Lotus Films: Afterhours

A bit off topic...

2009-12-06T10:27:00.000-08:00

Just a song I'm smitten with lately. It was featured very briefly in a recent Top Gear episode (during the Lamborghini vs Airship segment), and it's been stuck in my head ever since. I love the playful simplicity of it, and her multitasking skills are impressive.

Enjoy.

Cobwebs and Tumbleweeds...

2009-11-20T23:57:00.000-08:00

Been a hell of a long time since I posted here it seems, but I have an excuse in the form of an all-consuming project which is called "supporting the L-39". :)

Life the past few months has been quite an education, I'll say that much. Between bug solving, and learning what it is that simmers like and don't like about the Albatros, and fixing and improving it in two full updates, I've been pretty damned busy. It's been fun though. Aside from the CTD bugs in the first week, thankfully quickly sorted, I think the launch went as smoothly as could be expected. Somewhere in the middle of all that I went to Ireland, which was great, but I don't remember much of it, my head is so full of code these days. It was very green, that much I do remember. Oh and everyone drives like maniacs, loved that part.

Today I sent out what I think will be the final update for the 'tros, v1.3, which sort of puts the lid on the whole thing and wraps it up in nice shiny paper. It includes the last of the major user requested features, namely RXP GPS compatibility, and adds some new paints (those are fun to make!) and other stuff.

So that leaves me really, starting tomorrow, with a whole lot of nothing to do! Well, not really. I have a lot to do actually, but at the moment it mostly involves some thick textbooks and learning little things like C++ and Simconnect. Yes, there will be a second plane, at least one is fully planned. What will it be? Not sure I'm ready to make it fully public yet, still have a lot to figure out first, but it has two engines, one seat, it's not American, and it's FAST. :) I got to sit in one on my vacation, and it's quite simply a badass machine, one that demands respect even standing next to it.

I must say that despite the odd bug and hiccup I feel quite gratified to see that my entirely stubborn and inflexible philosophy on aircraft design did actually pan out in the end, specifically that the majority of users are happy with how I built this thing. Framerate performance does matter most and I feel that there's really no excuse for not making a plane shared cockpit compatible (if it has two seats mind you!) because it's just not that hard to do, compared to the other aspects of coding anyway. It just requires thinking in terms of bandwidth consumption a bit more when it comes to variables and how often they are updated. It's actually kind of an enjoyable logic problem sometimes, and the endeavour to maintain shared cockpit functionality comes complete with some mighty humourous results when you get it wrong!

I did ultimately have to eat a bit of humble pie though when I realized that draw calls do actually matter, just not for the reason everyone thinks. It turns out that excessive numbers of them can, even when efficiently structured, stall the PCI-E bus on heavily overclocked systems. Not good! Luckily I've been able to mostly mitigate that problem in the L-39 updates, and know how to avoid that issue entirely for the next project.

Additionally it's also been a ton of fun getting to know some of my customers by flying with them in multiplayer, something I suspect a lot of devs don't do often. They've given me some great insights into their perspective as end users, things I will be keeping in mind for the next project for sure. Our little (ok, long...) celebratory flight from Vancouver to Vodochody is nearly at an end, and it's been a blast to fly along with so many others in L-39s. I get an indescribable satisfaction from each one of those flights, using the results of a year and a half of hard work in exactly the way it was intended to be used. Hopefully there will be more in the months to come.

Anyway, I'm honestly not sure what purpose this blog will serve going into the future from here. I came to the realization on August 3rd, the moment that the L-39 went on sale actually, that I no longer have the right to publicly say whatever I please about the flight simulator industry and those who partake in it. I gave up that right willingly though, something a few other rather vocal members of this community might want to try doing, but really, after experiencing firsthand what it actually takes to see an FSX plane through to completion I have the utmost respect for any developer that chooses to deal with all the ups and down and pitfalls of this career! Some days I'm surprised anyone bothers, but I'm glad they do. :)

So since I have the right to keep my mouth shut I'll mostly be keeping my opinions to myself from here on out... mostly. ;)

Lotus is now staring at a blank screen once again, for the first time in a year and a half. Whew... here we go again!

Bueller?

-Lotus

I am the Stig?...

2009-08-23T19:26:00.000-07:00

According to the first line of what follows... apparently I am, haha.

Avsim just released their review of the L-39, and have awarded the plane their Gold Star of Excellence, woot!

Many thanks to Tom Dilbeck for the excellent writeup. :)

You can read it here:

http://www.avsim.com/pages/0809/Lotus/L39.htm

-Mike

What... a... week.

2009-08-09T23:46:00.000-07:00

A bit of a different blog post this time, since I have nothing new to show exactly, but much to talk about, hehe. This one is more of a diary about my first week as a payware developer I guess.

The L-39 has been received with much fanfare, certainly much more than I expected. Some of the forum comments and emails I've gotten have been humbling to say the least. I've had comments from people that have been utterly awe inspiring, to the point that I'm printing them out and making a little book of them, for times in the future when I might feel a bit flat or down. The fountain of beautiful repaints coming out is amazing too, and also a bit depressing! I thought I was a pretty decent painter... umm... no! :) But I'm cool with that. It's amazing to see what people have done with the paint kit. Good thing I don't have to change any UV coordinates! I'd get lynched at this point if I did.

The support questions have been INSANE. I really had no idea some of the things that could go wrong with a plane that's been in a constant state of testing for months. Between a couple of people not being able to click anything in the cockpit at all (thankfully sorted with a reinstall of SP2 or Accel) to the strangest crashes in multiplayer which I have NEVER seen before, nor can reproduce yet! It's been an adventure, and I suspect it will be for weeks to come.

Then of course there's the piracy. The rampant, unbelievable, and incredibly hurtful piracy. How people think they are entitled to 15 months of my life, and I do mean MY LIFE (I have done nothing else but work on the L-39) I have no idea.

At some point today I remembered to eat something, probably only because the waitress put butter chicken directly in front of me, a wonderful celebratory dinner out with my friend Eric and my mother. I think I've had perhaps 5 meals total since Monday, and maybe 25 hours of sleep, it has been a busy week.

