What is to come

Let's go over what I'll be talking about here on this blog.

Brief intro: I'm a flight sim enthusiast who has dabbled in sims from Flight Simulator II back in the 80's to Jane's in the 90's and Microsoft Flight Simulator moving into the 21st century. Civilian sims, combat sims, I've played the whole lot of them - although some more than others and others hardly more than once. After a few years hiatus to focus on getting into the game development industry (The Sims also played a significant role in sucking up any idle time I had) I got back into Flight Simulator around 2009 and now I write reviews for AVSIM and design freeware scenery (see the info box to the left for more on that).

There are four main topics I'll be discussing:

Random Ramblings

To be categorized as "uncategorized", these posts will cover some aspect of flight simulation and will sometimes be an opinion piece about something that's buzzing in the flight simulator community not just here on AVSIM but around the web. I'm not a very opinionated person nor am I usually one to bother sharing opinions whenever I find I have one, so don't expect these type of postings often. Generally I'll stick to commentary - I'm not looking to start a lot of arguments around here.

Review Addendums

If you've read my reviews (see info box on the left) you'll know that I tend to do a lot of tweaking to the product over the course of my review to make it even more realistic or effective. In my Texan review I made changes to the aircraft config file, created a voice pack mod for the aircraft model, and a few more things. For my Aerolites Falcon review, although I did not include them, I extensively revised the checklists for the aircraft and its various variations. For my first scenery review I did a lot of editing the airport file to fix parking issues, taxi accuracy, and more. I'll now be including these extra things here after the review has been posted.

Flight Logs

I still hop in the cockpit every now and then to go for a fly, and I record what occurs on these flights for two reasons: One is that I try to use as many real-world procedures and rules as possible wherever and whenever I fly, so for my own future reference I like to make notes of how I handled, for example, a DME arc so I can look back later on when I want to fly a DME arc again and make sure I don't repeat any mistakes. The second reason is that in describing the methods and procedures I'm using and the mistakes I'm making when doing so I hope others can also learn. Each flight log has a picture gallery as well. I have several already published I'll be adding here once a week until I'm all caught up, interspersing them with more recent flights as I undertake them.

Scenery Design

Every now and then I may have some thoughts or tutorials to share on scenery design as I continue to gain experience - I've only been doing it for just over a year now and am still learning as I go on. I don't model or texture yet (maybe won't at all - I was never good at that I found when I was doing game development) so I'll mainly be focusing in airport design and functionality.

And that's all! I hope everyone enjoys reading