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... :-) ) ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by the Moblin Your Move Developer's challenge Build the coolest Linux based applications with Moblin SDK & win great prizes Grand prize is a trip for two to an Open Source event anywhere in the world http://moblin-contest.org/redirect.php?banner_id=100&url=/ _______________________________________________ Flightgear-users mailing list Flightgear-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-users