To the pirates, if you read this or even care, you are doing yourself a great disservice, though you're simply too small to see it coming sadly. If you paid any attention to the ORBX site yesterday, that is where we're going unless you get honest and quick. Really. I'm not kidding. I hope pirates like their ill gotten goods though, and are comfortable with their karmic debt, because it will come back to them. It always does.

To my honest customers though, thank you so much for taking the time to send me the most wonderful comments, something you certainly didn't need to do. I can't tell you how much that support and enthusiasm means to me after such an incredible effort.

And that's about all there is to report. Back to the forum dance.

So far this is one hell of an experience!

-Mike

4... 3... 2... 1...

2009-08-03T06:54:00.000-07:00

The Albatros... is... OUT!

This feels like a dream... fifteen months of incredible effort has come to an end. This is the single hardest and most satisfying thing I have ever done. Thanks for all your kind comments and support this past year, and I hope you like the results!

Have a look at the features page items... you're in for some interesting surprises! ;)

www.lotussim.com

You can download the manual before purchase, from the media/extras page.

A seriously huge thanks to Pebble for all the beautiful manual work and Eric Smith for creating one hell of a website.

Also, please note that I will not be providing any product support here on this blog. You're welcome to comment here of course but if you have any questions or issues please ask them only on the LotusSim forums so that I can retain what little sanity I have left!

WORD.

10... 9... 8...

2009-07-29T12:08:00.000-07:00

She's oh so very very close to done. We could be looking at release in less than a week. I'm now performing final tests on all of the L-39s and their installer, and finalizing the vendor deals. Price and purchase locations will be given on release day, and I'm looking forward to revealing her little secrets at last. :)

Stay tuned, starting in about 4 or 5 days from now anyway. ;)

Memorex?

2009-06-30T23:01:00.000-07:00

This is something I've been looking forward to doing for many months. If anyone ever thought for even a moment that I didn't care about realism... well...

Click the picture to see the video.

Turbulence not included. (may take a min to buffer)

If you want to see a higher res WMV version click here

Enjoy.

A Milestone...

2009-06-20T22:55:00.000-07:00

Well I guess it's time to post something kinda major here... and that is that the L-39 itself is now complete! Woot. All versions finished, all bugs accounted for and squashed. Man I'm tired!

However, before anyone gets excited or anything, I still have a TON of work to do on all the stuff that has to go with the plane, such as the manual, developer website, paint kit, promo video, and some tutorial videos. In a few weeks I will hopefully be able to let you know at least where it will be available for purchase from (not finalized as of yet). Don't ask me for a release date though please because I simply can't give you one, nor can I give you a price, that is still under consideration. I don't know yet how long the items above are going to take but I will post again when the major ones are complete and sorted.

Anyway, here's the final roster of what will be included in the package:

- 9 Full featured Dual Cockpit aircraft (100% shared cockpit compatible). 5 of them are military models, 4 are civilian registered.

- 3 Single Cockpit versions of the aircraft above. They have the same features minus the rear cockpit. Two are military, one civilian. The single seaters knock about 28% of the render load off the VC, so probably better for marginal systems or big multiplayer hops.

- 1 Reno Racing model (Pipsqueak), single seat only, again full featured, and with mad performance compared to a stock L-39.

- 1 Special multiplayer formation team model (in Vjazma Rus Team colours). This one is completely stripped down for pure framerate performance. It has very little extra fun stuff in it, and does not have bump maps, but its external model will likely outperform the default Extra-300 in multiplayer. That means you can get a rather enormous pile of them on screen before your fps starts to tank.

- 1 very complete and hopefully entertaining manual.

The Breitling Team paints will not be included in the package I'm sorry to say, simply because I can't get an answer out of them on permission at all. Five emails and three phone calls later without a response and I officially give up. :) It's airshow season now and they're probably too busy actually flying their L-39s to care, haha. All power to them I guess. I doubt I'd have time for a virtual L-39 if I had access to seven real ones. ;)

Therefore I will make both Breitling paints available for free download, probably on the day of the L-39's release.

The manual will be available for download prior to a purchase if you want to read it, and the paintkit will be available for download as well. The paint kit is not included in the package itself in order to save bandwidth. The L-39 download will be approximately 200 mb in size, around 450 mb installed. Not sure yet on the size of the paint kit, but it will include at least 3 complete paints to use as guides, so it won't be small, that much is certain.

There will be a small manual included with the paint kit as well to guide potential repainters, and I'm not kidding when I say it *needs* to be read first before grabbing your paint brush. Everything in this plane is built for performance first, which means there are some non-standard repainting considerations. It's not a plane for beginners, put it that way. :) I must also mention that the paint kit makes extensive use of Photoshop specific features such as layer styles, and layer groups for organization, which means Photoshop is absolutely required to effectively repaint the plane. GIMP is simply not up to the task.

Anyway, that's all the news, back to the trenches!

-lotus

Virtual Cockpit done like dinner...

2009-06-02T19:33:00.000-07:00

That's one big piece of the L-39 puzzle wrapped, actually the biggest. There are still a few little tweaks left to do here and there, but this is the final look of the pit. This is a military spec cockpit obviously. The civilian and formation team L-39s in the package will not have the gunsight, and they have a few minor colour changes here and there, but are otherwise the same.

Night shots will be shown just prior to release, and I think you will be pleasantly surprised.

Anyway, this is going to be a seriously crazy month as I wrap up the final bits here, so further posts will be erratic at best. ;)

Also, sorry about the image load times but jpeg compression murders cockpit pictures. Hope you like it. :)

Click to enlarge as usual. Just for fun there's a comparison shot from the very first VC export at the bottom. ;)

Onwards and...

2009-05-21T01:11:00.000-07:00

Now that most of the bugs are fixed (and which are boring to talk about) I figured I'd give a preview of how the second pass on the cockpit is coming along.

