A guy has been communicating with me who is developing a new aircraft design program.

He has developed it from scratch & was wondering what I thought about the idea. He showed me some screenshots of it - the UI & some wing sections.

He's not sure yet about /freeware/payware or dual - lite(free) & pro (pay) versions .....

But this is no doubt in interesting possibility on the horizon. He's far from finished but he's agreed for me to allow a couple of developers to give it a run-through when it is a little further down the road ..

You are certainly one man I had in mind. ... 

I believe it should be freeware for these reasons:

GMAX is freeware and because of that, it is slowly growing in popularity ever since FS2002pro came out.

Not only that, there appears to be a wider range of GMAX tutorials and GMAX-related websites than there are for FSDS.

So, if this new aircraft program is to become successful and big, it should be (I'm not saying it has to be) freeware.

It took me a surprising 3-YEARS to master GMAX (both old and new version).

And since a lot of people are now becoming used to the GMAX UI (or FSDS UI), I suggest that the UI be related to one of these now-known programs.

3DS Max is to GMAX as FSDS is to "I-don't-know".

But since FSDS is still a little more widley than GMAX, maybe the UI of the new program should be a little more related to FSDS.

I volunteer to test it out. And if it's better than it sounds, I will suggest payware.

Well, actually, GMAX has its own website www.discreet.com

There, everyone knows that you can download it for free (if you have time though).

Anyways, back to topic.

When can we try out the program as a beta test?

I wonder about the usefulness of another aircraft design program. There is a need for one area of the sim that has been pretty much neglected since FS98. What I am talking about is true dynamic scenery. Yes, we have had "Busy Objects" introduced, but unless you understand coding, your kinda up a creek. DOD, Dynamaker, Dynakit and FS Action Scenery are all antiques now and none have been updated to function in the newer operating environments and newer sims. Example: DOD v3 seems to have a problem dealing with FS2000 installed in its default location of C:\Program Files\Microsoft Games\FS2000 and functioning properly in the Win2k OS. While Rafael Garcia Sanchez's program, Nova v1.6 and promised NovaSim offer some exciting posibilities,  such as operating jetways, animated marshallers and opening hanger doors, the basic idea of true dynamic scenery does not seem to be addressed. Being able to take a 3d object from either FSDS or gWax and have it move along a path for a period longer than 34 seconds would truly liven things up.

Lou

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I can’t agree with you more Felix And for me g-max was far from free. I bought FS2002 as real as it gets for $50 then found I wanted to design Ac and needed some plug-ins for the flightsim, so I had to go back and buy FS2002 pro for another $70   lol...

BTW a new UI would be some thing that would be cool to check out, I bet there is allot of work involved in making a new one, but my one concern is, after they spend the time in making one would it be as good as one that is already out there... I think if they instead spend there time making a plug-in for an existing program, like X_Eidos said, they could most likely end up with something better overall than they could of done their selves for the amount of time spent ??? That is just my Idea. it seems though, that he already has a chunk of it done, so it might not be practical to start over.

anywas, a new UI is still something I would look forward to seeing, freeware or pay ware

Cool, I didn’t know that Is there a tutorial or document that shows how this can be done? because I know that there are a couple of things that would be quickly accessed if they were mapped on a simple keystroke

Now only if Adobe Photoshop had this feature as well

Doh, Should of known ok thanks for your help, I’m going to check it out now