That's what this post is going to be about...

The Coordinate System:
Two months ago, I implemented the premises of a coordinate system when I built the terrain engine and the Google Earth Interface. This system was not including the airports. In fact, when third party designers (well, only me :P) designed an airport, they had to displace the whole scenery in 3DS as if Santa Anna airport was the origin of the world. This was not the way to go. So I changed this to a new way of doing things, kind of like the way we designed sceneries back in the FS98 days. (it might still be the same thing today though)
I added in the Airport.xml configuration file, that exists for every airports, a reference position in earth coordinates. This reference point is used to place all the objects that belong to this airport at runtime.
This is currently working, even though I have a little displacement of a few feet, but that’s hardly noticeable.
With this system I’m currently able to set the aircraft start position “theorically” anywhere on the globe. (I wouldn’t count on weird coordinates like the poles though…). This displacement will eventually be done at runtime to reset the center position and avoid big transformation values.

DAFIF Files:
I’m glad the log file now contains these entries :

Loading Navaids ...
Loaded : 2829 Navaids
Loading Airports Data ...
Loaded : 9994 Airports
Loaded : 24691 Comm Frequencies
Loaded : 13879 Runways

Okay, this only a file parsing, but I can now process a lot of new stuff like the runways. To my big surprise, they are correctly positioned in the game!
The screenshots show the runways, but no actual texturing is done yet. I’ll work on that later.

 
Long Beach and Los Alamitos Runway Debug

Shaky Gauges:
After a little chat with a friend of mine who works in the graphics business ;) I decided I would work on the shaky gauges issue.

This happened when the airplane was flying too far away from the origin. I need the gauges to be precisely positioned on the aircraft panel.
But when numbers were getting too big, the decimal precision was too weak to accurately place the instruments. Therefore, they were shaking.

To solve this problem, I had to change the way I rendered the aircraft in cockpit view. It’s now rendered at the origin. That way, I keep my floating point precision to the top and the instruments are no longer shaking!

One more problem fixed on my route to the endless world ;-)

Happy Landings

Well, since last post, I haven't worked a lot.

I've added a couple of things on the clouds to make them faster to render. This should be available in the next release. But they remain a frame rate killer ...

There is one thing that have been in my mind though ... It's a problem that you can experience when you fly far off in the terrain... You'll notice that in Virtual Cockpit view, the instruments start shaking... I think this is due to floating point precision.
So right now, I'm trying to find a way to overcome this problem by recentering everything periodically ... I don't know if it's the best approach, but I'll try that and see how it goes :-)

I don't really have a choice anyways, if I don't do that, the terrain will be limited, and I don't want that...

It's snowing today in Paris ...

I'm glad I'll be moving to warmer latitudes soon ...

For those wondering whatever happened to the flight simulator project, I've been quite lazy euhh I mean busy lately, I have compiled a list of stuff to do though, so expect news in a near future ;-)

Happy Landings !

A part from being a Flight Simulator addict, I've never been a real console game addict. But a month or so ago, my gf offered me a Nintendo DS :P
Yesterday, I bought a recently released game: Mario Kart DS. It's kind of a fun game, It seems that all my reflexes from the SNES days are long gone though hehe :)

So when I was about to go to sleep, I fired up the DS just to race a few CPU opponents ... That's when I remembered my friends talking about some Wifi option thingy where we could play online...
I went through the menus, configured the DS to pass through my Wifi Access Point and ADSL Connection, and 5 minutes later, I was online waiting for the system to find random players for me to play with ! Simply Amazing!

When your opponents are selected, you can review their skills, and their number of wins/losses. Then you select the character you want, and the car variation. Then there appears to be a choice for the most wanted circuit in some sort of vote or something.
After the circuit is chosen, the fun starts, and man this is fun! :-)
I've lost a couple of races and ended second at the last one. And this morning, I played again, and ended up 2second at the last one, but got the last place for the 3 prior races hehe.

