I wanted to this for a while now, getting rid of my current unknown file format used in FSP. It's XML based and exported from a modified IGameExport plugin for 3DSMax.

No one uses it... so it's definitely hard to import models in FSP... I wanted to change this. So this is why this rainy week end where all my tailwheel/night flights have been cancelled, I started implementing a Collada Importer for the Flight Simulator Project.

Collada is a new file format that's being adopted by numerous big DCC companies like Discreet/Autodesk, Softimage, Maya, Blender... The upcoming version of FX Composer, FX Composer 2.0 will have complete support for Collada, Google Earth can import collada data. (This means that I'll probably take advantage of all the Collada content made for Google Earth, sweet! :)

After two days of coding, it's starting to shape up real nice, I have the whole node system, geometries, parts of the effects/materials system with a custom common profile shader and animations already in place.

I used FCollada from a Canadian company called Feeling Software. I have to admit I'm really impressed by this library. It's really clean, nicely done, and super easy to use.

Importing a Collada file is not as easy as parsing a simple model file. There are lots of concepts in a Collada file like Effects, Materials, Material Instances, Common Profiles, Geometries, Geometry Instances, Nodes, Visual Scenes... Appart from some weird conceptions things, it's a really good file format and getting to the current state was way easier than what I thought it would be.

My biggest rant against this file format, is that they left the freedom to specify the Up axis of your scene... I don't really understand why this is in there... it's such a pain to implement a correct converter to Y_UP (Hello Autodesk, the axis that makes sense...!) that works for everything, that I don't understand why anybody would enable such an option for a format that is supposed to be made for exchange between applications...
Constraining everyone (Autodesk, or ColladaMax for instance) to export as Y_UP would make much more sense than to force everyone to support this stupid option...
(I used the Collada Refinery to get rid of this problem)

Anyways, so now, I need to link the materials to the objects and I'll be good to go! :-) My old file format will be gone forever, and I'll be able to import data from almost any DCC app that exists ;-)

After a long period of internet silence, my brother Jerome is blogging again.

Check out his website at www.jaylee.org

He'll be blogging about .NET, random stuff, and soon about Canada ;-)

I just uploaded a video of the latest shader for the plane. It has multiple point lights that turn on and off based on the state of the strobes.

Though it's a little exagerated, it looks real nice. The effect of these lights also disapear with the light of the day, so you can only see them at night, and barely during sunrise and sunset. FSX doesn't do that, you can see the effect of the beacon even in plain day light :-/

I love this Discovery Channel show called MythBusters! The idea is to take popular myths and verify if they are plausible or completely not true. (Click here for some examples)

This sometimes ends up in blowing stuff up and hearing them laugh after the experiment ended in a big boom is soo funny. 
This doesn't seem to be funny to Julie... I don't know why... They have all this equipment like infrared cameras, laser temperature sensors, they use all the ways possible to prove of dirprove these myths :)

Read all about the show on the wikipedia page & view some sample videos on their website.

What I know is that it remembers me of my teenage years... I remember a couple of experiments I did with my 2 brothers...

1 - The Projector Lense
We had this friend of us who had an old projector thing that teachers used to show transparent sheets of paper on a white board. He gave it to us, of course, we dismanteled it and found this HUGE kind of square flat plastic lense about 20 centimeters wide. We soon discovered that if you put this under sun rays, and focalise the rays on the same point, it can burn very quickly!

2 - The Telephone Card Over voltage
In junior high school, my class took a trip to England and to capture the beauty of this bloody country, my mother bought me a disposable camera. The instructions on the camera said that when the film was full, we had to take the whole camera to a store. What a waste of toy power to me! What about the flash? I knew there was some kind of electronic thingy in there to make it work... Even though the box said, do not dismantle, to hell with that, I wanted to see what was inside :)
So I dismantled one and found out there was this little board with a few components including a big capacitor and the actual flash light. I remember the flash having this high voltage print on the side, something like 300 volts... All this out of a double A battery, that's cool!
Ever tried touching the pins of such a capacitor when it's fully charged?? Well, I did, and it hurts hehe :)
So anyways, when I got back from England, me and my brothers thought it my be a cool experiment to try to power up a little telephone card chip with the capacitor, just to see what happens ;-) We connected to wires to the capacitor, got hit by the high voltage a few times on the way, and then we took the wires and connected them to two random pins on the chip... the result? TCHIIIT!!! An electric sound, few sparkles and in a millisecond, the chip was dark and smelly :) Sweeeet!

So all this to say that these Mythbusters guys, when they laugh hard after an experiment succeeded or failed in such a cool way, it reminds my of some of the things I used to do when I was a kid, but on a much smaller scale.

I'm still trying to figure out what could possibly be happening in my flight model to make the airplane vibrate that much after it reaches a certain speed...

This morning, I tried another random google search and found out that this phenomenon also happens in real life. It's called Wing Flutter.

Here are three Youtube videos that show what happens:

This month, I've started taking lessons to get my tail wheel endorsment! I have the phase check out next saturday with the chief pilot and if everything goes as planned, I'll be able to fly the Citabrias of the club!

I didn't know I would find tail dragger flying so fun! I already knew that landing was the most exciting part of the flight, but now, it's even more exciting! :)

Bruno was at Palo Alto during one of the flights I did with Cory, my new instructor, and he took some pics of my landings at Palo Alto.

 Click here to watch them all!

I just uploaded a new album with pictures I took at dusk in Palo Alto. I had to buy a tripod to do these. The exposure time was too long to get a sharp picture.

For some of the pictures I exposed at long as 10 seconds to see a light trail when the airplanes were landing. That makes a really neat special effect!

 More pictures here

Two weeks ago, Julie, Eric and I flew to Half Moon bay on the pacific coast to have lunch there. The flight was short, but a little bumpy.
After lunch we hung out at the pier next to the airport.

The weather was nice, and warm, that changes from the cold french winters ;-)

 See Pictures here

Last week, Julie and I went to the Grand Canyon / Vegas. We had a lot of fun on the strip, visited the Hoover Dam and saw the Grand Canyon at sunrise.

We even won 30 bucks at the roulette ! That paid for the taxi ;-)

Another cool thing we did was to go see Seinfeld Live at the Caesars Palace! He was only in town for 2 days, and we managed to get two seats for the last day! I really had great time :-) It was brand new material, only one of the jokes was from the previous show.

 See the photos of the trip here

I've added two things to the blog today:

• A comment spam protection thing. You'll have to calculate something before you post a comment ;-)
• A Donation Page, in case anybody wants to donate a few bucks to support the Flight Simulator Project.

Cheers and Happy New Year!