The last week [Nick] and I have been quite busy in getting our idea for a bigger community going. For those of you who missed the previous posts where we talked about this, let me start with a short explanation of the idea. The plan is to create a community for FS addon developers, it should be a place where they can discuss their (technical) issues with other developers. So the main focus is that it is for developers only, no normal users blaming you that you modelled that aircraft nose a few milimeters wrong or that your building is not completely correct. There are already enough forums that offer that kind of “services” to developers.

No, we want to create a community that has the same nice atmosphere as the current SceneryDesign.org community. But then not only for scenery designers, but for all addon developers. So it should become a friendly place, where everybody can be free to discuss his problems or ideas with other designers. No matter if you are a freeware or a commercial developers, a newbie or an expert. In the end such a sharing of ideas and experiences is of great benefit to any designer and will improve the available addons for the end users.

One of the reasons to start this community now, is of course because FsX is just around the horizon. And the new possibilities it offers (for example mission development and SimConnect) will certainly generate a lot of discussion. So therefore we think it is a good idea to provide a place for these discussions. And of course the changes in aircraft or scenery design will also generate enough discussions.

Another benefit of having a community of developers, is also that bringing a lot of them together also allows us to provide better feedback to MS. About wishes for future versions, problems with the SDKs, etc. If we can get a structured feedback about that (and we MVPs should be able to help there), we should be able to get even better addons in the future.

Of course not every developer will be interested in reading all parts of such a (big) community. That is why we will also provide portals for the different areas. So if you are only interested in scenery design, you can visit the scenery design portal. There you can find the news that would interest you and get easy access to the scenery design section of the forum. We will do the same for other areas, like aircraft design, missions, etc.

This sunday we will transform the current SceneryDesign.org forum into the new FsDeveloper.com forum. So stay tuned and expect some more news then.