Quick note to self that I should read next thankgiving:

Matt, do not believe what people say about Black Friday and all the awesome deals you'll get. Here's why:

• You drove 60 miles to some outlet mall to find out more than a thousand people had the very same idea
• You got stuck in traffic for 2 hours
• You didn't sleep at all this night
• Once there, you forgot that a night of November in Northern California is very cold... and you were freezing!
• Since you were freezing, you had to buy a sweater that you didn't really need, just to not be freezing anymore...
• All the good stores were full of people... I mean REALLY FULL...
• There were lanes to even enter some of the popular stores...
• All the good stuff was already gone by the time you got there
• All the crappy stores were empty
• You gave up on the interesting stuff you found when you saw the 50min+ line...
• You came home with just a bunch of socks and a sweater. yeah!
• You wasted 4 hours of your life in the cold
• When you got home, since it was almost five, you decided to go to Best Buy, which was plain stupid.
• You thought no one would be stupid enough to wake up that early to get some deals.
• You were WRONG!
• You got there at 4:45am and found out that the line was extending around more than two building blocks...
• You decided to try your luck at Fry's...
• It was the same!
• The store was full of people with all kinds of stuff in their carts and none of the good stuff was left...
• You got home at 6h00 completely exhausted
• The deals weren't even that interesting
• Remember this quote from a friend: "I'll be able to tell my kids I waited in line for 1 hour to get 15 percent off a shirt... well, maybe I won't tell them..."

To summarize, please read this message next thanksgiving night and don't do that mistake again. Some people are way dumber than you, and they are probably already standing in line for the deals you will never get anyways. So forget it!

:-)

I know, news about FSP have been quite sparse in the past few months... but I've made some progress... ;-)

Lately, I've been working on shaders for FSP. Last week, I wanted to re-implement my aircraft cubemap lighting shiny bright effect. I thought it would be an easy task. Just a rework of the shader. But that endeavor was quickly blocked by a big underlying problem... All of the object normals were completely screwed up. (This had been around for a while!) I couldn't go any further. A proper lighting + cubemap effect requires perfect normals to look nice... The old shader was just plain wrong...

While trying to fix this problem, I discovered so many other problems, some design decisions I took about two years ago that were not applying anymore, or some other things that were not flexible enough...

Of course I completely broke FSP :-/ It wouldn't render anything. My new approach was to use DirectX Meshes more intensively to take advantage of the normal calculation facilities... I feared that approach due to my previous experiences with that class... It seems to like to throw InvalidCallExceptions a little too much for my taste...

After a week of tweaking, where FSP didn't look like anything but a bunch of mushy polygons, I finally got some results.

(See the examples of depressing images on the side of this message)

Now that it's working, I'll be able start implementing my new cool shiny bright light effect tomorrow!

I used two tools I had not really used previously:

• NVIDIA NVPerfHud
• PIX from the DirectX SDK

These tools are really awesome, they gave me precious information on my vertex buffer formats, or other internal data/calls. I especially like the new pixel debugger where you can analyze all the states of a pixel and step through the shader code that rendered this pixel ! (In PIX)
I'm addicted to these two programs now! I suggest you give them a try during your next debugging session! :)

From the developer website at NVIDIA.com:

As you may know, our tools team is hard at work on FX Composer 2, our next-generation integrated development environment for shader authoring. As we finalize its features, we want to get your feedback about how you use FX Composer, and what we can add to ensure that it is the best possible product for you.

Developers who complete the entire survey (with meaningful responses) will be entered into a raffle for a brand-new GeForce 8800 GTX. Incomplete surveys or fictitious responses will automatically disqualify you from the raffle. Only legitimate developers are eligible for this survey.

Click the link and tell us everything! You might win the most powerful video card ever built!

Last week, Microsoft added a cool new feature to their Local.Live.com mapping website. It's a 3D application just like google earth, but that is integrated in IE as an ActiveX component. I like this concept.

Also, they have modeled some US cities with 3D buildings, with textures on the sides of the buildings! I don't know how they did that, but that's really impressive!

Apparently, there is already an SDK for the mapping application. Let's hope they add some sort of support ofr KML files, that would be really awesome!

Ever since I started playing FSX, the cooling system design of my one year old laptop was becoming problematic. Every time I played, it over heated...
The CPU/GPU heatsink temperature sensor was reading more than 97+ degrees celcius before automatically shutting down the machine. Nice eh?
That, plus the horrible frame rate (probably due to every component in the laptop being too slow... but let's blame this on the ATI Radeon X700 ;-)) convinced me that the time had come to buy a new machine!

That was exciting, I hadn't done this a over two years! I went to Frys and bought a new nForce 680i with an Intel Core Duo II. For the graphics, I didn't go for the 8800GTS/X yet. I took a 7900GS, which seemed to be the best price/performance ratio of the moment.

I assembled the machine and quickly tried FSX: What a blast!
It's way more beautiful than with my old system! I can crank up the settings almost all the way up and play full screen (1920x1200) with Anti Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering 16x on, sweet!

I flew a couple of times with Bruno. Poor guy is playing on an old laptop, probably at around 10 to 15 FPS... :-) Of course, we did some formation flights. I love to do that in FSX. The connection is super smooth and it's so much fun to fly in close formation!

 You can check out the latest pics I took in this gallery.

