A reader requested yesterday that I upload a high resolution video of the spotlight in FSP. Youtube didn't really give it justice by ruining the image quality...  I just uploaded a high res version here.

Be sure to check out the video page in case you haven't already done so... These are the ones uploaded before I started using Youtube as my video storage area :)

I just found a link to a paper written by Michael Zyskowski on Phil Taylor's blog.

This article is entitled "Aircraft Simulation Techniques used in Low-Cost, Commercial Software" and deals with the way aircraft systems are simulated in Flight Simulator.

I gave it a read, especially at the flight simulation part, and I'm surprised to say that my model is not far from Michael's. The missing inputs in my system are ground effect, side slip drag, flaps drag/lift, and prop wash.

Given the current system, they won't be too hard to add. I'm particularly interested in prop wash (for power-on stalls) and side slip drag...

Going slow, but still going :)

I recently added support for what is called an 'ubber' shader. It's basically a shader that does most of the common things for the Flight sim, from simple rendering like lambert or blinn lighting, to more complex things like normal map, envmap...

This is implicitely leading me to DX10, since I totally got rid of everything that was using the fixed function pipeline.

I've also added support for a very cool per pixel spot light... It certainly slows the rendering down, but it looks so much better than the ugly landing lights of FSX... (How can they be so badly done...)

Next on the plate, follow up on the normal map tests and apply it on the runway and aircraft.

I've uploaded 4 videos showing the new shader at work at sunset and dawn...

Here's one...

Julie has had a mac for 4 months now... and I've been helping her a few times to use it... she's coming from the Windows world and needed this for school... that's why she turned to the wrong side ;-)
Nevertheless, I tried approaching this with an open mind, and just go with the flow... and quite frankly, a few things were very annoying... here's a list that comes to mind...

- First welcome screen wouldn’t let me choose the type of WEP encryption my network was... the only way to change it was to go to the network settings afterwards... That's okay if they don't detect it by default, but at least, give us a wep type choice dammit! It's the welcome screen, everything should be easily configurable from there...

- Sometimes, when a program crashes (Illustrator most of the time) the system goes crazy (slow, cooling fan is spinning at 40000 rpms...) and there’s no (user friendly) way to kill the app... Well, there is, but it doesn't even kill it. (Right click on the icon, force quit...)
My Mac Fanboy friend from work suggested opening a shell and looking up the process number in top... but dude!! I thought  macs were supposed to be easier and simpler? is that easy???? Force quit, should do it's job of killing the app, whatever state it is in...

- IChat behaves like an idiot... if you click on it by mistake when you have no account setup, there is no way to get out of the registration process besides clicking next next next and registering anyway... What's up with that?! (No close button, nothing...)

- Laptop mouse pad only has one button, yet, a lot of the useful features require a left  button, and I don't intuitively think that pressing some apple or other button while I click the mouse is going to show a context menu...

- In finxed, there is no rename option in the context menu… You have to click twice on the file… That’s not very friendly…

- Stuck CD... I was installing windows with bootcamp, and maybe because of a busted CD, the install failed... And when I restarted it was still trying to boot windows, I couldn't find a way to eject the CD from the slot in... I had to browse the internet, to find out that you needed to press the mouse button while powering up the machine to eject the CD... Oh yeah, I guessed that alright…
Mac dudes? I never thought an obvious eject button was an annoyance... same thing for a (obvious) On/Off button on my IPod... Being kewl and remove buttons is alright when it's useless buttons... but an eject button that works at anytime, even when OSX is not booted up? Please...

- Applications are not in full screen... Oh my god, this must be one of the most annoying thing I've seen on the mac... Why, oh whyyyy would you want to do this??? I know it's changeable (in some apps), but man, that is so annoying to not be isolated within the bounds of your application... You inadvertently click on another window in the back, and bam!, you in another application and the whole top menu changed… It's makes everything so messy and confusing...

- Why can't I resize a window with with any other corner than the right hand one?

- Connecting to a samba/netbios share… There is no automatic network discovery, no easy way to type an address in an address bar… you have to use the Connect to thing, and type smb://<some ip or name>… what’s that!? That’s not easy… and user friendly… at all!

- and more I forgot...

I know you Mac Fanboys will say:
"Huuu well but, oh yeah!? well windows has tons of problems and you are just used to them so you don't care anymore..."

Well, then I'm sorry, but I always hear the stupid pot-smoker fanboy on the commercials saying that macs are so much easier and so much better than PC's...  If it was true, then this post wouldn't exist and I would just be saying "well, yeah, but windows is prettier!" just because of the lack of things to rant about mac... but I'm not... After these few months of using it a bit, I’m still not convinced that it does things so much better and easier than Windows…