Latin VFR : exclusive

Viva Santo Domingo, last airport available on FS9/FSX.

The interview published yesterday evening and deleted accidentaly by Blogger..

1) Airdailyx : When its about Caribbean, central and south american airports, Latin VFR has today a

radiance and popularity. Where does this come from ?

Ricardo Morillo, chief developer : We were the first to introduce, photo scenery, mesh, surroundings, extremely realistic airports in our scenery packages, whilst others were just doing the airport itself. In many ways just doing the airport itself fails to capture the whole meaning of these regions, the generic FS scenery in these areas made you feel that you were landing in Europe or North America instead of these exotic regions. The major designers that did such sceneries with high detail were giving priority to Europe and North America, and there was our place which needed urgently realistic work. Some people became enamored with our ways and since then we have continued to learn and tried to improve our techniques.

2) We never see (or its very seldom) any eastern or may discounts. What is your policy ?

Ricardo : From the moment we release the scenery, there is already a discount. Take for example MDSD, we sell it for 14.99 euros without taxes, 2 FS versions, mesh, photo scenery, surroundings, extremely realistic airports, that’s way more than many people offer. Each FS version is costing more or less 7.50 euros without taxes, you can’t hardly find right now in the market people offering for just one fs version 7.50. And its not as if there isn’t any difference in each FS version. Many of the scenery elements have to be done from scratch for each FS version. We have found that our pricing, its not cheap, but fair, and if we make discounts we might be insulting our customers that have paid the full price. Thankfully, despite having small prices our high sales make up for it and allow us brake even quickly.

3) A lot of us are impressed, how do you manage one scenery per month ?

Ricardo : We are full time developers. As for me, aside from having a family, a 6 to often 7 day work schedule of 12-14 hours permits me to do as much as I can. Sceneries are not developed in a month, more likely month and a half or 2, in many cases 3, but it takes a lot of effort, many people collaborating in the projects, though not a team of 10, we have C. Jimenez doing the autogen, Jon Schutte with texture creation and editing, 2-3 others with beta testing, one video producer all working on full steam.

4) Can we imagine Latin VFR someday will eventually make an european project (or an Asian, African...)

We would love to, but we want to have more airports in Latin America first. Per capita Europe leads, but Africa really needs some more fields, lets see what happens in the future.

5) Quality of your products is not disputed but are not a FSDT or a Fly Tampa. Are you working or relying on new techniques soon ?

Ricardo : These two companies you mention take 5-6 or 7 months developing, they quality is demonstrated in the amount of time they are likely dedicate to their works. That doesn’t mean because we work 2-3 months on one we justify our quality, we find that for what we do we do it in shorter time but we would have to find a balance between faster production rates and dedicating more time to the projects. But for now we find that our customers are more than satisfied, nonetheless this is a learning profession, every day we are learning new techniques, perhaps we are not experimenting as much with new things since we are developing for creation, experimenting and trying new things would lead us to shortly halt production, however we often stop and try to find out some of the things other developers do. For example we were the first in the Western hemisphere to introduce volumetric grass, after seeing it from an Australian developer, we are striving to have our scenery for the current standards. As I said before we are among the first Latin designers to modify all aspects of scenery design, photo scenery, mesh, surroundings, realistic airports etc.

6) Can you refresh our memory, when Latin VFR has been founded, what was its very first scenery ?

We were founded in the end of 2008, our first scenery was San Jose valley photo scenery and mesh. Its no longer in sale because its not to our standards but later we did Cuzco airport for FS2004 that was in March 2009.

Cuzco scenery in Peru, published in summer 2009.

Thank you very much to Ricardo. We are grateful for his time.

Dom Mason
Airdailyx