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Let me just repeat some of the ESP related news that Tim Gregson (Beatle) recently posted on his blog. ESP is now officially dead, MS has taken the ESP website offline. The SDK pages on the MSDN website are still there though. Tim also reported that he has left MS now and will be working as a consultant for Lockheed Martin on the Prepar3d program (which is what LM is doing with the ESP code they licensed). So good luck with the new job Tim and hopefully we will hear more about Prepar3d in the future.    

I guess you must have heard this news already, but last week it was announced that Lockheed Martin has licensed Microsoft ESP. I was at the I/ITSEC exhibition at that time and in the Lockheed Martin booth they indeed had a solution build using ESP on display, a PC-12 trainer. It is very interesting to see that ESP is still living on in some way. It should be stressed, this was discussed in some forums already, that this does not mean that the gaming version of FS is still living on. The license to Lockheed Martin excludes the entertainment segment. … Continue reading Lockheed Martin and ESP

You might have read about the International Flight Simulation Consortium on the internet already, for example at Avsim or Francois Dumas’ blog. I don’t so much to add to what has been said there already, except that I was also present at the meeting and that FSDeveloper is thereby involved in the initiative. Once there is more news to report I’ll certainly do so.

Nick is at the MVP summit and has a question about the tools for FSX, see his blog post. I would encourage everybody to share his thoughts on this one.

The recent developments of Microsoft shutting down the ACES studio are making me a bit sad. Let me try to explain why. When FSX was released it included some great improvements over FS2004. I am talking from a scenery designer perspective of course, so I was most happy about the improved terrain engine, that allows more resultion that 4.8 meter on the photo scenery, a better autogen system and the improvements to the modelling SDK, which means that more things can be done without tweaking the code. In my job I am also working with visual simulations and I can … Continue reading Is this the end?

If you are on Facebook, consider joining this group that Francois Dumas has started to show your support of FS.

Over the night some more news on ACES has appeared, I’ll just post the interesting links here: http://www.futuregpu.org/2009/01/end-of-era-aces-studio-and-flight-sim.html http://pc.ign.com/articles/947/947737p1.html

Yesterday while driving home I heard on the news that Microsoft would be cutting jobs. But at that time the thought never came into my mind that the consequences of that would be as big as we learned today. While looking at some simulation related news at work today, I suddenly came across the message that the Microsoft job reduction would have big influences on the ACES studio, which makes Flight Simulator, as welll. After looking around the web for more information, things became more clear. Former ACES team members posted more information, like Steve Lacey on his blog or … Continue reading Microsoft closes ACES studio

If you have not heard it already, Phil Taylor is leaving ACES, check out this post at Phil’s own blog. I wish him luck and a lot of fun in his new job. And a big thanks for all the work he did for FS in the past. Especially the role he played in opening up the ACES team more to the public is something that should be much appreciated. It must have been hard sometimes for him to deal with the community, especially the part that are never satisfied with the product, but in the end it is great … Continue reading Phil Taylor is leaving ACES

Complaining about the SDKs has been a favourite thing to do among developers for years. With previous versions of FS we always had to wait for ages to get them and of course it never told us what we wanted to know for our project (how could MS forget to include what I needed to know). I am sure you can all remember those good old time. But that is enough sarcasm for now. With FSX things have improved a lot already, the SDK shipped with the initial release and I think I can say that the quality and usefulness … Continue reading Are they listening?