I Live For This

A bunch of updates, then an invitation at the end:

Baseball season is upon us, and as with every year, my ability to function or the level of passion I have for anything else in life gets called into question.

Here's the thing...I missed the Washington Nationals opening day game on TV last night because I was too busy programming with SimConnect :p

So for the readers of this blog, you will probably think that my attention is in the right place.  I tend to agree.  Getting to go out to Redmond for a week only fueled the fire to make new things and push the limits.  There is a great team out there and knowing that they support what I do is a big boost for me.  In other news, without breaking any NDA's or anything, I'll just say that SP1 is going to be great.

 

So back to the projects...what I'm working on/planning:

- I have a backlog of tutorials to clean up and post
- Revisiting XNA and FSX SimConnect integration, I think this could be huge if people start investigating it.
- Tower Controller... I've got a pretty decent prototype that allows you to sit in the tower and control AI aircraft
- I'm way behind on finishing up the TrackerX web interface.  To be honest, web programming seems a touch boring in comparison to SC or XNA :D
- My new project since visiting Seattle is trying to get a "missile" to fire from a user aircraft and track an AI plane.  Tons of crappy math in there, but I plan on explaining it, assuming I get it to work.
- I'd like to start learning gauges as well, and putting them together with SimConnect backends.

 

Now, on to the invitation:

I noticed on Owen's blog that the incomparable Project OpenSky has released some new planes.  Owen mentions that he got his start with POSky, as well as several other AC creation notables.  Groups like that really become proving grounds for the people who are the future of our add-on community.

There's a possibility that someone out there reading this is a 3D modeler, maybe you've made a few plane models; maybe you are a painter who loves to create liveries, or an air file editor.  If you have any skills that might be applied to creating aircraft for FSX, I'd love to hear from you.  I have a mountain of available time to work on Flight Sim projects now, and it's been a dream of mine to build an aircraft for the sim.  I'm certainly not locked into real-world aircraft,  it would be great to try to model a fictional plane with all those features you always thought planes should have, but can't because of technology or cost.  I'm open to military or civilian planes as well. 

Here's the big thing.  I want people who are new.  I want guys who are just starting to discover the creation side of our hobby, and want to push out and expand what they can do.  It's hard for one person to get rolling on their own, but as a large group, we will have an incredible resource of knowledge and experience to draw from. 

If you are an experienced member of the design community, don't let that stop you from contacting me.  I'll want as many contacts and advice-givers as possible as we muscle through this.

Drop me a comment or an email at brian.gefrich@gmail.com and we can start setting out at creating some freeware aircraft that break some new boundaries.