Introduction

Thank you for purchasing XPax!

This add-on is something new for HiFi.  Over the past year we have had considerable requests from our customers and supporters to develop a passenger add-on.  Being that we've been working solely on Weather Add-ons for the past 6 years, we decided it would be a fun and exciting change of pace for us.  By June of 2007 we had the design specifications in mind and started towards bringing it to completion.

The original goal was to provide a low-cost, immersive, entertaining and realistic passenger carriage experience for FS.  We wanted both audio and visual content and a top-down dynamic diagram of the cabin showing all our passengers, complete with dynamic status including health and approval.  As our initial goal was met with preliminary Alpha versions, we expanded and polished things further.  With the great help of the HiFi Beta Team, we finally steered things towards a unique product we are proud to release.

Thanks to lots of hard work from Carl Hackman, a key Lead Developer at HiFi, we also recently completed development of our dual-version FSX/FS9 simulator interface and XPax was the perfect add-on to debut this with.  Using Peter Dowson's FSUIPC for FS9, and Microsoft's SimConnect for FSX (and beyond), we could concentrate on coding the add-on without worrying about the simulator version in use, as all calls would be common.  Since SimConnect is used directly for FSX, XPax will be easily portable to future FS versions, and also provides enhanced extensibility.

We hope you enjoy the product as much as we enjoyed putting it together!  This is the first product in a series dubbed "Pocket Add-ons" from HiFi that provide low-cost and entertaining enhancements to your simulation experience.  Keep in touch at our website and forums for the latest developments!

Enjoy!

Damian Clark
XPax Project Manager
HiFi Simulation Software