The 2nd and 3d day of the DevCon kept me quite busy, so I did not write a new blog posts about them. But I can tell you that those two days were great as well. Learned a lot and spoken to a lot of interesting people.

Yesterday was the 1st day of the Avsim FanCon and I enjoyed that a lot. There were quite some interesting presentations and I met more people that I know from the AvSim scenery design forums. It is so nice to have a face behind those forum user names now.

I also gave a presentation at the FanCon, about the evolution in scenery design over the last 10 years. Some time ago I realized that it is 10 years ago already that I started to make scenery for Fs5 and since then a lot has changed. So in the presentation I took an look at how the default scenery has changed between Fs5 and FsX. Of course this is quite a lot, in Fs5 we still had a flat, empy world. While in FsX we now have a realistic looking, living, populated world. Comparing screenshots of the same location in all those versions of FS gives a nice overview of the changes.

Besides the default scenery, I also took a look at how my own addon sceneries have evolved over time. It was quite fun to actually dig up the first addon I made for Fs5 again. With the help of a DOS emulator, I even got Fs5 with that addon to run again on my laptop. In the last part of my presentation I took a look at how the scenery design tools have evolved in those 10 years and you can be sure the changes are quite big. Some things have become easier, other things have become more complex now. But one thing is sure, in all those years we have had a lot of fun making addon scenery.

 In the evening there was the AvSim Awards Banquet. They had two very interesting speakers, the first was a Boeing test pilot who gave a talk about the Boeing 747 Superfreighter that is used to transport parts of the 787. And the second speaker was Eric Lindbergh Jr. who talked about his own transatlantic flight and the XPrize foundation he is involved in. Both together this made the banquet very interesting.