Anyways, regardless of the result, races are fun and the bonuses you get on the track add a lot of fun to the whole gaming experience.

I hardly recommend this game ;-)
Happy Landings

A new feature has been added to this blog : rss feed !

I'm using RssDotNet a really cool rss reader/writer.

Happy Landings

Well, not me actually, but a friend of mine who was having computer problems. She called me saying that some of her programs were randomly crashing and that most importantly, the winks in MSN were not working anymore because it was freezing !

Once I could get my hands on the machine, I tried a few things ... Well, apparently, the computer is definitely having problems, applications that were running fine the day before were crashed that day ...
A particular dictionary application kept crashing, so I thought I would re-install it ... I went to the control panel in add/remove program, clicked on uninstall, rundll32.exe or something started hogging all the cpu time... weird ...
Then I went onto the msn case, for some reason, when it was showing the winks window, it was going at a hundred percent of cpu time ...

I called my brother to see if he had any ideas … He suggested I install adaware, since this could be a spy-ware issue… I downloaded it, and ran the setup… and you got it right, it went a 100% as well … 

Every installers kept crashing …

I tried one last with MSN messenger installer … of course 100%, but this time, I fired up ProcessExplorer from SysInternals.
I went into the properties of the application and saw that this process only had one thread, and it was apparently blocked in an infinite loop. Then I had the idea !
Click on the Stack button of Process Explorer ! It stopped the process and showed me a stack trace. It was blocked in a GetTempFilenameA or something!
A quick look in filemon (from SysInternals again, thanx guys !) showed that setup.exe was actually trying to create temporary files, and that all these actions were denied.

It was still not the solution, but I was getting closer … I took a look at windows temp folder, and it turned out it was filled with approximately 32700 files ! (probably some kind of a limit on FAT32)

After removal of all these files, everything went back to normal, and she could wink me again ;-)

The moral of this story : if you computer behaves weirdly and you are thinking about formatting your system… think again J

After a year and a half of service, my former website http://www.matt-online.homeip.net, has now been shutdown ... Well officially shutdown. Some services remain active, but the site will be unavailable.
The only task that the IIS server on it will have to perform from now on will be a simple Response.Redirect() to this website.

Just for the fun of it, here are some of the stats I gathered :

My gallery is now up and running, you can check it out here

It contains photos of me, my flights, flight simulator and the flight simulator project...

I finally got it ! It came in the mail only 4 days after I placed my order on www.megascenery.com. Nice job from both PC Aviator and UPS ;-)

Photo real scenery, I think, is one of the most important aspects of a flight simulator. When I purchased Megascenery Northern California about a year ago, I totally gave up flights over the default scenery. This add on has changed my way of flying.

Don’t get me wrong, I love those big jets and all, but since I don’t fly them for real, it’s less fun for me to fly them that to fly light airplanes. Plus, I like short flights of about half an hour to an entire hour.
I’ve also been a big fan of Flight Unlimited 2 and 3 at the time they hit the market. I just loved those short hops in California with the greatest ground definition ever.
Therefore, I couldn’t skip on MegaScenery titles of the Bay Area !

I’ve flown about 10 hours or so over MegaCITY San Francisco so far. I’m impressed at the amount of details there is on the ground. It’s now possible to spot buildings, streets, even swimming pools !

I’ve taken a Mooney for a 30 minutes flight from Gnoss to Palo Alto, and here are the screenshots !

So to wrap this article up : Mega City San Francisco : A Must Have !

Happy Landings

Not much news since last post about a month ago… I’ve been very busy on other stuff, but now I’m back to business.
I’m sure every reader of this blog saw that the final build of Visual Studio 2005 was released last week. I had to try to build the simulator with it.
Of course, I ran into problems ?

Managed C++ Wrappers:

I knew these would not compile and I would get one of these weird link errors …

First one I got was about unknown references to DirectX assemblies. Apparently the project converter forgets to transform a macro and leaves a “{reference path}” instead of the actual path or something. I removed the references and added them by hand and the error got away.