Good thing is now that I have a NVIDIA video card, I'll be able to use NVPerfHUD at home on Flight Simulator Project. Not that I really need to optimize the game anymore now with this blazing fast machine ;-)

I thought that writting my own blog engine would protect me from comment spam...
Guess what, it doesn't...
It certainly protects from automated scripts targeting community server and such... but I didn't think someone would figure out a way to automatically understand how my system worked...
The only way I can think this could happen is that it's a physical person that posted these urls that don't even exist... Or perhaps they looked for a "post" button... I don't know...

The comments were left on two of my most read posts.

The Flight Simulator Project
Flight Simulator Project FAQ 

I guess I'm going to have to add some sort of image thing to prevent that. I'll figure something out soon.

I guess that all there is to say is:

You spammers SUCK!

Flight Simulator X was released about a month ago, it was about time, more than three years after the previous release ;-)

I was really excited about this new release, but it left me with mixed feelings. It has numerous bugs that were not fixed in the RTM and the Multiplayer can be really frustrating! I get disconnected every once in a while. I don't know if it's a Gamespy issue or what, but that can be annoying when it happens while you are flying...

I read on some forums that some people were thinking about switching to Flight Gear or X-Plane. That's funny how it reminds me these people who say they will switch to Linux when Vista is released... How stupid.

Okay, FSX has bugs I'm pretty sure it could have been optimized a bit more. I understand people's frustration: How would you react if with your brand new computer, Vista performed so poorly that you had to deactivate all the new kewl advertised features, making it visually and user-expercience wise, worse than Windows XP ?? You would be sure angry.

No this is not going to make me hate FSX or Microsoft. I think the Flight Sim guys did a great job. FSX just lacks a little polish, and I know how software development can be hard, especially at the very end of a project.
Despite its bugs and poor framerate, I'm starting to appreciate the multiplayer mode. I flew in formation yesterday with Bruno, from Brest to some island I forgot in close formation. It was really a blast!

Let's all wish a patch is on the way to fix the last few remaining glitches!

Well, I've decided to cancel the project and do a kernel debugger instead because it's much more fun.

Naah, I'm kidding :-)

I removed the dust off of the code again... It's a good thing I didn't forget anything about the code, and that it's still working!
Lately, I've been trying to implement an Autopilot for the Cessna 210. When I say autopilot, I don't mean lock the object on a spline, but act on the controls to make the airplane do whatever the autopilot settings are. 


It was clear in my mind what was to be done. Just compute the error between the actual value and the target... and it turns out it's more complicated than that. To achieve good results for that kind of stuff, I will have to implement a system based on a PID Controller (Proportional-Integral-Derivative Controller). I'm still getting into the theory. I hope I'll be able to implement something soon!

Stay Tuned!

 I finally uploaded the missing pictures of my trip to Japan.

 You can find them all here!

As I said in my last post, this sunday we flew to Castle Air Force Base!

The plan was simple, fly in a Piper Archer to Tracy to meet up with Mike and his Mustang II and Jimmy and his Pitts 12, take off to Castle AFB, visit the museum, have lunch, fly back home!
Everything went alright and we even had the time to fly in formation on the way home. That was a blast!
We took off from Palo Alto at 9h30 and flew directly to Tracy. When we landed there, Mike was already on the field, refueling his Mustang while Jimmy was flying in the pattern for runway 30.
At 10h30, every one was ready to leave. Bruno hopped in the Pitts, leaving the front seat of my Archer for my Copilot Julie to fill.
We started to taxi to 30. Mike was ahead of us and took off for closed traffic while Jimmy and I were still taxying. He made a high speed low pass on the runway as we were doing our before take-off checklist. That was nice :)

I took off after Mike's low pass and climbed to 3500ft heading 99 direct to our next waypoint. We then switched to 123.45, the air-to-air frequency so that we can chat together.

The Pitts and the Mustang were way faster than me and they flew ahead of me in no time.
Surprisingly enough, by the time we arrived at Merced (Castle AFB), they were only a few seconds ahead of us. We reported overhead the airfield while mike was on right downwind and Jimmy on right 45 for runway 31.

Mike landed first, then Jimmy, an Experimental was in front of me, he made a direct right base entry when I was in downwind, I had a Cessna Cardinal and a Cessna 152 behind me! That was busy! Good training for the radio!
Since the experimental in front of me was doing a touch and go, I taxied right behind Mike and Jimmy. Mike's plane was really easy to spot. His new plane is so bright yellow it's tough being lost while following him ;-)

We parked on the tarmac, next to all the other airplanes and took the shuttle to the Museum.

It was less crowded than last time we went, but a few airplane cockpits were open.
Very cool nonetheless.

After a quick lunch, we took the shuttle back to the airport. The plan for this last leg was to make a flight of three, mike being first and taking care of the radio, Jimmy following him, and me in the back of the line since I had the slowest airplane.

We took off simultaneously on runway 31. Mike said something like that: "Castle, Experimental 123XX, Group of three, taking off runway 31, Castle."
We all applied full thrust, and after a few seconds, we were airborne. It took me about 5 minutes to catch up with these guys. Then we flew in formation for a few minutes. It was really great!

Funny thing was that while we were chatting on the Air-2-Air frequency, we heard Lou, (Bruno's instructor and the Navy Pilot I flew in an Aeronca last spring), talking on the radio about 70km north of us. He was probably having fun in the sky again :)

After the formation flight, we headed directly to Palo Alto.

A really nice day!

 All the pictures here!