Cockpit Simulator Builders

Austin Meyer, creator of the X-Plane flight simulator made an announcement recently on his website regarding the closure of the ACES studio by Microsoft:

http://www.x-plane.com/ms_to_xp/ms_to_xp.html

X-Plane has become a real world-class flight simulation platform and with the SDK it is a great choice for cockpit builders.  I’m a user of X-Plane and I’ve written plug-ins for it.  I would highly recommend this if you’re looking for a commercial  alternative to Microsoft Flight Simulator.  For those that are interested in an Open Source flight simulator, you cannot beat FlightGear

I should also mention that X-Plane is cross-platform.  It’s available for Windows, Linux and Macintosh.

According to this article, Microsoft has made some pretty serious cuts in the division that works on Flight Simulator.  Hopefully this doesn’t spell the end for MSFS.

This would be a good time to remind you folks of FlightGear! 🙂  There’s  ton of new work going on for the 1.9 release, including a lot of visual improvments now that the new Open Scene Graph integration is completed.

I’ve got a new forum up and running finally.

This forum package allows me to “gate” traffic from the simpits-tech mailing list to the forum and vice versa.

The forum also has a “Product Support” area that currently has two forums – one for my DIY cockpit projects and one for you orphaned Beta Innovations hardware users.  I would be happy to add more forums as they’re requested, so if you want one added, sing out!

The forum can be found here, or by the link in the pane to the right.

I’ve added a new page where links to hardware suppliers and information will reside.  It’s called Hardware Information, Suppliers & Support and can be found in the column to the right.

I’ve also added a mirror for all the old Beta Innovations hardware drivers & documentation.  Leo recently updated the SDK and a few of the utilities as promised.  The link lives in the new Hardware Information page.

I’ve also finally been able to resolve a DSL issue that’s been plaguing the site since the “blog farm” went live.  It turned out that I was fighting TWO identical, failed DSL routers.  It’s been replaced, so keep your fingers crossed!