I haven’t posted much to this blog recently, because some other things kept me busy. Had a business trip for work, spend some time preparing for the Sinterklaas celebration tradition we have in the Netherlands, etc. But there has been quite some exiting news recently that I want to share with you all.

Flight beta

Microsoft has announced that the beta testing of Microsoft Flight will start next month. That’s interesting news, let’s hope it will be a good platform for addon developers again. The even better news is that you can apply now to be part of the beta testing. So if you want to help removing some bugs and making it a better simulator this is your chance.

SketchUp update

Google has announced an update for SketchUp. Two things from the announcement seem especially interesting for FS developers using SketchUp. The first is that the COLLADA exporter has been improved to be more compliant with the standard. I am going to test soon if ModelConverterX can still process the current output correctly. Another interesting improvement is that the filenames are now preserved when exporting. I think that could help FS developers a lot, since that would mean you don’t have to rename those texture0, texture1, etc all the time.

X-Plane

A demo version of X-Plane 10 has been released and the official release is scheduled within a few days. I haven’t tried the demo yet, but from the screenshots it looks like a very interesting platform. I am a little surprised it was release so quickly after the FSWeekend, since the demo we saw there was not so stable yet. Reading on the internet it seems the demo also got some mixed reactions. Especially this announcement on their blog tells me I probably better wait a few more patches before I start exploring making addons for X-Plane 10.