To FSX Beta testers

[Guest artmartin]

I just received a reply from the MS FSX Development Team (Hal Bryan) after asking if the non-disclosure agreement for beta testers could be relaxed now that the demo and beta were available to the public. He replied that we certainly now can disclose that we've been on the beta test team. He did ask however that we still refrain from commenting on specifics of any bugs being discussed.I think this will be a big help to scenery developers that would like their products to move gracefully into the new product. It will also help to reassure our customers or freeware users that we're getting wonderful cooperation from Microsoft and that they're taking our help and suggestions very seriously. I'm looking forward to the collaboration we can begin now in forums like this one and on Arno's Scenerydesign.org. I've been dying to talk to other developers about the problems and successes they've been having and methods they may have developed to advance their creations. I think this is great news.Art MartinSimulating Art

[arno 1]

Hi Art,Agreed, looking forward to these new challenges again. But for the moment I think we should be a bit patient, as the version of FsX that will be released will certainly be different from the current demo and beta versions. So somethings we found might again be different once we get the real product. So we better wait for that first.

[LuisFelizTirado 33]

Good news, indeed. I wish you guys would start revealing some of the secret inner workings of FS X now.Best regards.Luis

[Guest heclak]

I would be very grateful and interested to find out more about ground polys in FSX. Would i still need to learn how to create ground polys with the FS2002 SDK or would the FSX SDK do the job properly now? It would be tedious to keep holding on and keeping to the FS2002 gamepak just for ground polys.

[arno 1]

It's difficult to answer that one at the moment, as we need to spend more time exploring the (new) alternatives. But at the moment I would say that the Fs2002 gamepack would still be handy in some areas, for some purposes I have not yet found a good replacement.But as I also said above, we haven't seen the final version yet, so don't blame me if things get very different after the release :).

[Guest artmartin]

Arno, you've said it all very well. It's just nice knowing that others are grinding away at making their scenery compatible and may have some insights that you haven't come up with. I think we all know we haven't seen the final version yet and there may be major differences. We can certainly discuss the things that work so far such as photoreal textures and autogen. When I created my commercial scenery I went way beyond the autogen limitations in number of buildings in an area and I'm now seeing those extra placements showing up so, even without the scenery design SDK's fully released we already see hints of some of the capabilities and the backward compatibility. That may be important to someone. Animations I've created with conditions using your tools appear to work as I expect. Nice stuff to know. There's certainly lots more info coming but we've got a ton of insight already. As long as we're discrete and respectful, I see no reason not to share our experiences a bit.Art

[Guest andyjohnston]

Has anyone tried to load up an older scenery, say one that was built using SCASM code? I have several old sceneries like that, and I'm not sure I'd want to have to upgrade them.How about using AFCAD?