Coming up with a really good and consistent lighting solution was a major headache and required about a week of extremely annoying trial and error alone, inducing a lot of uncontrolled cursing and ranting (sorry Peb, hehe), but the results realism wise so far are well worth the effort. Keep in mind this is still work in progress and the improvements here are only about half complete, just the panels, seat, and controls really. The upper frames still need much love, everything else needs a little tweaking still, and this is also pre-weathering, but it'll give you a hint as to the final look of the pit.

(clicky)

Coooool....

2009-05-15T19:07:00.000-07:00

This screenshot by TopDollar is the best I've seen of the plane(s) so far and puts my roster shot below to shame. It's both very strange and very inspiring to see such artwork done by another using my creation. :) My new desktop. Thanks TopDollar.

(click to enlarge)

Comms open... and other stuff.

2009-05-14T09:41:00.000-07:00

Well, time for another update. First off, I'm opening up this blog to comments again, but, I'm asking anyone who reads it now:

Please do not give me any reason to close them again.

I really don't need any grief, I certainly don't have time for it, and if I see any comments that are even remotely insulting to myself or anyone else I will delete them immediately. If you feel the need to rant on me because you think the plane is taking too long, well, simply go and find something else to do because it just doesn't help, in fact quite the opposite, it's very demoralizing. C'est la vie.

If we can keep things polite and civil I am happy to keep correspondence going here, but if not then I will probably shut them down again, for good.

Anyway, on to better things.

I wasn't originally going to do this paint below, mostly because I'm an anarchist and not particularly fond of 'corporate' anything, but I've put that aside since my respect for this team has grown a lot in recent months. I also don't want to be a stick in the mud in the face of umpteen requests for this scheme, and nor would I wish it on any potential repainter, haha. One of the downsides of my mission to keep performance high on the airplane is that the UV coordinates are designed for speed and the lowest number of texture vertices possible, rather than ease of repainting. Generally the airplane is fairly easy to paint, but lining up the Breitling logo on the bottom of the plane would be a complete bloody nightmare without having the original scene files. Actually it was hard enough with them and I'd probably get real hate mail from the first person that tried to do this paint, so I figured I'd save them the bother. ;)

I'm trying to secure permission from the team to include their schemes in my release package, but if they say no then I'll probably just release them as freeware around the time the plane goes on sale. One way or the other I think they will be available for use. Both the 2008 and 2009 paint jobs are represented. The 2009 is the yellow tailed one.

As for the status of the plane, she's getting close. The paints are done, the code is now very solid, with few remaining bugs and some new fun features added, and all that remains really is a good second pass on the cockpit textures, some optimizations, and the writing of the manual, plus of course sorting out distribution. While that still represents a ton of work, enough that I delayed a trip I had planned in June until October, it feels really good to see the to-do list getting smaller every day rather than bigger.

In other news, if you haven't heard, Avsim sadly had their servers trashed by a hacker. There are few crimes I hate more than senseless vandalism and the turd responsible should simply be killed in my opinion. It's good to see that they're going to come back though, however long that takes. I wish them the best of luck.

They have a temporary forum up and I'm sure donations are welcome now more than ever. There's been a lot of support shown for them, even from competitor sites, which is great to see.

Avsim's Temporary Forum

By the way, here's a truly excellent film of the Breitling Jet Team in action shot by the best aviation filmmaker out there, Lionel Charlet.

-Mike

The Roster...

2009-04-16T19:32:00.000-07:00

Well, finally finished the last planned paint scheme today, which brings the total up to 10, an acceptable number to ship with in my opinion. Man that was a lot of work.

In my picassa gallery I always end up showing just one or two of them in screenshots from testing, and so just for fun here's the entire family posing together. There may be one or two more paints on the way, but this is the guaranteed lineup for the package.

Click to enlarge as usual. :)

Bonne Anniversaire Albatros...

2009-04-08T12:32:00.000-07:00

I realized this morning that the L-39 project is officially one year old as of today... drew the first polygon on April 8th last year. Wild. Happily the end is clearly in sight and not far off now. :)

She's come a long long way... 150,000+ polygons built, 100+ textures painted, 300+ parts animated, 7000+ lines of code written, 454.6 hours of testing flown, and at *least* 900 cups of coffee consumed. What a year.

Mustangs for breakfast...

2009-04-05T10:01:00.000-07:00

... with salsa.

Pipsqueak has finally joined the roster, a seriously fun variant to build (over the course of 28 hours without sleep haha) and she's one fast machine... the fastest L-39 in the world actually. Oh did your archaic Victorian era steam engine fail while trying to catch me? Aww... poor little P-51. So sad. ;)

Enjoy!

-lotus

Just because I can...

2009-03-31T01:20:00.000-07:00

That's why... :)

External v3.0 ...

2009-03-20T06:53:00.000-07:00

I promise I won't be all long winded with this post, hehe. The short version is that all of the external model upgrades (minus rebuilt pilots) are now complete. So here are some pics for your enjoyment. She's come a hell of a long way...

:)

-lotus

Upgrades aplenty...

2009-03-01T22:18:00.001-08:00

Well for those interested I figured I'd give a little L-39 status update.

The past few weeks have been spent doing a complete rework of the external model and all of its 27 textures, a very big job, one which I'm about 2/3 of the way through. The shape is now a *lot* more accurate, with a completely rebuilt external model cockpit, cleaned up mapping, and a ton of performance optimizations. It's very slow work but the results are well worth it so far.

Performance of the already very lean external model is now up by about 25%, which puts it somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 of the performance hit of the quite efficient Acceleration F-18 in multiplayer. I've also done some tests with the special formation team model, a 'no frills' L-39 which lacks bump and specular mapping, but which absolutely blows the doors off anything out there performance wise. The final count on that model came in at around 20,000 texture vertices, and that means it's even less of a rendering hit than the default Extra-300... aka it's *FAST*. On a really good system you should be able to get at least 10 of those Albatroses on screen before noticing any kind of real performance hit. If you're into large online formation team flying then I hope that extra effort will be a big help to you. That external model will be paired with a similarly spartan single seat VC.

