Gman

Hi tooting, 3rd party development does not necessarily mean payware. Nor does it simply mean aircraft and scenery object modelling, mesh development, sounds, skies and clouds, and water. A great deal of 3rd party development is in the tools and utilities such as Airport Design Editor, Model Converter X, and Static Aircraft Model Maker to name just a few. While it is a fact of life that innovation usually happens outside of the box, developing for flight sims has no hard fast rules, different people try different techniques to get their creations to perform as designed. Sometimes groundbreaking improvements are discovered, sometimes not, because everyone's system, hardware, and other addons installed are all different and it is virtually impossible to optimize for every possible combination. Working smoothly on 7 out of 10 computers is great for 7 out of 10 simmers, but there have always been those who had to find workarounds to get this or that running. Just as many developers now include wide aspect ratio cockpits, perhaps if more addons were configurable, users could tone-down or spool-up according to their own capabilities, especially scenery addons. It is important to remember that many potential 3PD's of DTG's new flight sims may have never used a flight simulator. Guys who are now 18 and active in aircraft modeling for FSX (and producing some spectacular work) were 8 years old when FSX came out. It is important that they will have expert advice and the development tools which were designed by the 3PD's who have blazed the trails ahead, passed along the hard won information they have gathered, and programmed user friendly utilities for accomplishing many tasks which were formerly difficult for the beginner to medium level developer to perform. I am afraid that asking for all 3PD's to gather in a conference room is like asking all simmers to have the same computer, OS, and addons. On the other hand, that conference room exists virtually at FSDeveloper.com where meetings on all aspects of flight sim development are in progress 24-7...the Sun never sets on the FSDeveloper.com empire! Cheers Gman

Absolutely! Nothing ruins the look of any carefully designed airport more than aircraft and GSE sitting darkened in what is supposed to be a pool of light beneath a ramp light. The effects for lighting an aircraft were in FS9 and FSX, and were quite apparent when illuminated by lightning, but unsupported in Gmax. As Rhumbaflappy mentioned, whether for freeware or commercial usage, any meaningful discussion of a well thought out SDK should be addressed at FSDeveloper.com which is where the majority of Flight Sim developers have cut their teeth for over a decade. Regardless of the features and capabilities of any DFS SDK, the chances are high that most people who are using the SDK are going to learn how to install, configure, and use it at FSDeveloper.com. Just sayin'. Gman