Long week end full of code and biking, that was great ... On the coding aspects, I began implementing my terrain system, I think it has some potential hehe, but the shadow thing still clearly sucks ...

You can see what it looks like in the picture... It is vertex based and calculates the lighting at each vertex based on the position of the sun... I'll try to optimize all this stuff during the week ... I think this will greatly improve the visual quality of the terrain in FSP...

This picture is showing the Silicon Valley, with San Jose airport on the right ...

Happy Landings ...

Well, I have not posted lots of pics from California since I got here. To fix this I just uploaded a 58 new pictures of various things I thought would be worth showing.

It goes from streets, airplanes, animals, stoplights ... I hope you'll enjoy them.

Click here to view the pictures.

On an other subject, ever since I wrote that post on Adam's talk a couple days ago, I got lots of new referers (websites pointing to mine), mainly from forums, saying that a new video was out, and that it was worth checking it out.

One of these referers thinks I actually released the video and documents ... Of course, that's incorrect, I just pointed to the stuff that Adam mentionned at the end of his talk.

This reminds me of the time FSP was believed to be Flight Simulator 2006, or when it was tought as a side project of a Microsoft Developer. =) Sometimes, I wonder where they get all this from ...

Happy Landings

I did a little work on FSP today, mainly on the Terrain Engine. I wanted to have a more open and LOD oriented system ...

I'm experimenting different techniques, mainly to avoid the hassle of having to programatically create the levels of detail. I'll discuss about this in a later post I think, but I just wanted to post this screenshot because it looks kewl :)The colors in the picture are based on the altitude and are applied in a modified version of the Fog shader.

Well ok, just a few words about this experiment... In a nutshell, what you see is a precomputed mesh that I built in max. This mesh is translated underneath the camera and all the vertices are recomputed each time the camera moves out of a defined radius. I know it sound stupid and dirty, but I want to try this option just to see if it sucks as bad as I think it does... The re-computation part is faster than I thought so that's a good point...
What sticks is the time that my algorithm takes to recompute the normals of all the vertices in the mesh... that'll be my objective for tomorrow, but now, time to ... zzzzzz

Well, I really had a great time there :) Even though I had no booth duty, I never got bored at all during the three days I was there.

Yesterday, I attended Adrian Wood's talk about the "Make Art Button". It was really interesting even for a developer like me. Well, especially for me since I kind of have to do everything on FSP. I learnt lots of stuff on Photoshop, Max Script and even DOS hehe.

Like Adrian said, this talk was not a course about how to make the perfect max or photoshop script. It was more giving ideas and talking about how he does things in Flight Simulator, to get rid of repetitive tasks and leave more time for creation.

On the FSX Exciting News, well, not much, he said this talk would not contain new FSX announcements, hehe. Nonetheless, if you looked closely at the names of the Normal Map files he was manipulating, you could perhaps guess the types of aircraft that could potentially be in the next release of Flight Simulator hehe ;-)

After the talk, I ran into Adam who was waiting for Adrian's talk to finish so they could pack up stuff and perhaps go back to Seattle.

I'm really glad I was so lucky to live all this and meet all these interesting people ;-) (Thanks again Philippe !)

So, back to my terrain engine ... (how coincidental, hu ?! :P)

Happy Landings !

Today was THE day I had been waiting for ever since I found out that Adam Szofran was going to talk about terrain generation and rendering at the GDC !

Adam Szofran is the developer in charge of the Terrain Generation and Rendering on Flight Simulator X. Those old flight sim fans might remember him from the FSASM days ;-)

I was lucky enough to get a pass for this session. I got there a few minutes early and Adam was at the door chatting with some of the GDC staff people.

I introduced myself and we chatted a little bit, and apparently, he already heard about my work :)

His talk was very informative, I learnt lots of things about how they do the terrain generation, and we saw a nice video of the new terrain engine with a camera starting from the ground and going up to space ! (Download here)

After the talk, I hung around and listened to the other attendee's questions. I just had one stupid question about vertex buffers and textures, and he thought that it would be better if we could sit down somewhere so he can give me more details !

So we spent a few minutes outside seating at a table with the power point presentation. It was really cool, I was actually talking with a Flight Sim developer guy hehe ;-)

Well, that was THE event of the day, so it got on top the stack of things I have to talk about here !

All the information about Adam's talk, and his paper can be found here.

Happy Landings Everyone !

Perhaps some of your readers remember my previous posts about the track export from my GPS to Google Earth. Basically, what I did was using a program called Navigation, to import the data from the GPS, and exported it to a kml file to give to Google Earth.

