Yep, I'm done with the studies, yesterday was my last day of school ... It's been 6 years since I graduated from High School in my home town near Lyon.

Now I'm gearing up to a whole new start, I'll be gone by the end of the february for 6 months in Sunny California.
I still can't believe how fortunate I am about this ... I couldn't thank Philippe enough, well, maybe with a few aircraft tours in the San Francisco Bay Area ;-)

Anyways, It's been 4 great years at Epitech, from September 2002 to today, I've met lots of interesting people, learned an incredible amount of new things... and most of all, I've spent amazing times with 5 fellows that I will never forget !

I wish the best for the 6 of us guys !

And Kitti, see ya in Hawai !

... is in sight ... in 4 days, my long 23 years of studies will be over (Including pre-school ;))

This is the last week, and I've got two presentations to prepare with my pals from school... One of them is in english, and I'm trying to rehurse it over and over again, but man it's way more difficult than doing a presentation in french ... and to make it worse, it's about commercial/finance cr*p ... you know, the kind of stuff I *really* enjoy ... (or not)
So this one is saturday....

The next one is on Monday and it's about a game I've been developing with my team mates. This presentation will be more fun to do since it's a project we've all enjoyed working on.

So I'm putting FSP aside for another 4 days, and after that, I'll have plenty of time to work on it like crazy, along with the preps for my big departure to the Bay Area at the end of February.

Speaking of that, I'm looking for temporary housing in the Santa Clara area, if anyone has anything for me ... ;-)

4 more days ... 4 more days ...

In one of his latest posts, Steve Lacey writes that he is leaving Microsoft to start his own company.

Steve, if you read this, good luck in your new projects and thanks a lot for all you did !
(Especially for not blowing me off a couple years ago when I mailed you to ask if you would give my simulator a try ;-))

I'll keep reading your blog, that's for sure !

While browsing my referers, I found out I was linked from an Avsim thread (here)

The post is about Flight Unlimited 3 becoming old ... (RIP, I loved this sim...) and Pete, one of the posters, says this :

"If youre up for another free sim, the dynamics of the 'Flight Sim Project' seem pretty good too"

I love to read comments like that =) I never thought my physics were really crappy but being mentioned next to X-Plane and FSX, this is cool hehe...

Thanx Pete, whoever you are :)

Lots of refactoring today for FSP. I have changed the startup form so that we can specify the airport we want to fly from. I have also added support of situation files à la FS2004. The Flight menu now contains a Save Flight item that allows users to save their flight and even set it as default startup situation.
Okay, okay, I'm ripping off MSFS ideas there, but since I use this often in FS2004, I thought adding it to FSP would be a great move.

There is still some work required on this. I had to move some code around to initialize parts that are now used in the startup form.
I guess it'll be done by tomorrow.

To test this startup location thing, I flew from KHWD to KPAO at sunset. This was too easy so I added wind and turbulences to spice up the flight... and man it was fun. I had to go around at KPAO ! The airplane was shaking so hard, I almost hit the runway :-P

After landing, used the kewl replay feature to take some screenshots of the whole thing...

I'm starting to realize that this sim could actually go somewhere... It lacks data but the feeling of flying from one point to another is getting better and better...

As always, screenshots !

 
Going around on the left, Short final on the right

More screenshots...

Happy Landings

Have you ever noticed that for every single terrain engine there is out there, there is at least one screenshot of the Grand Canyon?
Mine was missing one of these, this is now fixed!
Since the terrain system now supports DEM and SRTM data import, I thought I would also take FSP's origin point somewhere near the Grand Canyon and take a few shots…

Boring project today at school, some financial things we had to analyse… I got bored, and decided to show off with the Flight Simulator Project :-)

I was demonstrating to SharkOne the new lights and clouds, when I got an idea… Why couldn’t I go to a French airport, just to see if FSP crashes or not…
I was not sure of how it would react since I *never* tested it anywhere else than in the US (Negative Longitudes and Positive Latitudes). Since the coordinate system thing is full of stuff like ‘value = _Lat + _Offset - Scale * someVariable’ I was kind of expecting the worst… It’s supposed to work … but you never know … (I’m sure some of you know what I’m talking about :))
So, I used my new fancy Go To window, and selected runway 34 at LFLY my home airport when I’m in Lyon. To my great surprise, I could actually see a runway, over the void, but still, I was correctly positioned on the it!
I tried a few more, LFPG, even KJFK, KORD, the runways were there!

