In an age when so much is available to so many (although, worldwide, not nearly enough, mind you) it's easy to take for granted the technological world we live in. Pick Mark Twain or Charles Dickens out of their time periods and drop them in the world today and they would be astonished. Leonardo Da Vinci would just say "yah boo, told yer so" but then he's the exception.As I started my regular daily cruise through the Avsim 'What's New' section in the library, I felt the same as I do every day: I am incredulous that, on the screen of a computer, people are giving us the complexity of aircraft, panels, flight models and scenery that we can experience today in flightsim. For me, every day is Christmas Day (Hanukah, Kwanzaa, whatever).Go flying online, add in a little imagination and you can go anywhere.Is anybody still as amazed as I am? Or do some of us simply spend all day worrying ourselves silly that someone has used the wrong font in a British Airways logo?Mark "Dark Moment" Beaumonthttp://www.swiremariners.com/newlogo.jpg

My face hurts from the ear-to-ear '10 year old grin' I see each time I pass a mirror. It's been that way since I finally got a system to run all this stuff, feature and eye-candy at full throttle! :)I'm with you...the 'Holidays' of any faith, EVERY DAY on AVSIM!Cheers!Mitch R.

I am regularly pleasantly astonished by this amazing piece of software. When I was a kid, I used to spend hours and hours building stuff out of lego. MSFS feels sort of the same to me. Its like an endlessly evolving toy. As much as people want to argue about the minute details of flight modelling and what-have-you, I just find it totally cool that I can load up a reasonably believable recreation of a plane and go flying nearly anywhere in the world under an incredible array of different conditions and really get a pretty good sense of what its all about. I know for anyone that flys for real its nowhere near the same, but for the rest of us its really something...

Mark, I too am daily amazed at the contributions that so many unstintingly make to our hobby and I agree with you; it is easy for some to take those contributions for granted. I don't care whether you are the newest newbie doing his/her first aircraft, or an Eric Ernst who delivers the finest panels (or did), any contribution helps to advance my hobby and it is greatly appreciated. We average some 50 files a day uploaded to AVSIM by these contributors. Think about that... 50 individual creations and efforts of love daily. That's amazing to me!

It really hits home to me when I think of the versions prior. I've carried the same excitment thru out but its when I think of versions prior is when I feel astonished. Just thinking about the little things like wheels that roll on a/c and how more real the sim is with it but yet prior to having it the sim was none the less astonishing.

I am always amazed. It is humbling when you look at all the parts that make up something like the undercarriage of recent freeware releases, and realize that just those pieces of the projects take hours and hours. Having some design experience, I can only imagine someone slaving away for weeks at a time to get everything shaped, organized, and animated just right. For one component!It's an amazing hobby--a world unto itself. -John

Good post. Yes, sometimes I just need to stand back and appreciate what I have, turn off the FPS counter and immerse myself. It is awesome, really awesome. 100 years from now, when they have simulations for everything (I won't go there, but if you could simulate something, what would it be?), we'll stand out as the early adopters, or the whatevers. Who cares, this is now, and it works pretty well for me. billg

Yes, astonished every single day... What a great hobbie !!!Regards. Gabriel

I have a thought that Leonardo would look around for a while, say "Is that all you've done?" and head for the nearest bar.. :)boneshttp://fsaviation.nethttp://www.precisionmanuals.com/images/forum/ng_driver.jpg

Good post, Mark. I remember just how amazed and thrilled some 20 years ago when I got the very first version of MSFS. Although everything was just wire frames and very, very crude by today's standards, my imagination took me anywhere I wanted to go and I was commander of the skies.David

As a child, I used to lay under my bed and pretend I was in the cockpit of an aircraft. I would fly that thing for hours, with panels I had drawn from crayons and colored markers.Even as a FS developer myself, I am completely amazed with the inovation that continues to spring forth from different people, from all walks of life, from around the world, on a daily basis. Just to make our Hobby more enriching.I once said that if MSFS had quit developing FS at FS2000, I still would have been happy for the next 40 years. And as we all know, things have only gotten better since then. Even for us helicopter fans.Jordan Moore

Mark,Thanks for what I consider to be the best post that I have seen since I've been regularly visiting this forum (about 2 1/2 years).To me, its absolutely astonishing to see the realism which is ALREADY being achieved with PC technology.Its amazing to see how much of this is a community effort and how much the work of many talented individuals has ALREADY enriched the potential enjoyment for everyone.I'm also very grateful for all the help I've received from the community (creators of aircraft, panels, sceneries, as well as in this forum) in solving the problems I've encountered along the way.It will never be "perfect" but it doesn't have to be. It already good enough to have given me a sense of what its like to fly low and slow from small airports in places I will never actually visit and follow a valley just to see where it goes next. It is already good enough to have given me a profound respect for the skils and experience of the men and women to whom I entrust my life when I fly on real commercial aircraft.I suspect that Leonardo would be delighted to see such wonderful technology available to so many. I also suspect that after using it for a while, he would have a list of suggested improvements.......Imagine what this "hobby" will be like in another 10 years......

thats whats totally freaky! what will it be like in 10yrs or for that matter 5yrsits funny though how your imagination takes over, i remember back in the days of fltsim for the commodore 64, oh man i thought that was amazing and it was for the time, and i used to fly it imaganing that it looked like what we fly now! and when autogen came into being i nearly passed out! i thouhgt that would never happen, to think we used to fly over desert flat land , yowza weve come a long way ciao!Brian S

Mark,It sure amazes me too. I'm grateful for those that find it enjoyable to make new airplanes, scenery, etc. I salute you. We've surely come a long way from the days of flying that byplane over that pool-table-flat grid pattern with triangles (mountains) defining the boundaries. I'm also grateful for those that gave us the tools to further expand our imaginations and the imaginations of others. I'm using that same imagination to imagine what this hobby will be like in 10 years and I'm smiling.Dave Vega

My first simulator was a "spacewar" game I wrote myself for a roomful of transistors and a big round, green CRT. Wow, it supported vector draws! Cool! I learned to avoid sines and cosines, and to multiply a by a rather than doing a-squared in FORTRAN. So, yeah, I'm amazed every day by what's inside this box.But I can be amazed by other things, too. I was at Sturbridge Village, one of those historical-re-creation towns in Massachusetts. It's set early in the Industrial Revolution, about 1835. We were talking about how long it took civilization to get from mud huts to the water-powered sawmill we were watching. About 10 thousand years. Another 134 years, and we were on the moon.There's a quote by Arthur C. Clarke on my office wall: "Any significantly advanced technology is indistiguishable from magic." You've got to believe that. After all, we see it every day.