FSDevConf Feedback thread

[Gaiiden]

Thanks to everyone who was able to attend the first FS Developers Conference! Extra thanks to viewers who had questions to add to the presentation. Although overall everything went smoothly and we had 12 excellent talks, there were some small issues. First, some talks had a few seconds of audio/video drop at some point, but nothing really serious. The very last talk by Arno did suffer a large audio drop at the very end during Q&A. None of the presenters noticed anything so it was likely just some connection issue or something on Google's end and not really something we can control. The second issue was some questions asked weren't answered due to the several seconds of lag in the broadcast. We apologize to those viewers and have measures in place for next time to hopefully avoid this.

Please let me know what you thought of the conference if you were able to attend so I and the other conference organizers can use your feedback to deliver an even better experience in the 1st half of 2014!

 

[ScKevin]

First of all I need to tell you that this event was amazing! I really liked it. Before I restart on FS developing I am forced to look the videos again since on several the knowledge which was transferred per minute was too high for me. But since the videos are online (and I hope they will stay online) this is no problem and just a matter of myself.

There was just one thing which made me a bit upset and to be honest afterwards I was a bit disappointed. I hope I do not break any rules here or so but I just tell you my opinion. It was the presentation of Mathijs Koks and the question on How to make money with FS developing. I have nothing against Aerosoft nor what they do but I had the feeling that he wanted to acquire some projects with his presentation. This is for sure not wrong but for me personally the message was something like this: If you do not sell it via us (as publisher) you have really a lot more of work and you will be rewarded with less money since we do the rest for you. He said that if you deliver an foreign airport you more or less need to translate the manual to the local language. For sure this can maybe help but honestly I do not believe and as we can see it, it is really not needed. FlyTampa for example just delivers (if my minds is not trickying me here) english only manuals and I never heard anything against it. (And this was only one example since I am sure that FSDT, Taxi2Gate,.... does not do this since it really asks more knowledge, more time and usually more money) There I asked myself: Do I really need a manual delivered in 5 different languages? Do I really need a big customer support? (I mean if you deliver top notch products and your beta testers are really beta testers and not people who are seeking for a free product the customer support is really low.)
Anyway I still have a few more examples like this but I do not want to make that presentation that bad. I just found it "displaced".

I hope for 2014 we can even go a step beyond and maybe ask that a real developer from P3D joins our little freakish group who can tell us a bit more of the deeper things in FSX/P3D. Also is it maybe possible to get the slides as .pdf download? Then I can print me them out, add notices and so on, so that I have after each FSDevConf something like: "The Integral knowledge of this year"

 

[GHD]

The presentation on ground textures was excellent

However, I feel it has been superseded by the GP features in ADE 1.6 Beta.

I was interested in ChronoLapse which I had never heard of. Attached is a short video of AI following GP created ground lines.

 

[mrauh]

I thought it was an excellent event. In my opinion the presentations on the business aspects of commercial projects were particularly insightful, although Mattjis Kok's statement that "flipping burgers pays more per hour" was a bit off-putting. He's probably right though. I'd love to know real sales figures but I guess that's a well kept secret.

Anyway, I hope we'll see a new conference in the future as there's loads of topics that deserve some more attention.

Matt

 

[Gaiiden]

I am forced to look the videos again since on several the knowledge which was transferred per minute was too high for me. But since the videos are online (and I hope they will stay online) this is no problem and just a matter of myself.

hah, yea I really did a 90-min presentation in 60-min The videos will be online for as long as Google/YouTube is around so not much worry there.

Anyway I still have a few more examples like this but I do not want to make that presentation that bad. I just found it "displaced".

Wasn't around for this talk and haven't had time to watch it yet but I'll just say that no talk material was previewed or "vetted" by the organizers beforehand. Still, despite Mathijs' affiliations I can understand how his long-time experience in the industry could easily rub some people the wrong way. I often find myself unintentionally talking cynically towards newcomers to the game dev industry I've been part of for almost 15 years now.

I hope for 2014 we can even go a step beyond and maybe ask that a real developer from P3D joins our little freakish group who can tell us a bit more of the deeper things in FSX/P3D. Also is it maybe possible to get the slides as .pdf download? Then I can print me them out, add notices and so on, so that I have after each FSDevConf something like: "The Integral knowledge of this year"

We actually did talk to Lockheed Martin about a keynote lecture on P3D but the timing was not right, since they were so busy with v2. They have a small team, so taking time away to do a lecture is a bit impractical most times but hopefully with enough lead time for the next one they can get something together, as well as others involved in X-Plane.

I like the idea of making slides available. We'll look into that.

The presentation on ground textures was excellent

However, I feel it has been superseded by the GP features in ADE 1.6 Beta.

