Wow, I just found out Avsim has a front page news item about FSP, sweet ! :-)

So, welcome to avsim readers who are interested in FSP !

Everything you need to know about this project can be found in the Flight Simulator Project section on the left.

(Big thanks to the Avsim staff ;-))

Happy Landings!

Yes, I’m still working on it !

Since the latest release (a few months ago…) there have been lots of changes.
The flight model is way better now, I’ve reworked the glooming effect, there is an entirely new terrain engine that can take pretty much any satellite imagery, and I just added basic multiplayer capabilities…

The server is based on hummm a server me and my team mates from school coded during our last project ;-)
Since I hate network programming, I thought that would be the easiest way to go !
I only tried the game solo with two laptops, but I have a multi player session planned for tonight.

Anyways, I took some screenshots of the super high res imagery I have for Palo Alto. It’s really cool to fly over places you know and recognize every road, house and such…
You can judge by yourself in the gallery section. I also included high res screenshots (1920x1200) of high res imagery.
The gloom quality sucks, I know, but I had to remove the contrast and luminance filters… their pixel shader code were killing the CG at this resolution :-/

About releasing a version… I’m thinking about it. I almost released something last Monday… Problem is, the satellite images make the download package quite huge… (100MB+)
I tried using Bit Torrent for testing, but it didn’t go well…

Click here for the latest Screenshots

Happy Landings !

I have a bunch of stories I felt like sharing...

Since I'm no longer in France, I thought about cancelling my phone contract there. If you think having an internship or even a job abroad is enough for Orange, think again !

I sent a copy of my job offer and everything that they would need as a proof that I was no longer in France. Problem is, my offer doesn't say I'll stay at this position for 12 months+. Therefore, they can't cancel my contract.
These guys are idiots, the US is not France, there is no way to say that you will stay at the same position for a "indefinite" amount of time... It's more the french way of doing stuff. Here it's *really* indefinite, meaning I could no longer have a job tomorrow.

Julie is coming in a couple of weeks, and she wanted to do the same. She just sent a letter saying that she was going to study english for two months here... and Bouygues said : "Sure, we'll cancel it !".
Funny thing is, she renewed her contract only 5 months ago and bought a new phone with a two years contract...

This whole thing is just ridiculous...

This makes me think that if one day I have my own company, I would advise you not to buy anything from me as you will end up with a 50 years contract uncancellable unless you die... or maybe not, think about reading the small lines at the end of the 518th page of the user agreement ;-)

One last... I received a registered letter at home in France. My parents wanted to pick it up at the post office. They are my parents, they have proofs that I'm not in France right now, and yet, the postal services won't give them my letter... *I* have to pick it up...
And when you ask: "Alright, then what can we do ???" the answer is "You had to think about it before he left."
Well that's very wise... thank you !

Good thing is maybe if we ask another teller, this will be a completely different story !

This week end, Bruno (a co-worker) and I went to Castle Air Force Base to visit a aviation museum close to the airport. (http://www.elite.net/castle-air/)

We took off from Palo Alto at 11h15am, and about an hour later, we were arriving at Castle Air Force Base in the middle of the Central/San Joaquin Valley. We flew by Livermore, Tracy, Nasa Crows Landing... Interesting flight in awesome weather !

The museum was pretty nice, lots of old airplanes and we could even get inside the cockpits!

I uploaded lots of pictures I took at the museum in the gallery.

We also saw an SR-71 there ! I had never seen one in real... really impressive ! There was a navigation officer or something, that flew on that very airplane ! He told us this story about the time one of the SR-71 had stayed out for a long time, and was covered in bird poop... they took the plane for a ride at Mach3 and when they came back, the plane was spotless, everything had burned !

The return flight was somehow bumpy... Bruno insisted that we did this branch without GPS hehe :-)
We flew over the San Luis Reservoir, South County, San Jose... Again in great weather, but quite windy...

The landing in Palo Alto was tricky ! There was lost of gusts and I thought my landing was going to suck really bad... But I got lucky, no gusts at touch down and a nice kiss landing !

For the pictures, if you think the in-flight pics are crappy, blury, noisy, blueish... blame mister smarty pants co pilot who thought he could to better than the Automatic Mode of my digital camera ;-)

See all the pictures here