Welcome to the FSElite Developer Month. Our theme this year is about delivering for the community and part of that is delivering great content to you all. As part of our commitment to you all, we’re pleased to announced Developer Month – a month themed solely around celebrating our great development community. Over the course of March, you’ll be treated to some behind the scene looks at some of our favourite developers, stories from the FSElite team, exclusive interviews and more.
TOGA Projects stopped by FSElite and talked a little about their most recent product ENVTEX. Alongside how the team started, there’s also some great content in terms of their personal lives! Don’t forget, you can read our ENVTEX review here.
Tell us a little about yourselves and how you got started?
It is a long story but I will try to summarize a bit: I started flight simulation about 10 years ago with FSX, I didn’t have a great computer at that time and I went back to FS2004 that I have enjoyed for more than 8 years, 2 years ago I started to move again on FSX for beta testing purposes for a well-known aircraft developer and last year I definitely moved to P3Dv3. I still have all of them installed though.
During the 8 FS9 years, I created a lot of textures for my own use and even created a freeware package called “Full Environment 9” to compensate the lack of new add-ons of the old but gold FS9, and the idea of a complete environment rework for several simulators slowly came to my mind.
During that time, flight simulation got me into a real passion for aviation and I became a real pilot. I got my ATPL and CPL in 2014 in a small ATO but unfortunately didn’t find a job quickly and I had to move forward in my personal life. Not meaning I have abandoned the idea to get into a 737’s left seat!
As Steve Glinel, a friend, and I were creating repaints, I decided to create “TOGA projects” in summer 2015 to share our creations. After that William Musculus joined us to provide more repaints and I decided Envtex in the beginning of 2016, for personal reasons Steve and William couldn’t be involved in the development of this project so we searched for a good developer and Florian came to help us creating the user interface.
Currently we consider more TOGA projects as a community hub than only a development team, as we have several “teams” focused on different things. We are 2 in the development team, Florian and I, 3 of us are creating repaints and freeware contents and our Beta team now counts 6 members that I would like to thank again: Brandon, David, Enzo, Louis, Steve and William. We also received the help of Jannie Roelofse and William Bithrey.
With your latest product, Envtex, now out, what can you tell us about what you will do next?
Our main focus remains Envtex at the moment, we want to bring a mature product and deliver on our promises with the upcoming SP1 and our partnership with Hifi.
Of course we are already thinking about what’s going to be the next project, and we are already but slowly working on it, there is not enough to share to say anything about it for now.
How do you balance your work life and home life?
Not very well! (Laugh)
When development gets tough, how do you continue to motivate yourselves?
Hearing people encouraging us about what we did and what we are doing is the first motivation and also why development can be very rewarding.
When it gets really tough, coffee help us to remember the first reason! A French humourist said: “Coffee makes you sleep when you do not take it.”
If there was one thing you wanted to see developed for Flight Sim, what would it be?
There are still so many things that could be done to enhance our simulators. That is not an easy question but if there is one more important than the others, we would certainly like to develop it!
Within the Flight Simulation hobby, what else do you do to contribute to the community?
Our repaints team also create many repaints for several well-known aircraft add-ons. We have a document library where you can find some real world aviation stuff that I did during my own training, we’re still working on this stuff to add more contents. We are also considering other freeware projects that may come in the future.
Who’s your biggest inspiration in the Flight Sim community?
There are a lot of talented developers in this great community and many of them are inspiring us, but if we had to choose some of them, I would say that Hifi and FSFX are very good examples. They have always been able to innovate and bring new things that didn’t exist before. We are huge fans of AS16, ASCA and Chaseplane and would recommend them without any hesitation.
What is your favourite add-on?
We don’t have ONE favourite add-on, we appreciate the work of many developers but things like AS16, ASCA, Chaseplane, PFPX have been a real revolution for flight simulation and bring an incredible immersion.
Of course, there are many aircraft and scenery add-ons that we love but there are far too much products reproducing different things to say that only one is better than all the others.
What interests do you have outside of Flight Simulation?
Well, does real world aviation counts?! To be serious, I personally have many interests, I really like everything about the design, and I love travelling especially in wide open spaces like Alaska, Iceland, Greenland, Canada…etc, even if I didn’t travelled as much as I would want but I am currently preparing a travel to Iceland for the first time and I am really impatient to see that, hopefully I will bring back great real aurora pictures!
What are your thoughts on FSElite and what sort of content would you like to see from FSElite in the future?
I think this says all about what we think: https://togapjcts.wixsite.com/toga/our-partners
We all discovered FSelite at the end of 2016 and it captured our attention because it looked different, I appreciate to see that you support some small teams just as you did with us by sharing our news without losing an objective points of view on all developers. There are also nice ideas developed in your team like this developer’s month, I think this is pretty unusual and appreciable for the community.
About what we would like to see in the future: keep surprising us!
Tell us, where can people contact you about any of your products?
Anyone can contact us by many ways, our facebook page, our forum, our facebook community group, by mail or from the contact section of our website. You can also discuss with me on Pilote virtuel, a French forum where I started flight simulation when didn’t even know what was the “add-on scenery” folder!
Happy flights!
On behalf of the entire team,
Maxime Konareff
TOGA projects founder