Second thing I had was a problem during the linking. I got a link error that was saying that some .ctor function was missing. Of course with no information on what type this constructor was not found in. I only had a mangled function name to work with :-/
I browsed Google and found that I had to add these libraries to the linker additional dependencies.
In case it might help anyone, it was : “msvcrt.lib mscoree.lib msvcmrt.lib”. (does that make sense ?)

ODE :
There was another linker error with ODE. It was unable to find this function: “__iob”. I found out it was called from a printMessage() function withing ODE source code.
I recompiled ODE with the content of this function commented out and everything compiled alright.

fmod :
No specific problem besides the ctor and the reference path thing.

So now, I have the simulator running against the .NET Framework 2.0 !
I put some generics in the sim. It seems like it’s running a little bit faster. But I have 63 ArrayLists and Collections to convert so I’m far from being done on that one.
One problem I have though is that when I run the simulator with F5, it is freakishly slow, about 12fps … I get 60+ in Ctrl F5 … If anyone has a clue on that, let me know.

Also, take a look at this : 

This is the class diagram I generated with VS2005.

Click to enlarge

I’ve also created a simple Line Counter Visual Studio add-in (real easy with VS2005) and it tells me my .cs and cpp files count a total of 13000+ lines. Of course, this is the raw count, leaving the InitializeComponent()’s, comments, empty lines, and other generated functions.

Happy Landings,
Matt

Proud owner of MegaScenery Northern California add on for flight simulator, I recently ordered a new title from PC Aviator : MegaCITY San Francisco.

 I'm hopping to get it soon by the mail. One note though about the price of the whole thing. Add on price itself is fine. 19$ for the whole area, but the shipping is freaking expensive ! I paid a total of 46$ !

And who knows what the UPS guy is gonna ask me when he'll knock at my door !



Anyways, it doesn't matter, I really want this add-on since I might be moving there soon ... (more on that when I'll have more info ;-))

Happy Landings

I found this on a post on Pixelpoke's Blog.(One of the FS Developpers).

It's a website that contains videos of air traffic in the US. I just love the "Color coded aircrafts" video, especially at the moment when day starts at the end of the video.

Happy Landings

Here are the links to my other websites :

My Blog at Epitech where I wrote lots of articles about The Flight Simulator Project.

My old Website where you can download The Flight Simulator Project

Happy Landings !

What you are looking at now is my new website.

My old blog and personal website will be merged into this new space.

I will certainly post more personal stuff on this website since it will only be viewed by people who explicitely visit this page :-)

Happy Landings !

Reading the latest article on my blog doesn’t really tell first time readers what is it I’m doing. That’s why this post will be permanently linked from the main page of my blog and updated as frequently as possible.

Here we go!

What is the Flight Simulator Project?
It is a project I’m developing as a hobby. I go from feature to feature and try to build a fun simulator by approaching all the aspects of this type of game.
It features aircraft dynamics, weather, winds, time of day, visual effects, several aircrafts, replays, DEM data import …

Are you working with Microsoft Flight Simulator team ?
I wish ...

Is your project Flight Simulator 2006 or Flight Simulator X?
Nope ...

How much time did you spend on the game?
I started in May 2004 and developed it in my spare time ever since.

Where can I download it?
On my website here

What is the development language?
The FSP is developed mainly in C#. Some parts of the game are developed in Managed C++ (fmod and ODE wrappers)

What Graphics API are you using?
I’m using Managed DirectX 1.1. I never moved to XNA and i'm not planning to to so. Next API update will be for DX10.

How do you simulate the airplane physics?
Plane physics are simulated using a physics library called ODE. For more information about this library and how I implemented aircraft physics, check out this post.

Isn’t Managed DirectX slow compared to regular unmanaged DirectX?
If you’re talking about execution speed: perhaps, but not that noticeable.
If you’re talking about development time: hell no!

