Weekend Report

So, I haven't vanished, as those of you who are on AVSIM might know.  Due to the unexplained disappearance of Ken Salter, the guy who ran the forums over there, Geof Applegate (Geofa) and I have been asked to take over the admin duties for the AVSIM forums.   Besides the spam that the forum email gets, there's been a period of getting used to the new digs, and a few moments of me learning restraints, as I've been pegged as a FSX apologist. 

Speaking of apologies, you might have noticed that I haven't put up the next part of the SimConnect tutorial.  Everything is done for it except for the long process of writing out the blog post.  Welcome to the holidays.  Mostly, I've been out with family and friends, being social.  I did get a chance on Thursday to see ACES team member "Beatle" (aka Tim G.) in his new band down in Fredericksburg, VA.  It was an awesome show, and I'm glad I got to go.  We talked SimConnect, XNA, FSX multiplayer and the upcoming service packs.

In regards to SimConnect, I've been crunching to update TrackerX to version 0.5, which is pretty much a complete code rewrite on the website side.  It was messy as hell, and really needed to be consolidated.  I had a few bugs popping up in the way that icons resized when you zoomed in or out in the Google Map.  This behavior was only occurring after you used the Refresh function on the TrackerX page, so I went in and started rebuilding the whole process to clean it up.  I'm hoping that maybe tonight I can get something workable up on the blog here.  Also, I want to be able to offer a TrackerX API for use on VA websites.  That's down the road, but I want a clean code base to work from.

I've also been doing a lot of investigating into the way that the AI works for Icarus.   There are certainly some interesting things that go on when bringing an AI plane in to land.  My little tool for this can pretty easily be converted into a traffic viewer, so I might throw that up too, somewhere along the way.

So, I'm not gone, I'm still working on stuff, and I'll be full speed ahead after I get back from holiday travelling.