In other news I'm still waiting for my sounds to arrive but what I've heard from TSS so far is pretty stellar I have to say. Permission to recreate Pipsqueak (the reno racer L-39 I mentioned several posts back) has been obtained, so that's going to be a very fun addition to the lineup soon, and one that I'm very much looking forward to building. It's fully 100 knots faster than a stock Albatros and boasts double the climb rate as well as faster roll rates. Should be a good laugh for racing or very short cross country trips, and, performance aside, its crazy ass paint job and winglets are worth it alone. ;)

Almost forgot, in addition to all that, the real L-39 pilot testing the plane for me has given me a solid thumbs up on the flight model. Aside from some small compromises necessary to work around FSX's essentially broken jet engine model, the plane flies just as an Albatros should and no major changes are needed. Feels good to put that part to bed.

Oh, and in case you're wondering why I felt I needed to redo the external model at all, well, a picture will answer that question. The right wing is new, the left wing is the old style. ;)

And of course external upgrades have benefits in the VC too...

Bottom line... I'm a perfectionist. I want this thing to be as good as I can possibly make it.

After all of the external upgrades are finished then it will be merged into the VC model and a second pass of improvements will be done on that as well. Now that all of the cockpit parts are in and textured I can talk a little about performance there as well. If you have RealAir's excellent Spitfire for FSX (if you don't then you need to get it!) it's probably the closest match VC performance wise. The L-39's cockpit has fewer polygons and texture vertices but it does use a lot more texture space and draw calls, so it generally evens out in the end. Whatever performance you get with the Spitfire is probably around what you can expect from the L-39's full featured two seat pit. The L-39's VC texture load times are definitely longer on view changes but that's a fair trade for a smooth performing aircraft with two fully functional and detailed cockpits in my opinion. The single seat version of the L-39 VC is roughly 25% more efficient than the two seater though.

Like many recent addons, almost everything is built into the VC model itself and there are no 2D gauges apart from the GPS, so the L-39 is very much the opposite of traditional addon aircraft when it comes to performance demands and is pretty much videocard limited rather than CPU limited. The more powerful your videocard is the better your performance will be. People always seem to assume that FSX is strictly CPU limited but this isn't actually the case. It depends entirely on how content is built for it and I've gone to rather stupid lengths to keep the plane's render load on the videocard where it belongs, and off the CPU. As always top end Nvidia cards with 512+ mb of video memory yield the best results, though we're seeing surprisingly good performance even with a lower end 256 meg ATI card on a stock 2.4 ghz Q6600, 25-30 fps in most situations, even in multiplayer, which is very encouraging. The best part of an all-3D gauged aircraft like this though is that it's virtually 100% stutter free. Be gone archaic 2D gauges! :)

(I will no doubt eat those last few words one day when I decide to do an aircraft with a digital MFD based pit ;))

Anyway, again my apologies for disabling comments, but I just don't have time to deal with unreasonable people these days. I'll re-enable them after the L-39 is done, at the latest, and I'm looking forward to reopening dialogue with you all, but in the future I will probably be forced to delete comments that are outright rude or disrespectful to myself or anyone else.

Ok, that 'little' update kind of turned out to be long, doh. Hehe.

And with that, back to work...

Cheers,

-lotus

Enough is enough.

2009-02-11T12:58:00.000-08:00

My sincere apologies to everyone that visits my blog but I'm disabling comments until further notice, possibly until the L-39 is finished. I simply don't have the time or energy to put up with any more abuse and insults from certain posters. I believe in free speech and so I refuse to delete comments but I'm truly fed up with the bile being thrown at me lately in my own 'house'. To everyone that's been very cool and left some great comments and questions, thank you very very much, I *really* appreciate your support.

If you want to get in touch with me or have a question etc then please contact me through my youtube email.

I will still post updates on the plane whenever I can, but for now my blog will be a passive medium only I'm afraid.

Thanks for your understanding. I'm sorry it had to come to this.

Happy flying.

-Mike

Back seat drivers...

2009-02-05T09:43:00.001-08:00

Yup, you can be one. Here's a shot of the rear cockpit so far.

Click to enlarge as usual.

In case you're wondering about the orange panel on the centre console its technical name is the "Trainee Instrument Fault Simulator Panel", but a better description I think would be "Panel of Misery". ;)

The switches and levers on it let a rear seat instructor fail just about every single instrument in the front cockpit, in several combinations, including all electrical power, while everything in the rear pit continues to work normally. It's fantastic for partial panel or IFR training in Shared Cockpit. Most of the instruments in the L-39 are electrically driven and if you flip every failure switch at the same time then the only remaining reliable instruments in the front are, and I kid you not, the fuel quantity indicator and the slip ball. That's it. :)

Flip all those on someone at night or in cloud and you're going to be in for a lot of verbal abuse.

I should also mention that despite not having a huge 'step up' for the rear cockpit, visibility from the back seat of the L-39 is really good, and on a standard three degree approach you can easily maintain sight of the runway threshold and centreline until the very end of the flare.

-lotus

The Office...

2009-01-27T20:24:00.001-08:00

I guess it's time for you to see it. :)

I still have a about a thousand tweaks to do on it plus a fair bit of scuffing and weathering and have to add the canopy glass and such, but it's getting close, the front cockpit at least. The rear still needs a lot of work.

Most of what you see works and pretty much anything that could be animated does actually move. I'm a track-ir snob of course but I'm not cruel, so those without one can hide or show the control sticks in either cockpit independently by clicking on the leather boots at their bases. It makes things a little easier for IFR flying sometimes, even if you have a track-ir actually.

Anyway, enjoy. I myself am pulling the fuel cutoff handle and taking a day or two off now. I've been running at full burner since christmas and I'm utterly beat. ;)

-lotus

(click to enlarge, it's big)

Time to make some noise...

2009-01-25T01:08:00.000-08:00

...and blow some piping hot sprite based jet exhaust in Microsoft's face.

