My name is Steven Joseph Ryan. I live in San Jose, CA, and have been for all 17 years of my life. Living in Silicon Valley has grown me up with a keen awareness and love for computers and technology. And flight. I've always loved flight. I can't remember a time when I couldn't at least identify the aircraft's name, such as the "Falcon" or the "Hornet." My favorite aircraft has always been the F-16 Fighting Falcon. Its an incredible bird. Growing up with this love of the Viper has taught me to respect a few things that have been taken for granted with aircraft nowadays, primarily: maneuverability. This is the primary reason that most of the aircraft that you will download here will feature agility as one of their strong points.
My first flight sim that I can remember would have to be Dynamix's "Aces over the Pacific," a WWII Combat sim that was fairly realistic I imagine, with a multitude of aircraft that you could fly. Simple VGA graphics on a 386 were quite standard back then, and I really didn't mind... at least the frame rate was decent. I got fairly good at it, as good as a ten year old could. I moved on to Jet Fighter 2, a decent game in terms of landing and takeoffs, but for combat, it lacks. Only recently when I loaded a copy onto my 386 laptop was I able to get gun kills, and your missiles were far to accurate. Enemy aircraft would never come close enough to identify let alone kill at close range, and it was one of those you vs. the entire iron block kind of scenarios.
The first TRULY great sim I've ever owned was Falcon Gold, a version of Falcon 3.0. The Falcon series is notorious for its ultra-realism, and I fell in love with it. I got good too. Falcon 4 is great, I would strongly suggest buying it... its only about 20 bucks now, and its the best F-16 sim you can get, I'm fairly certain of that. The game was lacking considerably in graphics, with no textures and all polygon rendering, but what it missed in graphics it made up in game play. Small intracacies that you might overlook always surprised you, like little boxy men that would scamper away from their BMPs as a GBU glided upon them. Stuff like that. Awesome game it was.
That's me on the left. I kicked his ass. I also have his soul.
That picture is of me and my great friend Ben Seiden. We were touring at Cal Poly, and they had a sumo wrestling thing, so we gave them money and proceeded to smash each other. Oh yeah babY!
My love of X-Plane started from the minute I downloaded the demo. I used to fly MSFS 5 for a very short time, and I always wanted FSFS (aircraft making tool) but could never get my hands on it, so I was confined to only sketch and dream about aircraft. X-Plane changed that, you betcha. I can now sketch an idea, come home and plug it in, and have a good idea of how it would function as a vehicle. It has also made me an infinitely better pilot in terms of landing skills. If you can land any of the rapier series, then trust me, you're gonna have a hard time finding ANYTHING on the X-Plane.org registry that you CAN'T land. That's a fact.
Right now my life consists of a wonderful girlfriend, School, Music, and X-Plane. My girlfriend of over a year, Erin, has been a wonderful support for me, handling my airplane addiction with a cool patience that is great (I was always afraid my obsession with winged beasts would scare away any decent female). I play most saxophones and clarinets for two high school bands, a youth orchestra, and SJCMT, a local children's theater company that plays out of Montgomery Theater, downtown.
I can't imagine there is much more to say about me... just that I love airplanes and I love X-Plane! Enjoy my craft, I know I have!
