I found this link on Digg today about another one of those top lists. This one was about the Top 20 Entrepreneurial Quotes.

One that I like... "Some people dream of great accomplishments, while others stay awake and do them" - Anonymous

It got me thinking about FSP, and I where I was eventually going with it.

When people discover about this flight simulator, the first question that comes to their mind, depending on where they stand is:

• Are you going to go commercial?
• Are you going to release it for free and open source it?

I would say, I’m more leaning towards the commercial route… Mainly becaue the idea of flying an airplane for real on the earnings of a entirely personal endeavor would be something I would very much like to experience one day…

But the more I think about commercializing the project (through any form, shareware, donation-ware…) the more I get back to reality… which is:

It’s pretty damn hard to create a flight simulator on your own…

Obviously, difficulty is relative and its definition varies from people to people...

I see writing a simulator as the inverse of a cool Web 2.0 project…

For the Web project, the hardest part is the idea… the technological piece is just a mere formality…

On the opposite side, for the flight simulator, the idea is the easiest ingredient. It is already out there… All the rest is a long set of mathematical, technological, algorithmical challenges… and some of them look so hard to me, I have to digest them for months before I can even understand the topic or come up with a reasonable implementation…

For both, usability if going to be a key aspect… if the flight simulator physical model lacks realism, users are never going to stick around… same goes if the represented area is too small, if the scenery is not up to what it looks like in other simulators, if there is no content/add ons…

I suppose this is why I don’t get much feedback from users about the simulator. Pilots probably say: “well, that’s cool” click the close button and move on.

Reaching the level where users are going to stick around is tough… There are countless things to implement such as terrain that regenerates dynamically, a solid render engine, a model loader, a weather system, a sky rendering system… And each and every one of those tasks represent a multitude of micro-annoying challenges that sometime take days to solve…

I assume you got it… it’s a hard project…

Then why bother? Is it ever going to be something profitable enough to make a living out of it? If this happens, will it be before I die? Even though the donation page was only used by one user over the course of all those years, should I take this as an indicator of the interest of the Flight Simulator community? Should I abandon altogether and do something else?

My rational side tried to get me out of the useless simulator business… I attempted over the last couple of years to get interest in other projects… but after a certain amount of time, I feel bad for the Flight Simulator, and start working on it again… even though no one might ever have fun using it other than me… (have you?)

So right now, I think I’m just going to go ahead and continue developing the simulator, just for fun, and keep going from feature to feature according to what I feel like doing that day…

I’m just a bit sad that this simulator doesn’t get all the attention it might deserve…

I’d be happy to hear from you anonymous readers…

Would you be willing to contribute financially to support the project? To what extents?

Considering the previous well funded failures (FLY, Flight Unlimited, Pro Pilot…) and the linux-like simulators such as X-Plane and Flight Gear, do you think a one man Flight Simulator has its place?

I highly doubt it… but for some odd reason, that’s not going to stop me from going on with the project…

Why?

No idea… Foolishness? Delusion? ... Passion?

You tell me…

Lately, I've veen trying to figure out how I could add realistic water rendering in FSP... The problem I have is that I use satellite images which have absolutely no information about where water is...

Thankfully, seamless.usgs.gov has sets of data that contain useful information such as waterbodies, land cover... I tried the waterbodies one, but I couldn't really extract anything useful from it. It's a set of shapes in a file, and rasterizing this would take some effort I'm not willing to do right now...

I then took a look at the land cover dataset which proved to be much more useful. It's delivered in the form of a GeoTIFF file that contains a matrix of what type of land is at specific points. (Forest, water, city...)

Since it's a raster image with geographic bounds, I thought using my standard texture splitting code would work perfectly.

The way I generate tile textures in FSP is by compositing textures together for a min/max geographic coordinates. These small textures are rendered to an off-screen surface, and saved out.
The idea for the water bodies is to add a second texture to the surface renderer, which would be the land cover information and that a shader would use to set the alpha of the texture to a specific value.

Then when rendering the actual final texture on the terrain, the terrain shader would choose whether to render the actual terrain texture, or realistic water...
I've got the off screen rendering part done... but for some reason there is an offset in the land cover texture... I suspect this is because the texture mapping uses some sort of odd mapping... which is not the same as the one that's used for the satellite images...

I'll try to figure this out...

I made some progress over the week end on the Cessna 162 Skycatcher.

Bruno came over yesterday with his test-pilot hat to take a shot at tweaking the numerous flight model parameters.

I made some videos I uploaded on youtube of some tests with the airplane. Two crazy stalls and two landings.
The landings suck quite a bit... I know... :)

I should also get a Cessna 152 very soon (thanks Brian!) The good thing is that the flight model of those two birds is very close, so tweaking the 152 once the 162 is done shouldn't take long! :)

I also fixed up my common profile shader today... I noticed a bug with materials using both envmap and transparency at the same time. This type of setup is used a especially on canopies and windows of the airplane. So needless to say they look much better now! :)

Now, on to the media:

Here are some screenshots of the maiden flight of the upcoming Cessna 162 Skycatcher :-)
It took me two days to reach that state, but the biggest part of the work is done... Hopefully, it'll look better than that soon !