I am away from tomorrow (Sept 19th) until October 4th. I will not have internet access during that time.
September 18, 2007
September 16, 2007
Airport Design Editor Gets it’s Own Web Site
This site has been in the wings for a while but we have decided to make it active now and release a newer version of the program (0.52). This is still very much a work in progress version. you can check out the site at http://www.airportdesigneditor.co.uk and download the new version from there.
September 14, 2007
Should Tools Restrict Users Ability to Get Down and Dirty?
I did not realize just how long it has been since I posted here. Time has just flown by. I had a small accident that kept me from work for a couple of weeks but I am back at the day job again. I am continuing to work on Airport Design Editor. The pace of development has slowed down as I take a bit more time on things and I realize how much there is to learn as I go along. One of the challenges for Airport Design (and I guess scenery design in general) is how much design knowledge to build into the tool and how much it is up to the user to learn what to do.
There are two schools of thought. The one that says ‘make everything available and let the user beware’ SDE is much like that – it gives no help and does not stop or warn about mistakes. At the other end is the ‘make the tool so it stops mistakes’ Thus if it is known that certain things will not work or are dangerous to the airport or the Sim then do not allow them.
ADE is right now somewhere in the middle. It does try to help users avoid mistakes. There is no separate error checker at the moment (as found in other airport design tools) The design philosophy is to try and stop mistakes at the time and not later or have the compiler find them for you. This does lead to some situations in which the user cannot do things they might want to do that are actually OK but don’r make a lot of sense most of the time. An example is comm frequencies – should the tool allow the user to specify a frequency that is not used for comms in the real world?
I guess however things end up there will be some users who want the added benefits of ‘real time protection’ and others who will want to get down and dirty. That seems fine to me and is one of the tings that makes this hobby so worth while.
