[Flightgear-users] FSWeekend impressions

[Durk T. <d.t...@xs...>]

HI Folks,

I just came back from the annual FSWeekend fair in Lelystad, and thought I'd 
share some impressions. Last week has been quite busy, so I feel very strongly 
about having a relaxed evening and enjoy a glass of wine (try to spot an 
increase in typing errors toward the end of this message).Nevertheless, I do 
wish to share some impressions and experiences.

Preparations for this year's booth were a little rough, at least on my side. 
As I might have noted before, I recently moved and started a new job. Exams 
for the class I'd been teaching were earlier on in the week, I still had to 
grade 30 student papers, and on top of it all, I had a deadline to finish a 
research paper last friday. In the mean time, my internet connection wasn't 
working until wednesday, and I also had to install a new linux distribution on 
my main machine. 

Dispite all that, we managed to get a nice booth, at a very good location in 
the main exhibit hall (right across from the main entrance). I had taken a day 
off on Friday, to pick up Mathias Froelich at Lelystad train station, and the 
two of us set up the basic infrastructure of the booth. 

On saturday morning, Martin Spott picked me and Mathias up in Enschede, and 
the tree of us drove to Lelystad, where we met with Torsten Dreyer, and his 
wife. Since Torsten was bringing a huge banner with the FlightGear logo, we 
brought some leftover planks, a handsaw, a hammer, nails, screws, and an 
electric drill from my place to lelystad, in order to build a makeshift notice 
board. 

This year we had one main demo machine  that was equipped with two dual head 
nvidia cards, driving 3 monitors, and some smaller stations. The demo machine 
was directly facing the entrance, and was a big eye catcher. During the 
morning, I had some technical problems to solve. Since my new machine still 
wasn't in by friday, I had brought my old computer, which isn't quite powerful 
enough anymore. In addition, it had serious network problems. Halfway during 
the afternoon, I decided to shut that machine down, and just hook up my laptop 
to use that instead That worked well, and from that moment onward, everything 
was running smoothly. 

On sunday (still "today" as I'm writing this email), the four of us (Martin, 
Torsten, Mathias, and Me) were joined by Gijs de Rooy, and this way we really 
had an excellent crew. With Gijs's help we were able to operate all our 
systems, and still have enough time to talk to visitors. In general, 
everything ran a lot smoother than it did on saturday. Overall, I'm looking 
back at this year's FSWeekend with a positive appraisal, especially when 
looking back at the chaos during the organization (at least on my side of the 
equation).

My impression from this year's meeting is that there is a substantial amount 
of people, who are seriously interested in alternatives for Microsoft Flight 
simulator.  Two years ago, during our first booth at Lelystad, not many people 
knew us; this year I've been talking to several people who have been giving 
presentations about FlightGear to promote it at their computer clubs. With 
only a few exceptions, the great majority of people I talked with, were either 
enthousiastic about the concept behind FlightGear, or at least very 
sympathetic to our cause. 

Compared to last year, we had a very prominent location, and we made sure that 
we placed our main demo machine very prominently across from the entrance. 
Compared to last year's setup, this was certainly an improvement, which in 
turn was already an improvement over our 2006 presentation. On the downside, 
we didn't have a projector this year, which was a bit of a drawback. I would 
like to get one again next year, if only to drive a fourth camera, to make 
sure that people understand immediately that we don't use a matrox triple 
head, but have a real (and flexible) multiscreen setup. We also didn't do that 
many multiplayer demos this year. This year's booth setup was actually not 
really ideal for that; one get's the best impression when one can watch the 
two participating parties at the same time. With some minor rearrangements 
this should be possible, and I would like to try and get some more multiplayer 
demos done again next year. 

To summarize, FSWeekend 2008 has been a lot of fun for me, and I hope also for 
the rest of the crew. I certainly hop to organize another booth next year. I 
hope to post some photo's later. I will have to reconnect my server again, so 
I won't do that until tomorrow. 

Cheers,
Durk (your FGFS representative signing off... :-) )