The earth modeling in Flight Simulator has been through many stages over the three years of development of the game...
At first, it was a simple plane, then a plane with elevations, then another hardcoded bunch of super-imposed planes with different resolutions, then a pseudo flat part representation of a big chunk of South California, then another attempt at a more realistic model, handling real textures with real elevation data, and finally this new model I'm working on!

I decided to completely revamp the old system when I realized I couldn't go further without rewriting the whole thing from the ground up...
While trying to properly implement runway markings... I found some discrepancies between conversions from real world coordinates to game space and vice versa...
These errors were all due to the fact that our stupid planet is not flat... which would have made my life so much easier...!
Spheres are stupid, let alone spheres that are pretend spheres, like Earth with flattened poles... :)
Modeling it as a sphere sounds like a reasonable approximation, so the new system models earth as if it was a perfect sphere.

Most of the texturing code from the old model still works the same... but is now lacking on the performance side...
It's still using GDI+ for creating the ground textures from little patches, which is not really the fastest thing on earth as far as texture blitting is concerned... also, all my earth textures are stored in a one dimension table...
Okay well, the entire texturing system is wrong...
I have some new approaches to investigate like sorting the textures by areas so that I can perform some kind of quad tree search to look them up faster, and do the actual blitting on the GPU using render to texture... that should increase the rendering time by quite a bit hopefully...

Re-reading the introduction to this post, one questions might come up… why didn’t you think harder and design it as a sphere in the first place?
There are many answers to this question, but here are three:

• Because time makes you suck less at coding stuff…
• Coding something is like drawing a picture on a huge piece of paper… when can you say you are done? Same thing with this case… I want to design a simulator, not spend three years designing frameworks and concepts that are never put to practice…
• Because I am a lazy person… I always tend to go towards the easiest alternative… and it seems to shift with time :)

Click below to see a full set of screenshots I took during the first stages of the dev of the system.

I know, we already went to Los Angeles last year, but we wanted to spend more time there to check out some of the stuff we didn't have the time to see.

Also, this time, it was not all touristy stuff. We got together with Steeve aka Siwu (Intern at Google in New York) and Solomon (Another Epitech alumni who happens to work in LA). It was lots of fun to see these guys again. We went for a short visit of Venice Beach, then the Griffith Park and Observatory.

On the second day, Julie and I also visited Long Beach, saw the Queen Mary, and drove around the south peninsula to Redondo Beach, Venice... We ended up having sushi in a restaurant in Hollywood with Steeve, Solomon and one of their friends.

On our last Day, we met with a local pilot I saw last year, Remy. This time, we could actually go for a ride, so we flew from Santa Monica to Camarillo for lunch. Very cool, despite the hazy weather. (Remy, my bay tour offer still stands, let me know next time you come in the Bay Area ;))

Now, some facts/ramblings about this trip:

• Renting a car and driving down to LA is sure cheaper than flying... but man, getting out of the Bay Area on a busy week end sucks big time... And the drive is kinda long... 13~15h round trip.
• Parking in LA... It's horrible. Oh sure, you won't drive around a long time before you'll find a spot... but gees, what a rippoff! Each time it was between 8 and 12 bucks... and sometimes for non covered/non secured parking lots... wtf!?
  The two worst were the hotel, $12 bucks a nite for the car (are you kidding me?) and the parking in Hollywood, flat rate, $8 for as long as you want...
  For the whole week end, approximately $60~$70 of parking taxes...
• I got my first parking ticket... for parking somewhere after sunset... well 20 minutes after sunset... grrr just cause we were lost in a park, thanks!
• Los Angeles is dirty, noisy, gloomy...
• We rented a 2007 Dodge Charger for this week end. Nice car, but its turn radius sucks...
• Internet over GPRS on my laptop is the best thing ever
• Sepulveda Boulevard spotting location stills rocks, watching airplanes landing at LAX from there is so coooool!
• Long Beach is nice, at least the area we visited (Shoreline Village)
• I saw Ryan's brother's house, the one where Marissa shot him! (check out the gallery!)
• When I see some people's houses south of Los Angeles... I wonder where they got all this money...
• If you think Malibu is a nice place to visit, well, it's not. It's pretty boring...
• Windows Live Search for Windows Mobile is one of the best tools I've ever had to use! Live traffic is priceless!
• I'm glad I live in the Bay Area and not in LA... it's so stressful over there...

Here's the photo gallery for the trip:

2007-05-28 - Los Angeles, California