These tracks are points or coordinates that are recorded by the GPS at a certain interval so that you can review your flight afterwards.

Problem was, Navigation couldn't handle my GPS apparently (a Garmin GPSMAP 96C). It was only importing the latest portion of the latest track. I had some mail exchanges with the author but none of the fixes he tried fixed the problem so I eventually let it go.

Since I've been flying quite a lot lately, I thought I would give this track thing another shot... Still no go with Navigation... I figured I would have to do this myself.

It turns out that the latest version of MapSource, the mapping software from Garmin, the GPS Vendor, is now exporting to Google Earth. Since we don't live in wonderworld, there had to be a problem : they don't export the altitude, or it seems that google earth doesn't represent it.

So I had to find a way to do this myself. I tried to look at the export options of MapSource and found out there is an xml export format called GPX.

Enters GPX to XML, a wonderful C# piece of program that creates a nice 3D view of the flight from the GPX File.

It reads the GPX file and exports each track in individual files that you can open with Google Earth. At last, I have what I wanted, and without subscribing to the 20$ Google Earth Plus just so that I can have a stupid import feature activated. That goes the same for the huge pack of GPS Import programs that were sold 20$ each...

Anyways, click here to download the program. (Requires .NET 2.0 Framework)

EDIT : You need to have the latest version of MapSource to be able to export tracks in GPX Format.

Some screenshots of the result :

 
A fligth to Gap last summer


Guess where the airplane I took is parked ;)


Touch and to at Livermore


MapSource view


Palo Alto Approach

And oh, yes, I still have to write about the flights of this week end, but if you look closer at the screenshots, you'll have an idea of what we did hehe :)

Happy Landings

Well, I wasn't at the GDC today, but I met with a couple of .NET Managed Direct X guys, Andy (ZMan) and Todd.

Andy is the creator of the famous TheZBuffer.com so if you ever coded a few things in MDX, you probably know his website.

It was quite a pleasant dinner and I'll sure give these guys a call when I'll be at the GDC Conference Center on wednesday so that we can chat some more !

Other than that, everything is still fine. I have a couple of blog posts in the pipe, a report about this aeronautical week end, and another about some piece of code that is really cool ;) but more on that later ... or sooner, depending on when you read this post !

Happy Landings !

Well, everything is going ok here :-) Besides the crappy weather of course ... but people say it'll get better soon ...
They better be right, I have two flights scheduled for next week end !

I've been working on FSP for the past two days, revamping the flight dynamics ... Scary business ... I hate to touch to this part of the program, I'm always afraid to screw it up ...
I got some help from my Oakland Flyer pal, he is pushing FSP to its limits and giving me a hand with some math stuff, so hopefully, we'll have more realistic flight models soon !

I've made some modifications to the weight and mass system, basically, I plan to add a way to add weights wherever I want in the plane, to simulate fuel, pilots, bagages and whatnot...

I'm thinking about releasing a version soon, with enhanced shaders ...

Anyways, April 7th is coming, and that's cool !

Happy Landings !

Every year, in the US is held the GDC (Game Developer Conference) a big event where lots of game developers and game companies gather in the same place to chit chat. This year, is it in San Jose, which is about 5 miles from where I live.

Needless to say I'll be there !

There are three conferences that I'll try to attend. A couple from Flight Sim developers Adam Szofran and Adrian Woods, and also Will Wright's about what's next in game design.

Of course, I'll stop by as many sponsored sessions as I can, among which :

• GPU Performance Tuning with NVIDIA Performance Tools
• Havok FX™: GPU-accelerated Physics for PC Games
• NVIDIA Mobile Performance Tools and GPU Performance Tuning
• Physics Simulation on NVIDIA GPUs

All the sessions can be viewed here.

If one of you readers is coming to the GDC, let me know, perhaps we can meet !

Happy Landings!

This week, I met with a co-worker who happens to be French, and a Private Pilot. We got to talking and three days later, we were ready to take off in a Cessna 150 at Oakland International Airport ;-)
This flight was scheduled for the morning originally… But the forecasts weren’t very optimistic so Bruno (the co-worker ;)) decided the night before that we were not going to make it, so it got cancelled …
Once again, the weather people got it completely wrong, at noon, even though it was kind of cold, the sun was shining…
Bruno called me, the flight was back on !
We drove all the way to Oakland and half an hour later, we were taxying in a C150, to runway 33. Nice piece of machinery, well, kind of old but still, that’s an airplane, you gotta love it :-P

Oakland is another legendary airfield for me, as Half Moon Bay, it was in Flight Unlimited 2, so it was nice to be there and see it in real at last !

