By Javier Rollon · 2019-03-20
Seven years ago last January, I uploaded the CRJ-200 to the X-Plane.org store. I remember the exact moment — 2:47 AM Spanish time, a Tuesday, one final upload attempt after the previous three had timed out. I went to bed not knowing if anyone would care.
They cared. More than I could've imagined.
I'm not being dramatic. Before the CRJ-200, X-Plane didn't really have what the MSFS world called "study-level" aircraft. We had nice models with decent flight dynamics, but nobody had built a full FMS, a realistic electrical system, or proper cold-and-dark procedures for X-Plane. Philipp Ringler wrote the FMS plugin that made it all possible. Without him, the CRJ-200 would've been just another pretty face with shallow systems.
The FMS was actually the hardest part. Not the coding — Philipp handled that brilliantly — but the testing. I flew real-world routes for weeks, comparing our waypoint sequencing against Jeppesen charts. We'd find bugs at 3 AM, fix them, and then realize the fix broke something else. It was exhausting and I loved every minute of it.
The flight model holds up surprisingly well. X-Plane's blade-element theory does most of the heavy lifting — I just had to get the wing geometry right, and the sim figured out the aerodynamics. The CRJ-200's handling on approach, that tendency to balloon if you carry too much speed over the threshold, that's not something I programmed. It's what happens when you model the wing correctly and let the physics engine work.
What I got wrong? The sounds. Original sounds were recorded from YouTube videos and cockpit recordings of varying quality. Blue Sky Star Simulations eventually produced a proper sound pack in 2016 that was leagues better than what I shipped with. Should I have waited? Probably. But four years of development was already testing my patience.
The cockpit lighting was also rough by today's standards. In 2012, X-Plane's rendering engine had real limitations. The self-shadowing cockpit was actually a workaround, not a feature — I couldn't get proper indirect lighting, so I baked shadows into the textures. People thought it looked great. It was a hack. A successful hack, but still a hack.
I started work on a CRJ-200 V2 around 2017. New 3D model, PBR textures, rewritten systems. Then Philipp became unavailable. The FMS was his code, his architecture, his intellectual property. Without him, I couldn't update the most important system on the aircraft. So V2 stalled. I pivoted to the Jetstream 32 instead — a completely new project where I controlled every system myself.
It still bothers me. The CRJ deserves a V2. Whether it gets one depends on factors I can't fully control.
Don't build for today's X-Plane. Build for X-Plane two versions from now. The rain effects, the vapor condensation on the wings — those weren't standard in 2012. I spent extra weeks implementing them because I thought they mattered. Turns out I was right. Those effects became expected features that every subsequent payware aircraft had to include.
Also: charge what your work is worth. I priced the CRJ lower than I should have. Four years of development, and I undercut myself because I was scared nobody would pay full price. They would have. The reviews and the sales proved the value was there. It's a lesson I applied to every release after.
The CRJ-200 is almost a decade old now. People still fly it. People still email me asking when V2 is coming. That kind of longevity in a market where new products appear weekly — that's the best compliment a developer can receive.
Javier Rollon is the developer behind JRollon Planes, creating aircraft add-ons for X-Plane since 2010. Follow on Twitter.