Ralf-J. Triebel

The first program I bought for my C64 in 1982 was the "soloflight" simulation. From that day on flight simulations were my main interest when I had time to "play" beside my work. It changed to an "addiction" when the Microsoft Combat Flight Simulator was released, which I purchased in 1998. After some weeks of flying the Sopwith Camel in the MS gaming zone I was invited by two others to join a room where they tried out helicopters from FS98.

At that time there were no scenery add-ons for CFS available and we were looking to get helipads and landable buildings for our "choppers". One day I downloaded Airport 2.1 from FlightSim.Com and started to add buildings to "Interlaken", one of the stock sceneries of CFS. I also discovering the beautiful macros from Dan Geis, Martin Wright and others. Due to the lack of sceneries outside the "European Theatre" I've started to do one scenery after the other. I also launched my site www.combatflight.de as a place for sim-helicopter enthusiasts.

In November 1999 Martin invited me to join him and Steve McClelland and after some weeks we started the "Eastern Front" add-ons. It was planned as a single scenery but after discovering the Terrabuilder from Misho Katulic and due to the constant stream of ideas we ended up with ten parts of the Eastern Front. After discovering the secrets of the elevated mesh terrain my interest changed more and more to the designing of airfields and buildings. So I've finished a couple of German and Dutch airfields during early 2000.

One of Martin Wright's macros lead me to the idea to work out a tool for laying extended bitmaps as ground textures. Martin developed the CFSmap tool and I've worked out a set of parts for airfields which could be used like a puzzle game to get runways, taxiways and more in the same quality as seen on the stock airfields. It was released as the "Airfield Construction Kit".

After this "period" my interest changed again to the designing of photorealistic buildings and animated objects like radar stations, automatically opening doors, flying parachuters, a working helicopter-lift, etc.

The CFS community is only a small part of the large flightsim community but from my sight there were and are a lot of enthusiasts which are interested not only in dogfighting but in flying historical planes with all its aspects. As a part of that small community I've received a lot of ideas, support, friendship and encouragement.

Beside the fun I always have had during the designing process (to see what you have imagined) the release of my sceneries and objects as freeware always meant to me to give back a little bit of that what I have received from other members of the flightsim community. Mainly from all the planes, sceneries, tutorials and tools that were and are available the Combat Flight Simulator has changed for me from playing a bit with a pay program into the base of a full time hobby.

Ralf-J. Triebel (aka X_MAT)
rjtriebel@t-online.de
http://www.combatflight.de