We took off from runway 33, and headed east towards Livermore…
Everything was going well, and we were on our way to Tracy Airport.
During the climb at around 3000ft, we heard a little stutter in the engine … then normal engine sound … then about a minute later, another stutter …
We didn’t let a third happen, we headed back to the airport, Bruno didn’t want to take a chance on that one! That was a smart decision I think :)
Meanwhile, I took as many pictures of the area as I could; it was really a great day, weather-wise!
As we flew back to the airport, no more stutters happened, and we landed safely on runway 27R at Oakland.

Well, that’s too bad, little C150 wasn’t nice that day… I guess I’ll have to practice my radio some other time. (thanks anyway Bruno ;-))

Later that day, I received a call from Steve, my instructor about the next flight, and I took this opportunity to ask him about the afternoon mishaps in the C150. He told me that was a known thing for the C150 and 152, and that probably leaning the mixture would have solved the problem… Good to know.

Well, next flight is scheduled for next Saturday, then next Sunday ! hehe stop me if you can !

The Flight Media :
Photos
Video

Happy Landings

I remember myself in 1998, opening the box of Flight Unlimited 2 that I just purchased off my local retail store … I fell in love with this game, the way the developers depicted the scenery was just awesome. This game title was featuring coverage of the full bay area from Sacramento to South County. After some time playing the game, I found an airport that would become my “home base” : Half Moon Bay. I just loved the name of this city and I thought the location of the airfield, right by the Pacific Ocean would just be perfect !

I remember thinking someday I’ll fly there… see the actual airport, see the cliffs up north, see the ocean, experience the turbulences that pilots report in final due to the relief on the shore… As a matter of fact, I did all that for real yesterday !
I actually went to Half Moon Bay Airport and it was awesome!

I had an appointment with Steve Finnie, a flight instructor from the West Valley Flying Club at 11:00am Saturday. We had booked an airplane over the phone the day before, a nice Piper 28-181 Archer : N3576J.
After reviewing some stuff about the airfield, what the departure and arrivals were, taxiway and tie downs locations, we were ready for take off !
We went down to the aircraft at tie down L16, right in the middle of the airfield. I looked it up in local.live.com and the aircraft was there at the time the photograph was taken, it’s here, right underneath the blue pushpin.

So anyway, I faced one of the differences between flying in france, and in the US. In France, the aircrafts are mostly stored in hangars, here, they are outside, with covers and ropes tying them to the ground. After a pre-flight check, we were ready for rolling. And I faced some difficulties with the radio… I felt like the first time I had to send a message to the ground controller in July 2000… I had to say: “Palo Alto, Ground, Cherokee 3576J, at L16, for a 270 overhead departure”. Not very hard, right? We rehearsed and I don’t think I got it once without making a mistake… What an idiot!… Anyway, Steve helped me, and we made it to runway 13. Soon after, we were ready for take off and I said: “Cleared for take off, Cherokee 56 Juliet !”  Yikes ! ?

After take off, we made 270 to head towards the city of Palo Alto and Stanford University. Just before reaching the mountains, we headed west towards Crystal Springs Reservoirs, leaving San Carlos airport on our Right. We had a nice view of San Francisco International Airport in the distance.
As we arrived at the reservoirs, I told Steve that we could see Half Moon Bay on our left, and he said “yeah, that’s where we’re going…” “Cool !” I said, and he said “Are you happy ?”  hehe hell yeah I was ! Half Moon Bay, I could see the ocean and everything … Well, I couldn’t say the ocean was blue, looked more like gray than anything else, but it was because of this thin layer of cloud that had formed at noon…
So anyway, we contacted the airport and did a few touch and goes there. I’m certainly going to return there, mainly because the scenery is wonderful! Touch and goes at Half Moon Bay have so much more cachet than touch and goes in Lyon hehe :-)

I had some difficulties landing the aircraft; Steve let me land it, just to see what my skills where, it didn’t break so I guess I didn’t do too bad of a landing… I extended full flaps in final, that perhaps was not the smartest idea in the world judging by the wind… He told me some tips about his way of landing aircrafts. I never heard of such a way, and I think I’m going to add this way to my “instructors-ways-of-landing-an-aircraft list”.

The view that is stuck in my mind since the time I flew there is what you see when on final on runway 12 at Half Moon Bay… Waves hitting the cliffs, the Pacific Ocean, nice houses… Simply breathtaking!

