... on his blog about Beta Testing in Flight Simulator.

He replies to some critics about FS beta testing he read on a forum. It's nice that Aces team responds to these posts and say the truth about what's really going on :)

I found that too many ppl on these forums "know" how things are done, even though they haven't written a single line of code in their life ...

Thanks Jason, Steve and all others for these interesting posts !

Happy Landings !

Damn winter weather ...

I'm supposed to be flying in a half an hour, and from the latest metar, looks like its not gonna happen today either...

LFLL LYON SAINT EXUPERY
METAR LFLL 301030Z 00000KT 4000 BR FEW005 BKN230 M10/M11 Q1018 88010095 NOSIG=

LFLY LYON BRON
METAR LFLY 301000Z 00000KT 2000 BR FEW001 SCT100 BKN250 M09/M11 Q1019 16010095 BECMG 3000 BR=

In short for Sharkone ;) : Visibility of 2000 meters, few clouds at a hundred feet, -9 degree celcius ... Not good :-(

This'll give me some time to work on FSP so this is still an interesting trade :)

Happy Landings

Here's what my front yard in Lyon looks like this morning ...

I was supposed to fly this afternoon, so I immediately connected on the weather website to get the latest weather updates ..

LFLL LYON SAINT EXUPERY
 
METAR LFLL 281000Z VRB01KT 1000 R36L/1400VP1500N SN SCT003 SCT030 OVC050 M04/M06 Q1009 18491095 NOSIG=

TAF LFLL 280800Z 280918 VRB03KT 7000 FEW010 BKN030 TEMPO 0918 1000 SHSN BKN005 OVC020=

TAF LFLL 280500Z 281206 34008KT 9000 SCT025 BKN035 TEMPO 1224 2000 SHSN BKN008 OVC020 BECMG 0003 5000 SCT010 OVC015=

LFLY LYON BRON
 
METAR LFLY 281000Z 17003KT 0800 R35/1000N SN FG SCT016 BKN050 M04/M06 Q1010 340 4 //95 BECMG 3000 SN=

TAF LFLY 280800Z 280918 VRB03KT 7000 FEW010 BKN030 TEMPO 0918 1000 SHSN BKN005 OVC020=
 
Needless to say I'm not going to be flying ...

This is bad news, I haven't flown for almost a month and a half and I was really looking forward to flying again ... Looks like I'm going to have to try to schedule another flight :-P

All this snow reminded me of last year when me and my brothers built this HUGE snow ball on top of which the three of us could stand on ! :-)

The next morning I couldn't resist overflying the house to see what this snow ball would look from the sky :)
It was visible, kinda like the great wall of china !!

Happy Landings !

Like I said in my last article about the Flight Simulator Project, I’m moving the default location of the game to KPAO. This gives me the opportunity to stress test some of the coordinates stuff as well as the airport data things…

I added a Go To window to select an airport location by a keyword search. This window shows the runways from which you can take off. I’m running into problems with this feature mainly because I can’t find a way to successfully disable ODE bodies when I abruptly move the aircraft to the new position.

The wheels are attached to the main body via an ODE Hinge2Joint, and have to catch up with it at a tremendous speed when the aircraft has moved. The force applied to the wheels then throws the aircraft in random directions … I’ll try to find a workaround for this … (why do I feel like I’m writing in crappy English?)

Anyways, this system is starting to look like something cool and I have been able to make a little flight in the south bay area from Palo Alto Airport to Moffett Field. The runways on the screenshots below are all automatically generated as well as the terrain elevations.
I found a kewl way to make the airport at the correct altitude, by adding a flatten area of the dimension of the runways, maybe this is crappy, but it appears to be working…

This altitude thing also made me work on the slopped terrains, so FSP now supports slopped terrains and potentially slopped runways…

More Screenshots...

I think this is going to be all for tonight… I’m gonna go sleep…
Let’s hope the weather in LFLY will be clear tomorrow so that I can take F-GYKB for a little spin in the cold! :)

Happy Landings

Lots of work lately, but not really much on the Flight Simulator Project.

I've been working for the past week on a school project, an RSS Aggregator Webservice thing, kind of like NewsGator, in .net  2.0, and with clients on many platforms (Web, PC, PPC ...) A really interesting project !

I wanted to thank Jason (Pixelpoke) Wakey, from ACES to write a post about my website moving to this new location :) (Hello Fs Readers !)

One other thing too, it turns out I'll be leaving Paris by the end of February, to move to the US for a 6 months internship in the Silicon Valey. I’ll be an intern at NVIDIA in Santa Clara (Thank you Glitch ;).
This is going to be very exciting! I’ll sure be posting about this so stay tuned!
 
