I am back

After a long absence I am trying again to keep this blog active. A lot of good things happened during the last two years. I now have two daughters: Emily Sofie (born in October 2006) and Aurelia Luisa (born in last September). I will publish some new pictures soon and you will see why everything has been delayed so much in the last two years.

As some of you might have noticed FSFK v3.0.1 has been released and I am very happy with this release. I wanted two make the development a bit more public, but it turned out that due to the lack of time I was not able to do it the way I wanted it. Anyway I think that v3 really rocks and provides a lot of new tools for analyzing your flights. Check it out!

I am currently also working on FSMap v1.1, which will add some user requests and fix some minor bugs. It will hopefully ready within the next two months.

The year 2009 will also bring something new to my FS development: Team work. In the last six years in my FS career I was always developing everything on my own. Now I am starting to work on a new product with a very very talented group of coders and designers. I currently cannot give you more information, but it will rock!

FSFK v3.0 development progress

Some really good news: I was able to nearly complete the required updates to FSFK for FSX. FSFK has not been updated yet to use SimConnect, so the first v3.0 Beta will require FSUIPC v4 but I do plan to move over to the new Microsoft API and I actually prepared FSFK internally which took me the last couple of months.

Overall it seems that everything can be ported to FSX with some small exceptions (e.g. menu manipulation for the VA templates which is currently not possible with FSX). I have also added some new exciting features (like displaying the World Map in the ACARS Device, saving and restoring a flight, etc.). I will try to post some preview screenshots asap and update the blog more frequently.

Another decision I have made is that I will split the addition of new features over the next v3.x versions. I really want to release v3.0 (thus support for FSX) as soon as possible (my current schedule is December 2006 or January 2007). The current feature wish list is so long that I can not add everything to the first version without delaying the release. The current plan is to add the most wanted features to v3.0. FSFK v3.1 will concentrate on the new VA features I have on my list (planned release is April or May 2007). Thereafter I will try to add the rest.

The first Beta will mainly concentrate on testing the FSX support and the partly recoded ACARS Device (e.g. map display with dual core support). In the meantime I welcome you to file your wishes in my Wish List forum (please only one suggestion per post and please check if your wish has not been already posted by another user!). VA related suggestions should be posted at a later time as they won't make it into v3.0.