Time for a little update. This weekend was the annual FSWeekend in the Netherlands again, and I was present there on behalf of NL2000 and FSDeveloper. For NL2000 this was certainly not the first time we were there and it was a lot of fun to meet all those users of our scenery again. There are people you see almost every year at the weekend. For FSDeveloper it was the first time we were (a bit) visible at the event. Due to the more technical nature of the FSDeveloper community there was maybe a little less interest, but hopefully it helped some people to get starting in making some addons themselves.
Another interesting thing at the FSWeekend was that IVAO had organised a seminar about the future of Flight Simulation. At those sessions a panel discussed the consequences of the closure of ACES and what it meant for our hobby. The panel of 5 consisted of Jonckers (IVAO), Kenny Moens (IVAO), Mathijs Kok/Winfried Diekmann (Aerosoft), Francois Dumas (FSAddon and more) and me (NL2000/FSDeveloper). I guess this topic could deserve its own blog post later on, but in short the participants agreed that for the short term the consequences were mainly more stability and more time to develop nice addons. For the longer term the opinion varied more, but it is logical that you look differently at it when you try to make a living on FS addons. The fact that Aerosoft is considering to build their own simulator was also discussed of course and that sounds interesting indeed. I guess we'll see what the future brings, but the FSWeekend also showed that there are still many people enjoy flight simulation as a hobby.
So with the FSWeekend over now, it is time to move on to some other things again. Besides the busy work schedule and the normal family activities, I will try to focus on two things in the coming weeks. The first one is to finish the typical Dutch windmill objects for the NL2000 scenery. Since we got asked many times at the FSWeekend when the next release will be, it guess I should try to give this some priority. Because we can't release a Dutch scenery without such objects, we should keep up the myth that we all live in windmills and wear clogs. Oh and to come back to the question about the NL2000 v4 release (which I answered a dozen times this weekend), it will be released when it is ready and we can't promise a date yet. But we can see the end of the beta testing tunnel by now.
The other activity I want to put some focus on is the new gPoly tool I am planning. The idea has crystallized quite clear in my head by now, so I am looking forward to start the actual coding. I really think that a tool to make the creation of custom ground polygons a lot easier would be helpful to many developers. So hopefully I can report some progress on this soon.