I was interested in ChronoLapse which I had never heard of. Attached is a short video of AI following GP created ground lines.

To be fair, I did say that at the end But that's still in beta and I've never had time to play around with it, whereas the techniques I discussed are well-established and already proven in a commercial environment. Regardless, there was a ton of other related stuff I wanted to talk about anyways, like testing with Chronolapse, the AI issue (that can help people understand how to do drive-thru parking pathing properly), etc.

Speaking of - your video doesn't seem to be encoded properly. At least for me, I get nothing but this pastel colored mess

 

[Micky]

I really enjoyed the conference, congratulations to all involved. For my part, I wasn't able to watch properly the livestream even with a good internet connection.. (I don't know if the new "youtube system" has produced these small cuts..) But above all, they have done a very good work

 

[bob5568]

I thought it was fabulous. And for beginners getting their feet wet, VERY valuable.

 

[Captain7]

This online event was prepared, operated and held in such a professional way. Thanks a lot to the initiators, organisers and presenters for all the efforts that they put into this conference!
I watched almost every video by now and learned something new in each of it. Very interesting and exactly the right detail level for me.

Thanks again, Volker


Sent from my iPhone 6

 

[pfabian]

I am in the process of watching and I agree with Volker, learning a lot new!

 

[GHD]

Speaking of - your video doesn't seem to be encoded properly. At least for me, I get nothing but this pastel colored mess

Hmm, it displays fine here in Windows Media Player

 

[Gaiiden]

You're right it does. Weird, I can play all my videos in VLC fine so that was what I initially tried it with. Anyways, looks good.

 

[John Hubbard]

I just listened to Fabien's aerial imagery presentation. I thought it was excellent. He made a difficult subject seem simple - all those projections and conversions.

The hands-on section was terrific - always the best way to learn.
I followed all of it except for one short section during the map conversion using gdalwarp (at 33:30 or so).

I could not understand this: t_srs epsg:4326 -r

If anyone can put me right on this and on the syntax of gdalwarp generaly, I'd be grateful.

I'm sorry I missed the conference so many thanks for posting the videos.

 

[ollyau]

I just listened to Fabien's aerial imagery presentation. I thought it was excellent. He made a difficult subject seem simple - all those projections and conversions.

The hands-on section was terrific - always the best way to learn.
I followed all of it except for one short section during the map conversion using gdalwarp (at 33:30 or so).

I could not understand this: t_srs epsg:4326 -r

If anyone can put me right on this and on the syntax of gdalwarp generaly, I'd be grateful.

I'm sorry I missed the conference so many thanks for posting the videos.

-t_srs epsg:4326 tells gdalwarp that you the target projection to be WGS84. The 4326 is the EPSG code (see here: http://spatialreference.org/ref/epsg/4326/).

-r cubic tells gdalwarp that you want it to use the cubic resampling method.

You can see the rest of the syntax documentation here: http://www.gdal.org/gdalwarp.html.

 

[John Hubbard]

-t_srs epsg:4326 tells gdalwarp that you the target projection to be WGS84. The 4326 is the EPSG code (see here: http://spatialreference.org/ref/epsg/4326/).

-r cubic tells gdalwarp that you want it to use the cubic resampling method.

You can see the rest of the syntax documentation here: http://www.gdal.org/gdalwarp.html.

Thank you very much. That's just what I needed.

 

[Jess-B]

A bit late for feedback, but here it is I guess.

Firstly, it was a fantastic idea getting this conference going via google+ and YouTube. As for the talks themselves, well since watching them, I've taken to designing my own scenery and I'm finding it to be a quite fascinating subject. Each of the talks helped me get the basics understood, and I've even moved on from sketchup to gmax, although by comparison, gmax is much less user friendly. Other than that, using what I learnt from the presentations and a few other places, I'm finally getting to grips with ground polygons, 3d modelling and sbuilder. So thanks.

Best wishes,
Jess B

 

[mjl1966]

WOW I just finished the video on texture alignment and ground markings and it was a gold mine.

I'm still no a quest to discover how to make good taxiline lighting (the stuff in the middle, not the blue lights). You mentioned that you custom roll your own light, but I did not see a video that discusses it. (Or I didn't recognize the video if it's in the list.) Was there a discussion regarding taxiway lighting that I should go check out?

Now, back to the rest!

 

[Gaiiden]

Glad you enjoyed the lecture. The lighting I referred to was the lightstoo library you can find on AVSIM or FlightSim.com. It's not great on performance although it looks pretty good. I tried contacting the author on the performance issues but never heard back, which is a shame because IMO they are the best freeware light objects available

 

[ahuimanu]

Very grateful that such an event was procured and I look forward to another. More than anything, this site, and the conference, attempts to let others know about the techniques required to make good addon material.