First Day Report from Columbia, S.C.

From Columbia, South Carolina; The X-Plane Developer's Conference

Today was the first day of the DevCon for X-Plane taking place at the Hilton in Columbia. A global presence is in attendance, with Aerosoft, Flight1, JustFlight, and others here. The day covered some history of the X-Plane product line and the evolution of it over the last 16 years. The primary goals of this first day were to delve into both aircraft desigb and the instrument panel tools. Scenery is on the agenda for the second session on Friday. Some issues, installs spanning multiple drives as an example, were also discussed. Laminar will be looking at this and other issues that were raised. The User Interface is also a subject of discussion and we'll report on that tomorrow. From AVSIM's perspective, the content and dialog of the meeting is encouraging. The obvious growth of the product puts X-Plane solidly in the competitive ring as an alternative available to the future simmer and our hobby. Based on what we heard today, there are some significant add-on offerings coming from all of the publishers represented.