Are you a team?
Nope, just me for both code and graph.

Are you planning to go commercial?
Perhaps one day.

How can I help?
Contact me at flightsimulatorproject at gmail.com

Can I create add-ons for your game? (Airplanes, sceneries)
Sure. If you have a GMax aircraft model that you would like to see in FSP, contact me and we will work something out.

Can I dump all the other simulators and use yours exclusively?
That would be stupid, the FSP is far from being as complete as any other sims  available today on the market.

How can I uninstall your simulator?
Duh... Just remove the directory from your computer.

How old are you?
I was born on March 24 1981. You do the math :)

Are you a real world pilot, Does it help you in the development?
Yes I am. I fly Piper Warriors, Archers, DR400, Cessna 152, and lately tailwheel aircrafts like the Citabria 7ECA.
Flying for real does help in the development of the game.

What kind of 3D Model formats do you support?
Collada files

What's your education?
I have a masters degree in computer engineering from a french school called Epitech.

Where do you live?
In Santa Clara, California

Can I make add-ons to your game?
Sure! FSP Supports aircraft add ons and scenery. The specs are not out. Email me if you have cool aircrafts you would like to see in FSP.
Also, FSP now supports Google Earth KMZ files. So you can drop any kmz file and see it where it should be in FSP!

Flight Simulator Project, that name is.... yeah...
Yes, I'm looking for a new name... any ideas?

I wanted to add a program to the list of the little application I abandonned as soon as too many bug showed up...

This time it's a task manager for windows mobile 5.0. It lists processes and enables you to kill the selected process.
The cool thing about it is that it can be hidden and showed via a tray icon in the lower part of the today screen.

I did this because of the stupid task managing system of Windows Mobile Operating systems ...
(yeah yeah, I know, It's a clever OS, it kills the tasks whenever it sees I'm not using them anymore ... yeah ok ... when has that ever happened anyways !?)

I can't say really much more, Proppy is harrassing me to work on something else ...

Download

Shots :

Main Application Window
 
Close the app, and it minimizes to the Tray

Happy Landings !

Not much news since last post about a month ago… I’ve been very busy on other stuff, but now I’m back to business.
I’m sure every reader of this blog saw that the final build of Visual Studio 2005 was released last week. I had to try to build the simulator with it.
Of course, I ran into problems ?

Managed C++ Wrappers:

I knew these would not compile and I would get one of these weird link errors …

First one I got was about unknown references to DirectX assemblies. Apparently the project converter forgets to transform a macro and leaves a “{reference path}” instead of the actual path or something. I removed the references and added them by hand and the error got away.

Second thing I had was a problem during the linking. I got a link error that was saying that some .ctor function was missing. Of course with no information on what type this constructor was not found in. I only had a mangled function name to work with :-/
I browsed Google and found that I had to add these libraries to the linker additional dependencies.
In case it might help anyone, it was : “msvcrt.lib mscoree.lib msvcmrt.lib”. (does that make sense ?)

ODE :
There was another linker error with ODE. It was unable to find this function: “__iob”. I found out it was called from a printMessage() function withing ODE source code.
I recompiled ODE with the content of this function commented out and everything compiled alright.

fmod :
No specific problem besides the ctor and the reference path thing.

So now, I have the simulator running against the .NET Framework 2.0 !
I put some generics in the sim. It seems like it’s running a little bit faster. But I have 63 ArrayLists and Collections to convert so I’m far from being done on that one.
One problem I have though is that when I run the simulator with F5, it is freakishly slow, about 12fps … I get 60+ in Ctrl F5 … If anyone has a clue on that, let me know.

Also, take a look at this. This is the class diagram I generated with VS2005.

I’ve also created a simple Line Counter Visual Studio add-in (real easy with VS2005) and it tells me my .cs and cpp files count a total of 13000+ lines. Of course, this is the raw count, leaving the InitializeComponent()’s, comments, empty lines, and other generated functions.

Happy Landings,
Matt