Now what?

So beta 2 is out and I hope you are all enjoying that. So far we have only had positive feedback, and no real complaints that it doesn't work. So what's stopping a full release - at the moment it's time. I just haven't had much time with many university commitments at this time. While the main app is fairly complete and stable, there is still the manual and management application to work on, both of which form the rest of the package. Work is slowly progressing on these parts.

A little work continues on the main 3wirex add-on. The experiment with rolling and pitching carriers has been put on the shelf for further investigation at a later date. However, I have been working on another feature addition that I feel is quite important - being able to land on non-3wire carriers. These are carriers that are part of shipping traffic and missions, and so far things have worked as planned, and the feature is pretty much complete.

In addition, there is another ground-breaking feature currently in the planning and experimentation stage that is pretty exciting. I have to say, MS has done a wonderful job with FSX and SimConnect, it is so easy to make very complex add-ons like 3wire. I have a list of thing to do and try, and so far I been able to quickly make them happen with few lines of code. It may not be obvious just flying around, but with the power of SimConnect, missions and gauges I can see an exciting future for FSX.

Something you may have noticed with the defined carrier included in the beta is that it stops when you move to the bow of the ship (I put a note in the docs). After a little more research it seems there may be two factors in play - speed of the carrier and location. It seems that a speed of 30 knots or above stops this happening, and, even more strangely, carriers in the northern hemisphere seem unaffected. So MS has (inadvertently?) left out those down under!