Leaderboard

I can for sure understand the disappointment of the serious FSX users who had some hopes for a new great simming platform and I was following it with interest as well, because I have been using Flight Simulator since version 2, running it on a C64. However, from my point of view, serious or hardcore FSX users make only a fraction of total sales. Most people who bought FSX are not all that serious and don't want to go through detailed flight manuals and checklist and are also not interested in all too deep system simulations. They just want to take an aircraft for a spin and have some fun. My feeling is that Microsoft clearly recognized this trend or fact and this is the reason why Flight is what it is. A casual platform for all kind of "pilots", but if this leads to more people getting interested in aviation and are inspired by simulated flight, I am all for it, because the people who want to get serious will move to other platforms after it, like XP10. I don't see all that big of a loss there, with respect to Flight. We have a nice XP9 and now XP10, which I hope will become an awesome development and flying platform. Beside that, we still have FSX and in the hands of a talented developer (ORBX, A2A Simulations etc.) it is great. To be honest, I didn't expect anything new from Microsoft after they axed the Aces team. Now they have something called Flight, which could be a great tool to win new serious aviators in the long run. If not, nothing is lost and it is free to start using it. I would have loved that with the age of 12, when I started using flight simulators.

First of all I would like to wish you all a Happy New Year, and take the opportunity to show you some progress on the cockpit texturing. There is still work left, but I thought you might be interested to see what the Beaver office looks like so far. Beside the modelling and texturing, I continued to work on my plugin framework code, which makes it very easy now to add modules for systems and physics simulations and I can almost treat it as a standalone simulation, which is pretty cool, because it gives me lots of freedom. OK, here are some WIP shots of the Beaver cockpit. Enjoy!

While it's definitely a loss for the current generation of simulator enthusiasts its a massive win for inspiring the next generation of aviation enthusiasts.

Well, more like build, place n take piccies! Storms brewing..