Francois Dumas, a longtime addon developer, has started a facebook group called "100,000 Microsoft Flight Simulator Fans" in an effort to show the total fucking idiots at MS just how many of us there are out there that love this sim.

Anyone with a Facebook account can join, it's an open group.

700 people have joined in the last 36 hours, and the list reads like a who's who of the FS community. Quite impressive. :) Peb and I joined tonight.

Here's the link if you want to as well:

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=59637588200

It may all be for naught but it's something anyway. The other rather tempting option I guess is to drive to Seattle and punch Ballmer's smug face in.

It *is* only 160 kms away for me.... hmmmmmm. ;)

And yes, my shock has now been replaced with something akin to mild rage, hehe.

-lotus

(wow, 27 joined in the time it took me to write this)

Did not see this coming...

2009-01-22T19:04:00.001-08:00

If you read this blog then you've no doubt heard, but if not, it looks like ACES just got decimated by MS's big layoff.

What this means for FS11, who knows? I feel really bad for the people that worked there.

Here's the article.

Article Link

Lots of speculation on the usual forums, and real facts are pretty thin, but according to Phil Taylor it was pretty bad.

I'm trying hard to look at the possible silver lining, but in the mean time I think a toast is in order to the boys and girls of ACES.

I wish you guys the best of luck.

Oh and MS... next time... cut the goddamned VISTA team, or hang them from the nearest Douglas Fir, whichever is easier.

Idiots.

-lotus

Just to be clear...

2009-01-07T04:34:00.000-08:00

I kept forgetting to post this image from a few weeks back. Did I mention that the plane has backup systems? ;)

The L-39's development would have driven me truly insane long ago without such little moments of insomnia induced stupidity... and there have happily been quite a few along the way, the best of which will be included at the very end of the plane's manual. ;)

And speaking of the L-39's manual, Pebble has very kindly taken on the job of designing it (a huge load off my shoulders), and it's already the most beautiful and stylish thing I've ever seen for a flight sim plane. I am *uber* impressed. There will be a few good laughs in there as well for those who take the time to read it.

And those who don't? Well, they'll be spending more time crashing the Albatros than flying it I think, hehe.

-Lotus

I said I wouldn't...

2008-12-21T08:57:00.000-08:00

...but I lied.

Please keep in mind this is *very* work in progress, but the labour of the last two months (mostly mind bending code) has finally produced a little stuff worth looking at I think. Only a couple thousand hours of work left here haha.

Only the centre panel is remotely complete, minus some shading and weathering, and the rest is basically untextured still. Everything you see though works, and this is the kind of detail you can expect throughout the pit in the finished product. :)

The virtual Hobbs meter... from hell in my case.

2008-12-17T00:17:00.000-08:00

I got a good laugh out of this, so I figured I'd share. You probably already know this, but if not, you can see how many hours you've put on each plane in your hangar in FSX by going into the following folder, and checking the state.cfg file for each aircraft:

C:\Documents and Settings\(your user name)\Application Data\Microsoft\FSX\SimObjects\

Every now and then I like to check these stats out, so, just for fun, here are my current top 5...

5th place: Iris F-14A, 30.15 hours

4th place: Alphasim F-5, 30.78 hours

3rd place: Alphasim SR-71, 37.43 hours (at least I know where 17 of them came from)

2nd place: Iris PC-9A, 41.20 hours

and...

1st place (gee what a shocker): My L-39, at 307.66 hours!

Yes, that's about thirteen days sitting in my damned jet.

I really need to fly something else one of these days. The really scary part about that last number is that 99% of my flights in it last less than two minutes. Load, takeoff, test, quit.

UGH.

-lotus

I want my... never mind...

2008-12-13T07:49:00.000-08:00

Black Shark is out... and it's about frickin time. I've been waiting... no, itching actually, for this sim to be released for well over a year now. I told myself I wouldn't get it if it was released before my L-39 was done. Yeah... that idea lasted about 45 seconds when put to the test. ;)

Was it worth the wait? Definitely!

Only installed it just this morning and have been flying around for an hour or so, but I'm already very impressed. The performance is pretty good provided you don't go too bonkers with the settings. It's definitely better across the board fps wise than FSX, though it's a bit less consistent when the detail really piles on.

The flight model though... that is just a work of art. I've never flown a helo sim that feels so much like the real thing. People always say that flying a helo is like balancing on the head of a pin, or a million other such comparisons, that it's as unstable as a flying machine can get and you always have to fight to keep it upright. That's rubbish of course, helos are quite stable due to the gyroscopic effects imparted by large amounts of balanced metal whirling above your head and their very low centre of gravity. If you can compare them to anything simple at all then a quickly spinning top on a table is the closest match. They do get unstable when you abuse their controls though, and the Black Shark, having relatively low yaw stability, definitely makes you pay for it.

Retreating blade stall, ground effect, and the vortex ring from rapid descents are all modeled and the normal manoeuvres for getting out of them in the real world work perfectly in the sim. The vortex ring in particular causes a nice little vibration through the helo.

The trickiest bit I've found so far in getting a handle on flying it is managing the trim. It has an electromechanical cyclic trim that is very much like what you'll find in any modern helicopter: Put the cyclic where you want it, hit the trim button, and that's where it stays until you change it. It basically makes whatever cyclic deflection you had when it was trimmed, into its new centrepoint. It does take quite a bit of getting used to though after FSX's total lack of helo trim, and the patched in pitch trim of FSUIPC.

I have yet to blow anything up (besides myself) but I'll make a post when I do.

One other very impressive feature, besides the (500+ page!) manual, is that they've taken a different approach with licensing/copy protection. I am firmly of the mindset that when you pay money for something then you bloody well OWN IT, end of freaking story. I don't buy into this 'leasing' crap that most software companies seem to think is perfectly fine these days. Fifty (plus) dollars for a game is not a rental agreement, it's a purchase. It's always been this way, and I couldn't care less what the fine print in the EULA says for I will *always* view it this way. You rent movies, you lease cars, and you buy software. I understand the need to protect an enormous investment, particularly now of course, but this licensing garbage has always been way across the line for me.

