Functionality (release for 747-400 expected approximately Nov, 1.)
• PMDG 747-8 Queen of the Skies II Expansion Package
  • PMDG RainMaker Functionality
  • PMDG Electronic Flight Bag w/computation features and Airport Mapping.

Prepar3D v3,  FSX, and FSX-Steam Edition Users:

• PMDG 747-400 Queen of the Skies II Product Update (estimating Build 3.00.9004)
• PMDG 747-8 Queen of the Skies II Expansion Package
  • PMDG Electronic Flight Bag w/computation features and Airport Mapping.

As is the norm for PMDG products, FSX users may use their product license in either/both of FSX and FSX-SE, while Prepar3D customers may use their license in either/and/or Prepar3D v3 and Prepar3D v4.  Moving between the two simulation platforms does require the purchase of a license for the desired platform.

Speaking of Versions:  Prepar3D Users BEWARE that we have some changes coming:  With the advent of our support for the Prepar3D product line, we have tried very hard to support any possible version that you might wish to use.  We shortly afterward dropped support for v1 and v2 of Prepar3D because it simply wasn’t possible for us to maintain compatibility across the product platforms without limiting growth on the top end of the product line.

Fortunately, we haven’t run into this with Prepar3D v3 and v4 (yet), but we are starting to see problems across the Prepar3D v4 product line maintaining version between 4.0-4.3.  For this reason, we are updating the product requirements on the PMDG 747-400 Queen of the Skies II and PMDG 747-8 Queen of the Skies II to Prepar3D v4.3.  This doesn’t mean it won’t run on earlier v4.x versions, but it does mean we won’t be able to support you if you have trouble with the product not running in earlier versions and you choose not to be on the latest update of Prepar3D.

Inevitably there will be users who want to remain with an outdated version of Prepar3D for personal reasons.  If any of our versioning requirements cause you trouble, we apologize- but the vast majority of customers are focused on the newer capabilities of Prepar3D and in order to keep the product line growing and using the latest capabilities we need to keep moving forward as well.

Pricing Expectations:

As always, we will not be announcing pricing until release, but I can tell you that pricing will be *slightly* higher than previous expansion products due in large part to the amount of work required to build the simulation of this truly stunning modern airliner.

Additionally, effective with the release of the PMDG 747-8 Queen of the Skies II, there will be a small price adjustment to pricing on the base package of the PMDG 747-400 Queen of the Skies II for both FSX (appx. $10) and Prepar3D users (appx $5).