It's true—what an amazing week of meeting my favorite fellow FS designers, developers, and publishers. Being able to rap with the Aces staff was a huge benefit of the DevCon. I think I learned more from a ten-minue discussion with Adrian Woods about modeling than I have from over a year of pondering the SDK. Due to NDA restrictions, I can't discuss what we talked about, but you can be sure that the benefit will bubble through to my upcoming projects.

Among the famous FS faces that I got to meet up close and personal, several stand out. Finally, at long last, I got to shake hands with Francois Dumas, the venerable Fritz himself. And this after only a few years of working alongside him to build products! Arno Gerretsen was another of my favorite devs who showed up. We had a great time taking in the DevCon, and later Avsim's FanCon, together. Misho Katulic (of Terrabuilder fame) was on hand, showing his latest effort which transforms the FS world into the lunar surface. Folks, this product has to be seen to be believed. Misho has clearly put heart and soul into its development, and it shows. And he's a great guy as well!

Allen Kriesmann and Jeff (better known on the forums as "quantumleap") from Scenery Solutions, makers of the Ultimate Terrain series, flew in, as did John Venema ("koorby") from Orbx. Together with Nigel Grant and my pals Holger Sandmann and Justin (FSGenesis) Tyme, we all took to the town on Friday night, inundating the Rock Bottom brewery with no doubt more FS scenery designers than they'd seen in one spot in a long time. It's great to get to meet all these guys in person after knowing them for so long in the virtual world.

I've got some ideas for a set of FSX materials tutorials to post on the FSDeveloper Wiki soon, based on the talk I gave earlier today at the Avsim FanCon on that topic. More on that as it develops. In the meantime, here are a few pics to give you the feel for what was there. Pardon the couple of extremely "artistic" shots. I forgot my regular camera the night we all went to the Red Hook brewery, and my silly cell phone camera had to pinch-hit. It's not very agreeable to low lighting.