Just Flight & Just Trains blogs

Welcome to the first instalment of the Just Flight Support Blog. Hopefully our ramblings over the coming weeks and months will offer an incite into what goes on down amongst the nuts and bolts of a flight simulation company.

Some recent happenings…

Last month I was lucky enough to have the chance to visit parliament and take a meeting with one of the UK’s most well known MPs, Boris Johnson (you may know him from TV’s Have I Got News For You, some ill-advised comments about Liverpool and an outrageous rugby-style tackle on an ex-German international football player during a charity match).

Many of you may have read Mr Johnson’s comments in his Daily Telegraph column:

“Some children have it bad. Some are miraculously unaffected. But millions of seven- to 15-year-olds are hooked, especially boys, and it is time someone had the guts to stand up, cross the room and just say no to Nintendo. It is time to garrotte the Game Boy and paralyse the PlayStation, and it is about time, as a society, that we admitted the catastrophic effect these blasted gizmos are having on the literacy and the prospects of young males. We get on with our hedonistic 21st-century lives while in some other room the nippers are bleeping and zapping in speechless rapture, their passive faces washed in explosions and gore. They sit for so long that their souls seem to have been sucked down the cathode ray tube.”

Does he have a point? In my own honest opinion I believe he was getting close to something cogent. Stealing cars and murdering in the street ala Grand Theft Auto probably isn’t the most character building way to spend ones time, fun I guess, but hardly educational. Our mission was to show him that not all games have to be 18+ gore-fests of criminal activity and can actually be educational. As well as myself and our MD Andy Payne we joined up with Paul Jackson of Elspa (http://www.elspa.com/) and a PR guru from Nintendo and headed off to Portcullis House to give Boris a tour-de-force on the positive aspects of video gaming. Nintendo gave Boris a demonstration of Dr Kawashima’s Brain Training on Nintendo DS which he seemed to enjoy even if he was slightly baffled by the dual-screen concept. Next up we put him behind the controls of the Spitfire and let him dive-bomb, roll and loop-the-loop over the white cliffs of Dover in our VFR Real Scenery software. I’m very happy to report that he had a great time despite his complaints about a lack of Hun to lace with machine gun fire (who was the one complaining about violence in computer games?) and has since modified his views on our industry!

Back to matters a little closer to home…

As I write this the entire team has assembled at Just Flight towers for our quarterly series of meetings, chats, discussions and social outings. Wolfgang has flown in from Munich and Marc Seagel is over from Corsica and are showing off a jaw-dropping R44 which is currently in the Beta stages.I’m all the more impressed as a very lifelike virtual rendition of myself resides in the rear passenger seat, after being left out of the last load of Flying Club aircraft it almost seems like a promotion! That embarrassing day spent taking photos in a car park on a sawn up office chair seems to have paid off as the passengers are looking great.

Coming up over the next few days we have a raft of Flying Club updates and rewraps. The individual Flying Club aircraft are finally being re-wrapped as fully FS9 and FSX compatible, doing away with the need for customers to patch it up for FSX once they have purchased it. I have been trying to put this job off for so long now and finally had to bite the bullet, Scotty was beginning to not believe my excuses anymore, the old “Granny dying” and the “dog ate my installer” dodges only wash for so long…

Next up is the job of releasing a service pack for Traffic in FSX. Wolfgang is busily working away on some enhancements to the traffic tools which will be bundled in along with a few bug fixes that users have been asking for. Regrettably a Vista update is looking like an impossibility now, hopefully everyone will be able to console themselves with a fully Vista compatible version of Traffic X in a few months time.

Sandwiched in between all this will be mastering the Space Shuttle software. Interesting to see how this will be received by the FSing community as although it is fantastic in many ways, it doesn’t have any launch facilities and is essentially a Space Shuttle re-entry and landing simulation. We are doing our best to make up for this with a desktop program that will run a launch video before opening FSX directly with the Space Shuttle ready for re-entry. Couple this with the outstanding visuals of the Space Shuttle and a great VC and you have a very interesting piece of software.

Before I sign off I would like to give a little preview of something we have been talking about for a while and are now finally getting around to putting into action. Check out the YouTube video below and it will run a short clip of a 737 that is being developed in GMAX for the upcoming Traffic X software. Hopefully once we flesh these things out they will form an interesting behind-the-scenes glimpse at work currently going on the development side of things. Is this kind of thing of interest to you or are you only be interested in seeing things once they are textured and flying around in FS? You tell us!

Bye for now…