3rd Party Avionics

[doodlebug]

Blackbird Simulations has always been committed to providing the highest quality simulations to our customers. We are also a strong proponent of user choice.

However, with the highly dynamic and ever-improving environment that Microsoft Flight Simulator has become, we've found that it is out of our wheelhouse for us to ship our products with full support for 3rd party avionics products. Most, if not all, of these, are highly susceptible to compatibility issues that have little to nothing to do with our products. And yet, we're EXPECTED to provide support and fixes for these products.

These issues cost us valuable development time, as the sim continues to evolve from month to month and update to update. This, in turn, prevents us from working on new and exciting products that we would like to share with our customers. It's hard enough dealing with our own fixes, let alone having to deal with problems with other devs products...

While we'd love for our customers to have the freedom to use any and all 3rd party applications that they choose, we believe there is a better path than what has been followed to date. As such, going forward, we will not be enabling native support for 3rd party avionics in our products. The fact is that, we can no longer be responsible for the coding practices (good or bad) of other developers. We make aircraft. Good ones. That's where our focus must, and will, be from this point forwards.

We have looked at the strong modification community that exists in MSFS, as well as current examples of the extensive aircraft modifications that have been done by enterprising groups and individuals. With MSFS, we have a simulator platform where aircraft modifications can exist without directly editing a single file of the aircraft in question. Because of that, we've realized that it would be entirely possible for every aspect of nearly any desired component to be added via modification; thus, we feel that the responsibility to add and support 3rd party avionics packages should fall to the developers or publishers of those products. This will ultimately benefit users of those products far better than aircraft developers trying to continually play 'catch-up' as various situations emerge.

As such, we will commit ourselves to providing 'modification-friendly' aircraft when it's possible to do so without exposing our intellectual property. The means of doing so may vary from aircraft to aircraft; it may mean that we allow for blank areas where 3D meshes may be added, it may mean that we include the 3D meshes and textures directly while giving mod authors the documentation to use them effectively. We will do our best but, our concentration must, and will remain, making the best aircraft we can.

We hope that this path will eventually provide a situation where everyone benefits. We realize that this may not be initially desirable for everyone, but the current environment has become unsustainable and a new path was needed. We hope that our customers understand and continue forward with us to the exciting projects we have upcoming in 2023.