In the beginning

I must confess that, until recently, blogging never really appealed to me. I really could not see the point of it all.  All that changed just over a month ago. I happened to be perusing the x-plane forums and noticed a link in one of the posts to Microsoft ACES Lead Program Manager, Mike Gilbert’s blog. Since then a number of ACES team members have joined the blog roll. Indeed my perusal and reading of blogs has now extended way beyond flight simulation and I now spend at least an hour a day reading blogs covering a wide variety of subjects.

Anyway to cut a long story short all this opened my eyes to the allure of blogging.

People generally write about topics they are passionate about. Being passionate about something is very much a buzzword these days. We cannot just have a mere interest or indeed a strong interest in a topic or field of endeavour. We now have to possess a passion for, or be passionate about our interests and endeavours.

What passions do I have? Well… many to be quite honest, perhaps too many to address in just one blog. For the past 19+ years the world of computer graphics and computing in general have been strong interests [ok then …… ‘passions’]. Digital painting and has been more than a passing interest since 1986. Digital imaging and more recently digital photography have joined the list too. I have dabbled in 3D graphics since 1988, initially on the Amiga platform with software such as Videoscape 3D [the daddy of Lightwave 3D], Sculpt Animate 3D and Imagine, later on the Windows platform, VistaPro, Poser and Cinema 4D. In the last couple of years I have started to get serious again with gmax and more recently 3DS Max. Body Paint R2 has been added to the pipeline but I’ve yet to use seriously. Programming i.e. coding was a strong interest in the early years of my computing interests, however in 1992/3 given the demands on time I decided I could only pursue either CG or programming, not both [these were hobbies btw]. A decision was made and CG won the day.

A few minor achievements were attained in the early 1990’s. Some of my digital paintings and renderings were published in Australian Commodore or Amiga magazines and I won runner up prize at the World of Commodore Amiga in Sydney c. 1992. I deliberately aimed for such, as the first prize was no good to me.

Now another strong interest from a very young age.... about 4 years old, has been anything to do with aircraft and aviation. I lived in close proximity to two airports or airbases in central Scotland, with a third not all that far away. To visit these was an enormous treat at the time. [I hope to reminisce on these years in a later post]. My late father was a very keen R/C aeromodeller, my grandfather had been an observer in the Royal Flying Corps and RAF in WW1 and, of course, I was a very keen [passionate.. LOL] plastic scale modeler from childhood through to my 20’s.

Combine my creative and digital interests with aviation and it’s only natural that one should find flight simulation to be an absorbing and indeed passionate interest. Add the ability to create content for simulators and simulation games [and many other games] such as Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004 or Combat Flight Simulator 3 [CFS3] and one has found the natural outlet for a creative such as myself. As with digital art I have possessed a long standing interest in flight simulation and 3D games going back to these early Amiga days. I think I must have owned nearly every simulator or air combat game released on the Amiga platform, including FS II. The Windows platform has been no different and I have owned many simulator and air combat games, though it was not until the advent of Windows XP that all this really came together for me.

In addition to the playing and creative aspects of these simulations much research is involved. This encompasses not only aviation matters, but history as well, another area of immense fascination.

Other computer game genres that fascinate me include Real Time Strategy [RTS] and to a lesser extent First Person Shooters [FPS].

All this then, loosely defines the scope of this blog – digital art and 3D graphics combined with flight simulation, military history with the occasional foray into other areas of digital entertainment and gaming. Much will be spontaneous, shoot from the hip type stuff and will focus on what I am doing now. There may be the occasional article/essay. I may go into soapbox mode on occasion. Of course I will post links of relevance and the occasional heads up as I come across anything of relevant interest on the web. Some of these topics may spin off into blogs of their own.

For a broader picture of where I am at please check out my ‘everything else’ blog, Island Times.

Enough of the introductory waffle…. on with the blog.


Robert Bruce