One of the latest images from Microsoft Flight team - it seems that the Beta will be held in FebruaryAll, my apologies for the lack of updates and communications in the past few months. I have been quite busy with my job and I had not much time to spend on my hobbies - nor the will, honestly, to spend even more time in front of a computer screen than the one I have to spend at work.
Hopefully I will have more time to work on Flight (Simulator) designs in the following months but I am not sure. Also I am still waiting for some informations on Flight and its development tools, in order to see how the development process will be different from FSX (not too much I hope) and what will be the possibilities of the new simulator. It looks good - much better than FSX in some areas - and I cannot wait to try it. By the way, Microsoft it seems that Microsoft is planning a Beta stage for February - which means probably a release in summer or early autumn.
Here is a brief update of the projects in my folders... although I did very little in the past few months.
T-45C Goshawk - NO UPDATES. I am quite happy with the latest release... I am just curious to see how easy it will be to import that into Flight. If it will be possible to convert it to Flight, it will be freeware.
New F-14D Super Tomcat - External model is almost ready and I am really happy for its quality (, while for the internal I am a bit undecided between making only the pilot cockpit (by reusing most of the geometry from the previous model) or do also the RIO one (which means many more hours of design). In both cases the plan would be to have completely new hi-res textures. Although I paid a significant amount of money for professional 3d data for this project, these have been covered by donations and revenue from the payware F-35 so I still plan to release it as freeware. But I have no idea on when.
F-35 Lightning II - As you may be aware of, I am working on a new high-res model based on quite expensive high resolution meshes. It is not far from being complete - but there are some bad news. It is a frame rate hog. It looks beautiful, but the vast majority of the users will not be able to run it at decent frame rates. I have tried several solutions, but they do not seem to work for several reasons. I am undecided what to to with it. Maybe Flight can handle it in a much more efficient way? I do not know - and again I do not know how easy it will be to import it in Flight. It probably requires 12-15 hours of work before release.
So, again, my apologies for the lack of updates. Also, my apologies for the lack of personal contact information - I am not using the old email anymore. I have a new one for "personal" (i.e. non FSX) uses and I may need to set up a new one for FSX... for the moment, this blog is the only way to contact me - although I cannot guarantee a reply or any level of support. Sorry for that.
Last my apologies for having having rejected all the friedship requests I have received on facebook. Yes, I am on facebook. But I have decided to use it as a communication tool for "real life" friends only - so I am rejecting all requests from all people I have not met in person. No offense intended, I just prefer to stick to that decision.
