With ‘the piscine’ and all the things that have been going on lately, the simulator has not been updated for a month …

This week end away gave me a chance to catch up …

One major update is about the ATC, things have evolved and the ATC aircrafts now have the ability to taxi to the runway, ask for takeoff clearance, take off, contact the tower for landing clearance and report in downwind then final …

Each one of these steps took some time to design, and this system being linked to time and not linear, the more options I add the more difficult the coding is … I have to deal with a lot of variables to update the aircrafts, the ATC Entities … I think I’m going to keep coding this way until I can safely land an aircraft back, then I’ll refactor the ATC code …

I’ve faced a lot of problems that I haven’t handled the same way … and this would be the occasion to even this up and use the same technique everywhere…

The aircrafts are a little more clever now, they don’t collide with each other, they stop when an other aircraft gets too close, and they get in line for take off.
The clearance for take off is only granted by the tower once the runway is clear. It’s really fun to watch the aircrafts wait for their turn to take off!

 

The aircraft camera motion has also changed. It’s no longer like in the video, it now has smooth interpolations between positions, and a slight change of angle when the aircraft moves abruptly. This last thing is going to be interesting when turbulences will be added to the wind system.

The aircraft model is a little better now,  I’ve purchased a nice Garmin G1000 Glass Cockpit for the aircraft, check it out in the gallery !

 

Happy Landings !
Matt

Steve Lacey posted a message on his blog about a video of Channel9 who came to visit the flight sim team :-)

I really enjoyed this video, we can see Steve, and a bunch of other guys from the team talking about their job :P (Lucky them !)

One thing that struck me the most is that their place is huge, and that they are about 60 to work on the sim.

We learn that the sim is in C++ and asm in some parts, and that they build some of their tools in .NET.
I would have liked to see the guys who work on the physics model, and on the weather, and on the aircraft models, and on the scenery design, well everyone ! :-)

Really a nice video, too bad it's too short :P

Happy Landings everyone !

... as i got woken up by some maintenance people coming to my apartment to check on some over-heating problem it has had for ever ...

I don't have enough time this month for two things :
-> Flying ... i can't get back to Lyon to fly, my week ends are too short :-/
-> Coding on the Flightsim Project ... ending work day at midnight doesn't help ...
I'm glad this TA job ends in two weeks :-P 

I saw on the blogs of two Flight Sim coders (lucky them :P) that they were visited by a team of Channel9,
and that the video should be available soon on Channel9 website :-) Cool eh? :-D

Still no idea about the graduation project/game we're going to code ... We know it's a game, we know we want something not too big, but not too easy, we know we want to complete it (for once), and that we definitely want a *fun* game ! I keep proposing a flight simulator, but i get beat up all the time :-P

Training period report... 30 pages and has not grown by a word for three weeks... i'll work on that this week end ... After i get my new-old 17" screen to replace the one that died last week ...

Note for later : talk about the updates on the Flight Sim... ( the ATC is now a little more clever and won't clear an aircraft for takeoff if there's already one on the runway :-) )