This year we celebrate an anniversary: 15 years of HELI-X!
Here is a small (personal) review of the 15 years. So that it does not become so long, divided into 3 parts.
2008-2011:
The HELI-X story begins in 2007, when the first contacts were made at the Munich Heli Masters and the idea for the simulator was presented. Here the first supporters for the project were found: Markus Schaack, Marc Trautmann, Volker Desinger, Thomas Böseler.
Especially Thomas helped me a lot to develop the first physics engine. He has infinite patience and a great ability to analyze the aerodynamics of helicopters. Later Markus Siering and Sebastian Zajonz joined HELI-X. By the way, Sebastian created the first helicopter model in HELI-X.
At the beginning of 2008 the version 0.9 was published, at the end of 2008 the first release, version 1.0.
More and more helpers joined: Silke Kustermann painted the picture for the splash screen in oil, Gerhard Klauser, Klaus Stangl and Martin Bestgen contributed the first user models.
At this time, Klaus Treichler and Harald Bendschneider were the main contributors to the scenes. By the way, Klaus created the scene “Dietersdorf”, which was the standard scene in HELI-X for many years.
As the computers became more powerful over the years, and scenes with a higher resolution became possible, of course a new standard scene had to be created. But we definitely have to create a new scene Dietersdorf with the current possibilities!
In 2009, version 1.1 was released, which had multiplayer and indoor scenes as new features. It also ran on Macs with Power PCprocessors and Intel processors, which were an innovation at Apple at the time.
It was also at this time that speed helis took off. I am still proud that HELI-X was the first simulator to have Henseleit’s ThreeDee rigid as a model. Wadim Wall generated the model at that time, and so that one could try out the colors available at that time in the simulator, the color and texture change was implemented.
At this time also the cooperation with Mikado and Ulrich Röhr started. So it was possible to read the V-Stabi configuration files into HELI-X.
Then, since the year 2010, Rolf Rohner and Reiner Stein have been very involved in HELI-X. The rotor blades, whose display depends on the setting angle of the blades and the angle to the sun, and the plugin interface date from this time. It was possible to control external programs with HELI-X, e.g. an editor for the model parameters, which Reiner had written. Since that time there are also crash objects in the photorealistic scenes and also the first 3d scenes.
Tomas Jedrzejek translated the User Interface into Czech.
In 2011, many new scenes were added. Paul Dürr and Martin Koall are to be thanked for that. Since that time I also like to work together with Martin Wycisk, a great pilot, who helped a lot with the settings of many, many helis. Martin still tells that he had spent a large part of his youth in Diestersdorf (i.e. in the simulator HELI-X). He was also very disappointed that Dietserdorf was now replaced as the default scene with the Almere site.