Mother, What a Day!
Whew! What a weekend! Not only was it Mother’s Day on Sunday but the Internet was alive with buzz about FSX thanks to the crew’s great work at E3.
This year marked a mini-milestone in maternal celebration. Out daughter is now old enough that she was able to offer a spontaneous “Happy Mother’s Day!” upon seeing my wife Sunday morning. Of course, I’m sure she has no idea what she’s saying, other than Daddy told her to say it so it must be important. Mom got flowers, cards from both of us (our daughter even managing a semi-recognizable signature), a gift basket and some well-deserved pampering. That included made-to-order breakfast, lunch out, al fresco, and a home-cooked dinner. I bought some hardwood charcoal and a chimney and prepared an Alton Brown seared tuna recipe I’d been meaning to try. Mmmmm! There’s nothing like semi-raw fish on a bed of coconut rice. I love spoiling my wife but it’s also nice to set a strong precedent—Father’s Day is just a month away!
In between meal preparation and responding to our daughter I managed to check-in on the FS forums to see how the E3 presence was playing out. Despite the rough start (see my previous post) the positive vibes began to predominate as more and more details were made clear. The initial reaction to missions as “too game-like” subsided as people let their imaginations flow with regard to what could be done using the technology. Of course (not to be too self-congratulatory) that was our plan all along. We’re only going to have time to build a relative small number of missions and need to cover a lot of ground. I’m sure once special interest groups like Bush Pilots Unlimited or the many virtual airlines get a hold of the mission editor we’re ALL going to be surprised at the level of coolness, realism and fun!
The other thing people seem to be figuring out is that we still have a long way to go before FSX will hit the streets. That doesn’t mean we’re adding new features (we’re not) but it does mean we haven’t disclosed all the features that are already there. I think people will be pleasantly surprised when we decide to make another big splash in the press. Will everyone be happy? No, of course not—that’s unrealistic. But I do think most people will gets tons of fun and value out of FSX and (hopefully) understand why we made the design decisions we did. In fact, some people like JSPuonti are trying to figure things out already, including visual aids!
The crew than manned the FS booth started to show up again at work today. They’re a bit weary but overall I think they felt we had a good show. (It’s tough for developers who spend all day in a chair to stand and talk for nine hours a day.) Naturally we tend to be our harshest critics. The Jet Setter mission showed some graphics bugs and of course that’s what people chose to photograph and post! Plus the UI was bit buggy and wouldn’t always save settings changes. That’s too bad because the Settings dialog was also the subject of a photo exposé—not to mention one of my big contributions to the FSX code base. (A photo exposé on the Settings dialog, you say? When we say that tweaking settings is “game play” for many of our users, we aren’t kidding!) But hey, that’s why we leave so much time at the end to fix bugs.
Speaking of which, I probably have a few assigned to me and the wife and kid are in bed. Time to fire up Visual Studio…