Tonight, I had an idea. How about adding some relief below these runways?! Fired up Internet Explorer went on seamless.usgs.gov and downloaded SRTM data for the region of Chambery, a nice mountainous place in the alps, just a few miles east of Lyon.

I flew there so many times and I just love the “Col du chat”. It's report point in Chambery Airspace where you fly low over the mountains and dive over the Bourget Lake while turning along the ‘cliff’ to avoid crossing the IFR approach route… It's a great place where you really feel like you are flying !
You can take a look at pictures of my flights to Chambery here, here, here, and here.

Here are a couple real life samples :

 
Col du chat and Bourget Lake in real life ! (mmm, FSP sure is ugly compared to that ...)

Anyways, I downloaded this data and loaded it up in FSP and here is the result:

 
The lake from south east 

 
The Col du chat 

  
Slopped Terrain ;)

 
The Bourget Lake

I'm glad it works, so who wants to fly from France to the US in the Citation now ? ;-)

To close this post, just a couple pictures from last summer on the tarmac at Chambery... Two idiots with their toys ... and our ride for the afternoon !

Happy Landings !

I finally managed to have a few hours to myself, just enough to release a new version of the Flight Simulator Project.
Here is the changelog for this new version:

Changes in version 2.0.2203 (2006-01-12) :
- Moved to Framework 2.0
- Default location is now at Palo Alto of Santa Clara Airport (KPAO)
- Options Menu now contains a "Go To..." option. Just type the name of the airport you want to go to, and click OK.
- Added automatically generated terrain
- Included airfields are : KPAO, KSFO, KSQL, KHWD, KNUQ.
- Runways and Ligthing are autogenerated from DAFIF files
- Added strobes to the Cessna 210
- Added support for clouds (Disabled by default, go in Options->Options...->Settings (performance) to enable)
- Runway lights are disabled by default. (Go in Options->Options...->Settings (performance) to enable)
- Smoothed camera transitions have been removed temporarily, until I found a cooler system...
- Aircraft now collides with relief ! (Landings on slopped terrains are now possible)
- Reworked the Effects pipeline (this is internal, so who cares?)

Most noticeable changes are :
The move to the .net Framework 2.0:
This is a great thing. I didn’t upgrade to Managed DX for .NET 2.0 though. I ran into problems with buffered input so I had to give up this option.

Automated Runway and Lights generation:
They are explained here and here

DEM Terrain:
The modeled area is now wider and adding new terrain will be easier now!

I guess this is it, time to go back to school projects…
Happy Landings

Yeah … I’ve been meaning to post about the stuff I did during the holidays…
Two things have changed.

The Terrain :
I have refactored some of the terrain engine. The gaps I had in the terrain are now gone, well, almost… There is still an occasional gap here and there but the huge things that were visible before have disappeared !
There was a problem in my algorithm; I was ‘forgetting’ one of the rows of the terrain… So, it’s no precision issue like I feared it would be :-)

The Airports:
The area covered now includes the following airports :
KPAO, KSQL, KNUQ, KSFO, KSJC, KHWD… Best thing of all it that all of these airports have their runways *auto generated* !! 
I’ve also worked on the lighting system. I’ve thought about some technique to do this properly and support all types of lighting based on what is on each runway definition. Of course, this data comes from unmodified dafif files, so it’ll always be up to date ! :-)
Now I only coded two lighting types :
- Regular Runway Ligthing. (White lines on the edges, green and red lights to indicate the beginning and end of the runway)
- Runway Threshold Identification Light (Flashing lights on the threshold, on each side of the runway)

I could fly from Palo Alto (KPAO) to San Carlos (KSQL) and even to Hayward (KHWD). The cool thing about this is that I didn’t even include special code to support all of these airports. They just appeared in the game :-)
Now, I just have to include new terrain, and all the airports will be present at their actual location! Actually, they are all there now, but over a big void since I don’t cover the whole earth yet.