After these touch and goes, we went back to Palo Alto, via a VOR in the mountains west of the terrain. The landing went pretty smoothly, no shock or anything…
In the end the totals were : 1.3 hour of flight, 3 hours and a half of instructor time … way too much money … That instructor part is way more expensive than in France, that’s a shame …

 When looking back on this, what stroke me the most about this whole thing is the Radio Communications, not because I completely failed in this area, but because it’s so clean and quick.
No useless calls, short messages: efficient!
I was surprised that when leaving the tower airspace, we didn’t even say anything to the controller, apparently that’s the way it works around here.
 
So that was a nice flight, besides the financial aspect, it was interesting and I could see what some of the difficulties of flying in the US are, at least, some of them. We only did a local flight this time, but Steve said next time or the time after that I would have to prepare a navigation to some airfield of my choice. I really look forward to that.

I was supposed to fly again today (Sunday) but the weather forecasts where planning gust winds and rain … so it got cancelled… I should be flying next Saturday hopefully…

Full Photo Gallery

Video

Final at Half Moon Bay

Happy Landings !

Yep, this is sooo cool, I'm now a member of West Valley Flying Club ! I came by their offices this afternoon and completed the registration form.

My first flight is scheduled tomorrow at noon, I'm sooo excited ! It'll be a flight on a Piper Archer !

More details on that later !

Also, this afternoon, I had the first video+sound chat with Julie, my lovely girlfriend, it was great, and so good to see her speak to her :) :-P

I'm just back from IKEA and on my way to a computer store in Santa Clara. I just bought some furniture for the house, and killed my back while carrying stuff in the apartment ... :-P

Okay, I'm off to the stores !

(note to self : stop buying stuff ...)

Happy Landings !

My second day in the US has been exhausting! I needed to get some things done, like get a bed, a cell phone number and lots of other things …
I took care of the bed the first day, it should be delivered sometime tomorrow. Today I decided I needed to rent a car to do things faster than by the new bike I bought. Besides, some of the stuff I wanted to do would have required long bike rides so I really needed a car.
I booked a car online in the morning, and called the renting company to come and pick me up ! (they can pick people up, and this is free, that’s amazing ?) A friendly guy came to my house and  to drive me to the rental facilities a few miles from my house.
I got a Ford Focus something, a really nice car that has AC in it hehe. What I like the most about this car is that it has automatic transmission! It’s like Managed Driving ! I don’t understand why we don’t have more of these automatic things in Europe…

So anyway, I used my GPS to guide me to all the places I needed to go like computer stores, San Jose FSDO, and of course Palo Alto Airport ?
I’m glad I had it to tell me when to turn left and right cause all these roads can be pretty confusing sometimes!

Okay, now things I like about driving in the US :
1 : The automatic transmission !
2 : The large roads
3 : The highways are huge !

Things I don’t like :
1 : Way too many red lights ! Especially when turning left at an intersection … Have Americans ever heard of roundabouts ? Sometimes I ended up waiting like 2 or 3 minutes for the green light !
2 : The highway is full of imperfections and holes… at least on the portion I drove on…

Okay, back to the places I drove to, first, the San Jose FSDO. I had to schedule an appointment at this FSDO to get my Temporary Airman Certificate in order to fly in the US. It was all done in an hour and I decided to drive to Palo Alto airport to check out the flying club I’ve had an eye on for the past three months. (West Valley Flying Club). I came to their office and I spoke with a nice lady who gave me the application papers. This club seems to be alright, they have lots of aircrafts and I’m really looking forward to flying there !
Since no instructor was there at the time I came, I think I’m going to have to go there again tomorrow.
I still took the time to visit the neighborhood and listen to airplanes talk on the radio. Then I got back home.

Some random things :
- When you buy something, don’t trust what’s indicated on the price tag, they always add the taxes in the end apparently…
- I was sad to finish my last box of “Petit Ecoliers”, a French biscuit with chocolate on top of it, but today, I found the American version of these biscuit : “le petit écolier” à la française. Different box, same brand and tastes the same.
- Danone brand is spelled Dannon here
- Bio yogurts also became Activia in here too. (no one cares, but I found this funny…)
- I’m completely disoriented in an American grocery store, I don’t know what’s crap or not and all the stuff you can buy

That’s all for tonite…
Happy Landing

I'm there ! Finally ! Sunny California !

It was a long trip, especially the part from Chicago to San Francisco. There was a kid in the plane that wouldn't stop making high pitch noises... and he HAD to be seated next to me ...

Anyway, I'm there and I've got lots of stuff to do... More later !

Meanwhile, you can check out the first pics by clicking here !

Funny thing, I just heard two typical american noises : a train horn, like in the movies, and a police siren ! :)

Happy Landings !