It's been a very interesting couple of months.
Our current flagship product, the 747-400 Queen of the Skies, has been receiving great reviews by almost every flight sim site out there. We're actively working on the Service Update at the moment, so I get to spend quite a lot of time reading our forum users' comments on what they perceive as "bugs", trying to actually figure out where those critters might have slipped into the code. A lot of times, what a user might report as broken turns out to be proper functionality of the 747. How do you tell them, without making them feel stupid or ignorant? Usually, a direct approach I find works best!
I am also working on some very interesting stuff: Interfacing the Engravity CDU with our 747 and 737 FMC code. This is a nice side project which, even though it has already taken up more time than I originally envisioned, I hope will prove helpful for those hardware cockpit builders and/or hard-core enthusiasts out there who want to go a step further with their simming. I'll be posting more details about that, along with some nice pictures, later on...
Hey- having loyal customers is really nice sometimes: Here's a beautiful video that one of our friends (goes by the nickname "The Arkitekt") made about the 747-400 - he's a post-production video editor, by profession, and his work shines. Give it a looksie - it's really great!
Also- make sure you take a look at some friends' blogs, over at Microsoft FS team HQ - I posted them on the right hand side column, for your viewing pleasure. These guys ROCK!
About Me
- Lefteris
- Athens, Greece
- Born 1970 in Athens, Greece, where I am residing once again after a ten-year period of studying and working in the U.S.
- Founder / Managing Director of NetGroup, a software and network consulting business.
- Founder / Managing Director of Flight Sim Labs, Ltd., a group of developers producing specialized airliner aircraft simulations for MS Flight Simulator.
- Founding Member of VATSIM, the world leading online network of simulator pilots and controllers.
- Co-admin of FSDeveloper.com, the largest FS developer community world-wide.
- Microsoft MVP from 2007 to 2012.
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2 comments:
"A lot of times, what a user might report as broken turns out to be proper functionality of the 747. How do you tell them, without making them feel stupid or ignorant? Usually, a direct approach I find works best!"
A problem in the core product as well, of course! I would love to come up with (or hear from others) some creative solutions to the user experience problem of "too real". :)
Hi Susan, thanks for stopping by!
This issue stems from the majority of people out there simply learning things wrong the first time around. That's mostly our fault, though, for not doing a good-enough job teaching them through tutorials, step-by-steps, and/or by making our product behave wrongly to begin with (I know I've coded many a wrong functionality in the past, and people frown when I correct it in the future, based on comments from RL pilots - they argue that "it worked more correctly before" :-)).
The more accuracy we put in the core product, the less we'll be observing these issues, is my take on it :-).
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