I finally integrated my new Earth system to the core of Flight Simulator Project.
To test the new system, I decided I would fly a bay tour from Palo Alto. It all worked like a charm! There are still some seams in the textures but overall it looks good. I flew almost 100% of the time over high detailed terrain refreshed as I was flying over it. Really cool!

The earth update system was designed to be updated with my fast moving first person camera, so the slow moving aircraft was just piece of cake for it :)
Memory stabilized around 350-400MB which is acceptable considering the amount of texture that I loaded. I could not really feel the loading of the tiles, no stutters at all!

Next steps:
- Figure out why frame rate is not at 60fps anymore... (dropped to around 25...)
- Integrate my FX Composer 2 atmospheric scattering effect (yay!)

Alright, I'm off picking up my parents at SFO!

Flight Simulator Project - July 2007 (2)

I've read on a forum that linked to here that FSP was dead since it appeared that I was not working on it anymore... well, that's far from true... I'm working on it, but just a tad slower than before... :)

Anyways, today I've been working on adding the relief to the new earth modelling system. It was quick to implement as my old system was pretty generic and easy to use. (GetElevationAtCoordinate())

I still had my old elevation dataset of the bay area to work with, but it was getting pretty limited in terms of coverage... so I went back to seamless.usgs.gov and downloaded a significantly bigger  chunk of Northern California. And I gotta say, it looks pretty sweet in the game now :)

I posted screenshots on Picasa.

Next step will be to plug this new earth system back into the flight simulation code and I predict that this is going to be a pain...
Oh well, we'll see...

For the past few years, I've been listening to a french internet radio called Frequence3. But as time passed, I got fed up with the idiotic show hosts and their over-airing of the same songs (you know, just to make sure you really like it...)

Last week, a friend pointed me to Pandora. It's an flash based online radio where you can rate the songs that play. You create your own channels based on singers you like and then it plays songs by similar artists, genre, harmonics etc. The more you listen to it and rate the songs, the more it'll know about you and play only the songs you will most likely appreciate!

I've been listening for a week now and I almost never skip any songs now. I think I've found my new radio ! So long Frequence3! I will not have to put up with your crappy verbose show hosts ever again... :)