Military AI Works History
Military AI Works, "MAIW" as it has come to be known, started in August of 2006 when a group of like minded Flight Simulator enthusiasts set out to fill a large gap that existed in the AI world. By 2006 the AI segment of the Microsoft Flight Simulator series had been growing steadily for several years. Thanks to newly developed tools and techniques, developers were bringing entire pre-made airline packages to the scene which had mass appeal. This allowed users to add their favorite real life airlines as artificially intelligent traffic inside of FS2004 and brought a whole new level of realism to this long running series. However one group of users was still not satisfied with the status quo which up to that point had focused solely on the civilian aviation world and had virtually ignored the world of military aviation. These users increasingly found themselves venting their frustrations over the lack of military style AI traffic at the old FSGateway.com site.
With likeminded individuals beginning to pool their collective knowledge about the AI traffic system and engine, slowly but surely, new models, new techniques and entirely new ideas started to emerge from a small core group of users. By that point, several larger military ai style packages had been released as freeware, though most were forced to use older FS2002 style models or even flyable aircraft models as their AI stand-ins. While this proved to be an intermediate solution, the results were poor graphical performance on most computers as the numbers of military style models dedicated specifically for AI use remained small.
The FSGateway site had provided a common place for military AI enthusiasts to meet, however it also focused on other areas related to the Flight Simulator series. By August 2006 several individuals expressed an interest in forming a completely new group with its own dedicated website that would be strictly dedicated to the advancement of military style AI aircraft and packages. With enough interest in this new project, one member agreed to purchase a user domain and with that, Military AI Works was born.
From the very beginning, MAIW has been run by a collection of enthusiasts from around the world which continues to this day. The hardest part was getting someone to actually take charge, another facet that remains to this day! Fortunately everyone who considers themselves as part of the team takes the team concept to heart and contributes whatever skills they can offer, whenever they have the time to offer them. MAIW has always prided itself on not pressuring its contributors to produce anything that they don't want to produce and to not push contributors with deadlines. The overriding theme that still exists today is that "it's done when it's done".
That philosophy has served MAIW very well and this summer, we will celebrate our 4th year as a dedicated freeware AI group. That makes us one of the longest lasting AI groups in the history of this little segment of the Flight Simulator world.
Currently MAIW is stronger than ever and we hope to keep it that way well into the future!