February 28th... I've feared this day ever since I book my plane tickets...

We're there, and in eleven hours, my flight to San Francisco will be leaving...

Expect news from me... whenever I can, either at the airport, or from Sunny California...

Wich me luck, profesionnally or personnally, whichever one you want ...

Happy Landings

I have added a new section to the blog : Flight Videos

It will contain videos I or my passengers made during my flights. Eight videos are already available. I hope you have fun watching them. They were all shot by my brother Sébastien during a flight we made to Chambery in August 2005.

Previews : (click image to download)

Landing at LFLY


Taking off at Chambery


Flying with the Clouds...

You can watch the rest of the videos in the Flight Videos Gallery.

Happy Landings !

This had been in my head for quite some time now, I wanted a GPS Receiver to hook up to my QTEK 9100. This is now done hehe :-)

I bought a nice Holux GPSlim236 GPS Receiver ! It sends data over Bluetooth, and works great on both the PocketPC and the Laptop.

So far, only one thing that bugged me about this device, is the weirdness of the COM Ports. It works, and I don't know why, so this has a high potential of not working for whatever reason some day...

One of the things I'll do with this device is use it as a navigation helper tool while I'm flying. Okay, I've got the 96C already, but I like toys, plus, it's a backup system, just in case.
I browsed around to find out what was available and I found PocketFMS, a Flight Management System that works on  PocketPC. I find the interface quite hard to handle, and the qtek is perhaps a little slow to run this program correctly, but I'll sure give it a try during my next flight, whenever it will be.

On the right, you can see a screenshot of the tool that is shipped with the device. It runs on the PocketPC as well as on the PC and now you know where I live !

I have also played a bit with the GPS samples of the Windows Mobile 5.0 SDK. I think I'm going to have a lot of fun with this :-P

Happy Landings

Well, I'm guessing all FS fans already know about it, so this one is for people outside of the FS world : check out FSX latest screenshots here and here !

A blog about Flight Simulator Game Design, now that's great !

It's over at Paul Lange's blog.

I was still in high school. Back then, I worked on a scenery project for Flight Simulator 2000 called Polynesia 2000.

This came back to my mind when today, while cleaning my apartment, I found a magazine that contained a 2 page article about this scenery package. I remember being thrilled when I discovered that our project made it to the cover of the magazine !

We were three working on this project and it took us 8 months to complete the 25+ islands of the whole area. We modeled dozens of 3D objects, aircrafts, hangars, poles, lights... to populate the islands. I remember coding a simple program to place random points of light ... I'd like to recover the code of this thing, just to have a good laugh, hehe :)

Anyways, I'm back to cleaning...
Happy Landings

Well, weather forecasts were wrong again for Lyon area yesterday. We were supposed to get nasty weather, but it was far from that.

It was a good thing I didn't cancel my aircraft reservation for the afternoon.
Julie and I went for a one hour flight around a mount next to Lyon, the "Mont Pilat". Given the orientation and position of the windsock at LFLY, flying in the vincinity of a mountain might not have been the best idea... Nevertheless, it was the place where the weather was the clearest, so we headed there...
As I suspected, it was kind of shaky when we flew near the mount, it was fun :-P

My pink co-pilot took some pictures for you viewers to watch :) Accept our appologies for the quality, of the shots, we forgot to bring an actual camera so we were stuck with my telephone's built'in camera.

Also, my good friend, the Garmin 96c accompanied us in the trip, and it was kind enough to record the track of the flight :)
Using MapSource, I imported the track to Google Earth, and here is the result.

 
Complete flight track

 
Touch and go track, and departure / arrival on the taxiway

As you can see in the pictures, I couldn't keep myself from making a few touch and goes at the airport ;-)

Happy Landings

As promised, I have uploaded a bunch of videos showing the latest things added to FSP.

The cirrus in the videos doesn't reflect the very latest version because since then, I've added moving parts and a cockpit.

Click here to see the videos

Happy Landings

One big change today in FSP, I have added a new aircraft : a brand new Cirrus SR22.

Adding this airplane to FSP’s fleet has been on my todo list for a very long while, and yesterday I decided I was going to take a shot at designing it.
It was one of the hardest planes I ever had to design. The shape of the aircraft is very peculiar so I had to struggle with the vertices of the plane to make it resemble the actual thing.

It’s still unfinished work, I only modeled the exterior parts of the airplane, and a raw interior. So far, I’m satisfied with the result. I think that the interior is going to be challenging, especially because of the full glass cockpit … I don’t know why but I feel that I’m going to have to re-think my whole gauge system because of that …

I also worked on the runway lightings. I implemented three new lighting types :
MALSR : Medium Intensity Approach Lighting Systems Runway Alignment Indicator Lights
ALSF-2 : High Intensity Approach Lighting System
Center Line : High intensity center line lighting system.

Both MALSR and ALSF-2 lighting systems contain ramps of lights and a flashing line of strobes that really look great in the sim !

I’ve uploaded a bunch of videos to the website so you can appreciate this yourself :)
(More on that later, I need to create the page before)

Also updated is the airport scenery at Palo Alto. Check out this screenshot

Couple last :)

More screenshots here

Happy Landings

Shaders:
One of the things that have been bugging me for a while now is the gloom. I don't know if anyone ever noticed, but it had an offset ... I had a few hypotheses about this problem and I thought that to correct this problem, I had to refactor the whole filter chain of FSP. So this is now done and the gloom shader works like a charm.
I was kind of fearing that I wouldn’t be able to recover the original look and feel of FSP but it didn’t change, I put the correct shaders back in place and everything went back to normal…

Scenery:
Two weeks ago, I got contacted by someone from XP Simulation. They make sceneries for X-Plane, FS2004 and Alsim…
They offered their help with sceneries and provided me with two complete airports : Brussels (EBBR) and Malaga (LEMG)
I ran into some issues integrating Brussels airport in FSP. First, my runways were way too long compared to the scenery (todo : investigate on that…) and apparently, we didn’t have the same orientation for at least 2 runways out of three…

The import of Malaga scenery went better, and I could add it to FSP in a little less than an hour.
The scenery looks nice, it’s great to see new content in  Flight Sim Project !
I uploaded screenshots in the gallery here.



Runway Lights:
Also, I figured out that one of the greatest hits on frame rate was the latest addition of the runway lights. I investigated and found a great way to improve performance on that type of rendering… Point Sprites. As usual, it took some time before it worked, but I eventually figured out how to integrate them in FSP in place of my old slow sprites thing.

Okay, time to go sleep …
Happy Landings