Anyway, as you're all probably used to, when you install your game, and enter your license crap, everything's great until your machine crashes, or you upgrade, or need to reinstall windows or whatever, at which point you're basically screwed and have to go begging to the publisher for the right to use something that you already OWN.

So in a brilliant bit of foresight (what? people upgrade their computers!?) they've actually allowed you to get your activations back when you uninstall Black Shark. About bloody time! It's still wrong, but this makes it slightly less wrong at least, a small step back towards the realm of 'sane' copy protection.

I also highly recommend having a Track-ir for this, and if you do have one make sure you update your drivers for it (latest version Oct 8th) or you're going nowhere fast. The control setup is a little wonky to figure out at first, but it's customizable in the *extreme*, which I love.

Bottom line: Its Lomac roots are visible, but it's been given an absolute ton of polish and the user interface is brilliant as well. If you've been lamenting the lack of any decent helo sims on the market as much as I have, you really should buy this. Just be prepared to be thrown in at the deep end. There's an 'arcade' mode in the sim, but no self-respecting pilot would ever touch it of course... right? ;)

It's $50 US, a 2 GB download, and took about 6 hours to get.

http://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/

-lotus

Revenge...

2008-12-08T09:59:00.000-08:00

So I tried the L-39 out in some of the Reno air race missions for the first time yesterday, and well, let's just say I got spanked, and quite badly. The plane's top level speed of around 360 kts in standard form just isn't enough to deal with those racing P-51s.

However I am certainly not about to take *that* crap from some stupid sixty year old propeller planes.

This means that a new L-39 is going to be added to the roster of variants sometime in the next month or two:

That's "Pipsqueak" above, a pure racing L-39C that has been stripped down and heavily modified: No back seat, 15% less weight, about 25% more thrust, no tip tanks, and a ton less drag. It posted lap speeds at Reno of around 500mph.

Granted, with that kind of power and those modifications you've got enough range to maybe make it to the grocery store and back, but those arrogant old crates in their fancy "look at me" paint jobs will be in for a rude surprise.

And yes I'm aware the L-39s run in a class of their own and this sort of match doesn't take place, but as you can see I don't like to lose.

Until that version of the plane is done, those ridiculous Mustangs are going to be experiencing an unusual number of engine problems and a mysterious loss of power across the board. Strangest thing really. They should have bought jets I guess, much more reliable. ;)

Happiness is...

2008-12-06T10:24:00.001-08:00

As Jeremy Clarkson would say... "Result."

I say: Good start! Well done. Only a few thousand to go.

More bigger stuff...

2008-11-22T08:17:00.000-08:00

Well after 6 weeks of nonstop XML gauge and system programming, totaling thousands upon thousands of lines of code, my brain is utterly fried... and I'm only halfway done with the functionality in the cockpit haha.

And when my brain gets fried I need to make some art, so here's the latest repaint, an aircraft from the sadly defunct but still very cool looking Slovak air force formation team, the Biele Albatrosy ("White Albatroses").

A request for more feedback...

2008-11-13T10:18:00.000-08:00

Firstly, thanks to everyone who answered my poll before on the handling etc. That was a huge help to me and I think you're going to like the results. I have one more feedback request though for any of you that have a moment to spare.

I'm working on the sounds for the plane at the moment, among a million other parts, and unfortunately FSX isn't all that flexible when it comes to this stuff. To circumvent its sound limitations I'm planning to license Doug Dawson's excellent XML sound gauge, and I've already confirmed that it works great in Shared Cockpit mode as well as normal multi and singleplayer. The only problem with it though is that it runs outside the FSX sound slider system, and so matching up the volume level of all the extraneous sounds I plan to add, like the Saphir starter and G-suit pump etc, is really going to be a tricky exercise.

What I need to know from you is where you normally keep your sound sliders in the sim, specifically your numerical values for each one would help me a lot. Such as: Engines: 60, Cockpit: 40, Voice: 70 etc etc. Also if you use different settings for multi and single, or change them around for other reasons, I'd like to know the reason and your numbers there as well.

If you have a minute to check your settings and let me know I'd really appreciate the help. I'm looking for an average to work with, just for the sole reason that I don't want to blow anyone's eardrums haha. The hitch of course is multiplayer. FSX's voice chat is unfortunately so quiet compared to the average in-game sounds that myself I end up putting all the other sliders down to around 3 or 4 out of 100, and leave voice way up high.

Here's hoping FS11 improves this aspect greatly!

Thanks all!

-lotus

Two seconds of fame...

2008-11-11T13:45:00.000-08:00

Well... more like 1.2 seconds, hehe.

Here's another great TED Talk, this one by Dave Perry of Shiny Entertainment, discussing the progress of video game graphics and the medium as a whole. There's a pretty slick progress video about six minutes into the clip showing the graphical evolution of various game genres, and the basketball players I made in 1999 for NBA Live 2000 appear for... you guessed it, exactly two seconds hehe.

I've never been proud of or happy about any single minute I spent working at EA, or of anything I created while I was there. I never was a basketball fan either, ending up on the NBA Live team somewhat by accident when I'd applied to work on Need for Speed, and I basically consider it a wasted few years of my working life, but, I was pretty stoked to see my stuff included in a TED vid. You can see my basketball dudes at 7 mins 10 seconds.

The World of Warcraft stats he discusses are pretty humbling too, and although this video was released on Ted.com just last month, it was recorded over two years ago. Those stats are a *lot* higher today. Scary! :)

Anyway, enjoy.

Samhain Night at Lotus'...

2008-10-31T18:05:00.000-07:00

Man, I wish every night was Halloween. Even though I'm not up to anything exciting this year, just manning the door for sugared up munchkins in their flimsy camouflage of witch and superhero costumes, and working on the plane between interruptions of 'trick or treat' (what ever happened to the 'for a' in that phrase anyway?), I still love it.

Just think... What if every night you were expected to be someone else, anyone you wanted to be, to wear completely outlandish and exciting clothing, and were given nothing but smiles and free candy for your efforts?