About an update… I guess it won’t happen before the end of this month. Work is going crazy at school. I’ll be clear starting February 1st, so expect an update around this date. It’ll include all these new exciting improvements!

 
Taxi at KPAO

 
Bay Shore Flight and HWD

More screenshots here

Happy Landings everyone !

Everyone is talking about it, this is official, the next version of Flight Simulator was announced today !
It'll be called Flight Simulator X (for 10) and will be released at the end of this year !

Lots of screenshots have been released and we can notice aircraft cast shadows, sun reflections on the aircraft fuselage, moving cars on the road (now that's great !), amazing scenery, fantastic autogen, lots of new airplanes ... It'll be hard to wait that long to give it a try !!

Jason Waskey on his website makes a comment about the fact that these screenshots come from different builds of FSX and that there is *really* more to come !

Q&A and Screenshots can be viewed at Avsim !

Yippi !

From what I read on various websites, Microsoft would be about to announce the next version of Flight Simulator. A computer game magazine said it would be Flight Simulator X. I don't know if this is true, but I like this name :-)

Anyways, I guess we are going to have to wait a little more !

Last saturday, I could finally fly !
Considering the fact that the day before, the whole country was under a big snow storm, I thought a flight just the day after would have been a treat, with lots of white scenery ... well, no it wasn't ... The cold weather we had was long gone when I took off and the temperature had be way above zero from the early morning, so all the snow was melted away ...
I was unsure about whether we (My lovely copilot Julie and I) would take off or not ...
First turn off was the fact that we had to pull about 6 aircrafts prior to reach the one I booked, which was in the very back of the hangar...

Since another aircraft was closer to the door, we decided to go back to the Flying Club's desk and book the other one instead... Bad timing made it impossible, another pilot was just getting in to book it ... Well, at least, we'll have more hands to clear all these birds out of the way :-)
Five minutes later, we were ready on the tarmac, with full tanks! There was only a quarter left but I always feel better with more fuel than less ... I like this French saying: "bidon plein, coeur léger !"...
Anyways, the aircraft hadn't flown for 6 days. I had to manually spin the propeller to ease the starter during engine startup... It has something to do with oil being moved around in the engine or something ;-)
After a quick preflight check, we were ready for startup, took me three attempts before Kilo Bravo would start, and man it was coughing!!
Little birdie was cold! But after a few seconds, the engine ran like a charm though ;-) We took off about five minutes later, and we were almost alone on the field :)

Weather was not perfect that day, ceiling and visibility where quite alright, but we could see rain showers in the distance … We headed south, to Sierra Alpha report point… After this point, I started climbing and we flew into a light rain shower … A quick look to the north (my intents where to make a quick tour of Lyon by the east), made me realize I might not meet friendly weather … The visibility there was more than crappy, kind of like if it was raining heavily … I decided I wouldn’t fly in this soup and return to the airfield … Made radio contact again and flew back to the airfield… I forgot to mention that the wind was quite high that day. If I remember correctly, it was something like 190° at 18 to 25 knots … Runway 16 was in use, so the crosswind factor was limited…

Anyways, I still took the time to make a little detour to the north of the airfield to fly over my house ;-)
On the way back, it was kind of shaky! My copilot wasn’t feeling very good; we were bouncing off on turbulences. Since the wind was kind of high, I only deployed 10° of flaps…
The landing was a perfect kiss, once I reduced power prior to the flare, the aircraft was stable and I could land it without a single shock or anything ? I love DR400 for that, it’s so easy to make kiss landings!
40 minutes of flight … It’s always wayyyyyy better than nothing ;-)

Happy Landings …