If you are a new visitor to this blog, please check these links to read about the Flight Simulator Project.
Flight Simulator Project FAQ
Flight Simulator Project Gallery
Downloads

Happy Landings and Merry Christmas !

I’m in the middle of a commercial class in what I would describe as pretend English and since it is so boring I thought I’d blog about an old project I worked on about 5 or 6 years ago…

Back in these days, I was a flight simulator 98 scenery designer working on a scenery of Lyon airport in France. I got contacted by FlightWorld editions to work for them and sell my sceneries as part of a package called Geneva 98.
At the same time I discovered computer programming. I started desigining tools such as a bitmap to r8 converter and so on… all sorts of utilities that would help me in my scenery related tasks.

The boss of FlightWorld thought it would be a great idea to sell all these utilities… I was young, I went for it and I ended up making a set of 7 utilities designed to help scenery designer...

One funny thing though… I didn’t know anything about malloc at the time… hehe =)
I remember myself coding something like that
”int points[10000000000];”
right on the stack and wondering what the hell this “stack overflow exception” was =)

You can read a couple of reviews at these addresses:
Review at Simflight
Review at Avsim

I sincerely apologize to whoever bought this suite for the design of the programs, it was not (entirely ;) my responsibility…

Happy Landings

News is, today Microsoft released the latest version of their mapping application : local.live.com !

Among the numerous new features, I'd like to mention one, the Bird's Eye View mode. It basically is a mode that shows pictures of places taken from an airplane. It shows a tremendous amount of details, you can even spot actual people on the ground !

Here are a few pics I took :



The Boeing C17 Globemaster construction facilities at Long Beach Airport in California

A United Airlines 747 at San Francisco International Airport.

 

Air Terminal at Los Angeles International Airport

Just a little post about this option of ipconfig that kept me from pulling hair a few times ...

When you can't connect to an address when every other addresses work fine, this is probably a dns problem, a Windows Dns Cache problem to be more precise.

A google search lead me to this explanation : Apparently, when a DNS Request fails (no connection available, or for any other reason), Windows keeps the returned address in cache, even though it's a false IP address. (randomly generated ?)
When the connection is available again, since Windows has an IP associated with the name you request, it won't request it again, thus it'll use the false random IP...

So don't forget this option of ipconfig, it might come in handy ...

Happy Landings

Last week, I decided I would check if my coordinate system worked a little farther than the Los Angeles Metro Area. I downloaded the data for a couple of areas in the San Francisco Bay.

It turned out, it works ! :) I still have some inaccuracies here and there, but the overall is correct and the runways seem to be correctly positioned.

Here are the first screenshots of San Francisco International Airport from a few thousand feet.

  
Offset at KSQL and No Offset at KSFO before textuing (I misplaced the aerial photography on KSQL, it was late...)

 
KSFO from different angles

Happy Landings

A few month ago, I dismanteled a machine that I no longer needed .. The contents of this machine have been sitting around on my desk ever since... I don't know why, but today I decided I was going to check what was on one of the 80GB drives that used to be in this machine ..

I found an interesting project that you may have heard of if you read the article I wrote in the November issue of PCPilot Magazine.
This article mentions a car simularor project that was the starting point of the Flight Simulator Project. And today, I found it hehe :)

I've always loved to find old stuff I've done a long time ago :)

Maybe some day I'll write about a couple of Flight Simulator 98/2000 projects I've worked on back in 2000 ;-)

Happy Landings

I continued to work on the Airport/Runway system today. Lots of refactoring took place!

Now the airports in the airport directory are not loaded each time the simulator is started. Instead, I make a query to the AirportsManager, asking it to return the airports within a 20 NM radius, then for every airport, I look for its scenery. If none is available, the default stuff is shown.
For every airport, the runways are now processed, and displayed in the game as a simple sprite with a texture.

I've taken the Citation for a little spin to LAX and monitored the whole thing on Google Earth :-)
I've figured out there is a small offset in the scenery at LAX.
I've noticed some inaccuracies in the position detection and on the aircraft model when it was standing still on the ground... I'm getting close to figuring out what the distance-to-origin limit will be...


Today, I have also tried to revamp the external camera system ... and it turns out I can't do it ... I've spent a few hours trying to mimic the FS style camera, but I can't do it ... I'll come back to that later :-P
I never give up hehe...

I think my next move will be the runway lights, I want runways to light at nite...

I also had a nice comment-chat with Andreas Jung today in this post, you might want to check it out :)

And now, some shots :

  
Google Earth View and Long Beach Runways
 
Short Final at LAX, and LAX Overview

You can view the entire gallery here.

Happy Landings !