Now that's a world I definitely want to live in.

Always been my favourite night of the year and always will be. :)

-lotus

Quiet progress...

2008-10-22T23:53:00.000-07:00

Well another Albatros update here, and this one will be the last visual preview on the blog most likely, which I'll explain in a minute. I've been jamming fifteen hour days consistently into the plane over the past several weeks and I'm happy to say that all of the gauges are now finished and working perfectly. She's fully IFR capable and great fun to fly in the soup. It actually turned out to be slightly easier than I expected to get a full suite of 3D gauges built, mostly thanks to the rather clever and logical FSX SDK. I still have a fair bit of systems programming work ahead of me but getting the gauges complete and functional (all twenty three of them... per seat) was a major milestone. As with all things on this plane, there's the standard American way to do something, the Russian way, and then there's the Aero Vodochody way, which is almost always clever, elegant, and utterly bizarre at the same time. Just about every instrument on this plane is bespoke to it actually.

Just a note, I hope you're all comfortable with the metric system. The only English/Imperial system gauge is the altimeter. ;)

So why is this the last preview? Well it's because I've gotten just about all of the funky features into the cockpit that I hoped FSX was capable of and I don't feel like tipping my hand to the competition from this point on. I also rather enjoy dropping surprises on people. :)

At the moment I'm working on building the full VC model, which is about 20% complete. Then I just have to texture it (gonna need a few thousand lattes for that part), finish off the systems, get the sound hooked up once it arrives, kill all the inevitable bugs, and write one massive manual for it haha. And yeah it's going to need a massive manual. On the surface there's a great deal left to do but total effort wise I'm well past the halfway mark on this grand adventure, and that's a good feeling.

Anyway here's a shot from the rear seat (minus the gauges) of the very early and nowhere close to finished VC model haha, and one of the seat itself. It'll give you a little hint as to the kind of detail that will be present throughout the cockpit anyway. As I stated at the beginning, performance is my number one goal with this project and happily the VC is where I really get to use everything in my bag of tricks in keeping the framerate up. It's really good fun to build.

I'm still shooting for a wrap up at the end of December, but I don't have high hopes of making that self imposed deadline. It'll more likely be the end of January or early February, but regardless I'll only release it when I'm 100% happy with it. If that takes until June then so be it. Such is a labour of love. :)

-lotus

The Israeli Rollercoaster...

2008-10-14T07:11:00.000-07:00

Well I'm back again. It was a whirlwind trip in more ways than one and I'm mentally exhausted from it. Normally I have an easy time articulating my experiences in travel, but this one's tough. My last trip to Israel was just a cursory looksee really, I enjoyed it but didn't get a lot out of it. That definitely changed this time around. We had an excellent local private guide for the trip which really made a world of difference. It's one thing to see a place but quite another to get the backstory of every single thing you're looking at. The history of the place is just amazing. So much hope, and life, and death and destruction all packed into such a tiny space. In fact I can't even describe how tiny it really is. From the edge of the West Bank, at Israel's narrowest point, you can actually see the beach in Tel Aviv, it's just 25 km. You realize when you're there that history is a very real and present thing, being made moment to moment, which is a feeling you just can't get in good old safe and boring Canada.

The bottom line is that I came away with a great deal of respect for the Israeli people, much more than I ever had before. How they manage to live in a state of constant conflict and yet still build an advanced and extremely liberal nation and maintain some sense of normalcy to every day life just amazes me beyond belief. I really hope one day that true and lasting peace can be achieved there. If the beautiful city of Haifa, a place where Jews and Arabs co-exist peacefully, is any indication then it's certainly possible. It definitely gave me some hope. Fingers crossed.

The side effect of the constant threat they face though is that at a very subliminal level they really strive to make the most of each day. Few work harder than the Israelis but nobody parties harder. We always say to ourselves to live each day like it's our last, but the reality here in North America is that it doesn't work, we will likely live to see tomorrow just fine. In Israel though it's different, there's a real and constant danger involved in living there, one that only fluctuates in intensity but never goes away, and it breeds a zest for life in the people that is just utterly infectious. I wish I could explain it better. It's one emotional and inspiring ride that's for sure haha.

Some of the highlights of the trip were seeing Jerusalem of course (it still has that special magical air about it), seeing Masada, where the Jews made their last stand against the Romans and committed mass suicide instead of accepting their inevitable defeat and slavery, and visiting the Israeli Air Force museum, an enormous well of contemporary history. It's one thing to see a Mirage III in a French museum, and quite another to see an Israeli one with thirteen Syrian and Egyptian Mig kills painted on its nose from the Six Day war. Impressive as hell. I also saw one of the IAI Lavi prototypes from the mid 80's and suddenly realized that the Eurofighter is just a shameless copy haha. Put pictures of the two side by side, you'll see what I mean.

On the flipside of the trip, we went through New York city on the way to and from Israel, and in both cases I was given an unjustified and protracted grilling by the gestapo that the US Customs system has become, including bag searches and being detained for upwards of an hour with no explanation. And that's me, an upstanding Canadian citizen who has never committed a crime of any sort. I feel truly sad for anyone else trying to visit the country. The unfortunate result though is that this trip must represent my final flight into a US city. I'm not putting up with that anymore. In the future I will drive to the US when I need to go there, though I'm not really sure how long that will last either. It's sad really. I lived in the US for many years and used to really look forward to going south. No more. Thankfully one can fly to just about anywhere in the world from Toronto, though Pearson International airport may be that city's only really useful feature haha.

Anyway, here's a few piccies from the journey. Enjoy.

-lotus

Poof.... again.

2008-10-01T23:13:00.000-07:00

Well I'm off to Tel Aviv in a few hours. Been a long time since I visited Israel and there's a lot I missed the first time around.

