Hello everyone,
I’ve been playing Flight Simulator since 2004, and I have always great interest to this simulator. Then I became a software engineer, and have worked different areas so far including mobile and web areas. I want to make a simple app/web app, just for beginning. I honestl’y haven’t decided yet but I’m thinking about making a traffic board where I could check departures and arrivals. Since this is the first time I’m gonna be doing this, I really need some advice. Any programming language, anything I should know would be grately appreciated.
Thanks in advance !
This really depends on what you’re making, and whether or not you want to keep it proprietary and charge $ for it or make it free and open source.
Assuming you go down the open source route, here’s some things I’ve learned along the way as a FS FOSS dev:
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Do not skimp on UI/UX. Does your application look like it’s from 2004? Is it hard to find features/buttons? Stop. Think about how the user can most easily interact with your product, and how to make it look clean. Give it a brand, a color palette, a graphic design language, a font etc. and go from there when designing the front end.
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Make libraries, not single-use apps. Do you think your application has uses elsewhere? Write some documentation for it, make it adaptable to other applications. Write it in a way that any developer can get started in 15 minutes or less if they want to contribute to it or use it elsewhere.
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Want to collaborate with others? Discord. Discord. Discord. This is where the Indie/Open Source MSFS Dev work is happening, and you can get a lot of help and advice from people on this social app by joining various servers.
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What language you write the app in entirely depends on how much you value your time, and the application’s performance. Just need a simple web app with a departure/arrival API? Probably Typescript with a REST backend. Need to index thousands of flights to search across hundreds of airports asap? Probably use a WASM module compiled from C/C++ for the backend.
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Do not announce anything before you have a working prototype. People are impatient in this community. They want it quality and they want it now. But you can’t have both. Do your research, take your time, and when you have a minimal viable product, that would be a good time to announce it if you’re looking for contributors.
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These are indeed awesome information ! Thank you so much, it’s at least nice to know the intro part, where to start what to do etc. I got that info now thanks !
I am curious. How is it going? I’ve tried a couple of things with dev mode but found it way too clunky to appease my impatience. I hope you are doing better than I did!