Jerusalem in particular is a place I am definitely psyched to see again. Of all the exotic cities I've ever been to around the world, and there are a lot, Jerusalem is truly the most surreal. I swear that if you took all the people out of that city that you would hear the walls whispering to each other. That's the sense I had last time I was there, that the city, the very architecture itself, was 'alive'. Even cooler is that I'm not alone in that feeling. Ask anyone who's ever been there and they'll likely tell you the same thing. I'm curious to see if that feeling remains. :)

Back in ten days, a quick trip this time.

-lotus

Albatros Progress Update...

2008-09-18T02:15:00.001-07:00

Well despite all the video work (and a last minute road trip to Banff) it's been a busy month for the L-39. I've been jamming some insane hours (mostly those evil dark ones where birds chirp outside) into the flight dynamics and they are now 99.9% complete. It flies just as an L-39C should, on the numbers at all altitudes and speeds I'm quite proud to say, and feels just like my ride in Tyson's jet. Pitch and roll rates, acceleration, G-loading and limits, drag, takeoff and landing rolls, stability and such are all about as accurate as I can make them. It can even sideslip nicely on crosswind approaches now, no small trick to set up let me tell you.

I also discovered a solution for what seems to be one of the great flight modeling mysteries concerning jet engines in FSX, especially lower power ones like the L-39's AI-25TL, and that's properly modeled thrust at both low and high altitudes. Generally, getting a jet to perform properly speed wise at low altitude means screwing up its high altitude performance, and tweaking for the upper flight levels normally results in a very overpowered ride down low, something you're all familiar with I'm sure. That is not the case with this jet! From sea level up to her service ceiling of 37000 feet, and at any altitude in between, she pulls off the speeds and climb rates the real thing is capable of, no more, no less. A realistic increase in thrust from intake compression is also modeled. The L-39 is fairly underpowered when stationary or at low speed and relying solely on its engine's compressor stages. Fly faster and you have more net thrust available, up to a point. :)

So, the remaining 0.1 percent?: Spins. Can't quite get her to do them yet, and I think that's something I'll be fighting with until the very end. ;) There is definitely some dark voodoo involved in that, but with time she'll get there. Both my love and my hatred of the FSX .air file format have grown in equal portions over the past few weeks, haha, but the effort was worth it.

The external model has been given a lot of subtle fixes and tweaks as well, mostly in the cockpit and inlets, both areas were just grossly oversized and misshapen. A lot of the really fine curves on this plane I simply couldn't determine from photos, and so I must thank Tyson hugely again for the chance to crawl into and all over the real deal. It helped immensely. The pilots have also been increased in size to more realistic non-hobbit proportions. 'Gary', as you'll see in the pictures below, has also rejoined 'Ace' in the office at last. ;) A great number of shading and smoothing issues have also been fixed, and very few remain. Tyson's L-39's paint job has been done as well, and while it's by far the easiest paint I've ever made (rearrange a few parts and spam blue haha) it's also one of the coolest I think. She oozes menace. ;)

Also, much to my delight, Christoffer Petersen of Turbine Sound Studios has agreed to take on the formidable job of creating a full sound set for the plane, something I am simply not equipped or trained to do. My expertise ends at the pixel level. ;) By all accounts there are none better at this kind of work than Chris, and 'the best' is what I'm interested in here. :) The sound set should arrive sometime around December. AI sounds were also specifically on my shopping list, so, unlike most other addon jets, this thing will *not* sound like the default Lear 45 in multiplayer.

So with the external complete, except for a few minor non-critical tweaks, I will be doing the grand 'slice' tomorrow, a moment filled with joy and dread for me. The external and VC will become completely separate projects at that point and I'll be working full time now in XML 3D gauge land. This is the point in the project where vigilance for inconsistencies becomes truly important. Wish me luck, ugh!

Oh, and my sincere thanks to the sixty two people who responded to my flight dynamics/user preferences poll awhile back. That's a lot more feedback than I expected! I really appreciate your input and I have made my choices accordingly:

The L-39's handling properties are now designed for and will reward the hardcore fliers among us first. The slow engine spool up and unique 'coffin corners' in her flight model are all present. For example, if you forget to watch your airspeed and end up too slow on a shallow approach with low engine RPM, then all you have left to make up your mind about is which patch of ground you're going to put a virtual crater in. Any hope for recovery in that situation below about 500 feet AGL is marginal at best. The ground handling is fairly tricky now as well without nosewheel steering, relying solely on differential brakes. There might be an optional 'easy' mode config, we'll see. ;) If you don't have rudder pedals with differential braking ability, and desire to drive her around 'Top Gear' style, then I'd recommend getting a set at some point haha. I recommend CH Pro Pedals, they're virtually indestructible. My first set survived nearly twelve years of hard abuse.

Some piccies!

-lotus

Hired Gunnery...

2008-09-17T00:28:00.000-07:00

Over the past couple months I've been working on a clutch of videos for Sim Giants' new series of Canary Islands airports for FSX, and just wrapped up the last of them this week. While I would never agree to do a true 'wingviewer' video (yes I've been asked, ugh) I figured doing some airport promos would be an interesting little challenge. Actually, despite the fact that I don't need to chase an airport around at 500 knots in multiplayer to capture it, it's quite a bit more difficult than I first thought to showcase one properly.

Anyway, if you're curious to see the high res versions, head on over to www.sim-giants.com, or check out their Youtube page: SimGiants on Youtube.

As for the airports themselves, they're really very good, and, most importantly, framerate friendly. While I'm admittedly not much of an airport guy myself, since I spend as little time as possible on the ground, haha, having watched these sceneries evolve over the past few months I really respect the amount of love they've put into them. Good stuff.

Here's my favourite of the four vids I made for them, and definitely my favourite airport among their creations.

I'll get to meet the makers in a couple of weeks when I visit Israel as well. :)

Oh, I probably forgot to mention... I'm going to Israel on Oct 6. Part of my "Dotting the 'i's" year I guess, aka visiting countries that I didn't really see properly last time I was in them. :)

"What was the question?... I was looking at the big sky." - Kate Bush

-lotus

Just so wrong...

2008-09-15T21:50:00.000-07:00

X-Plane = ehhhh...

iPhone = rubbish. (just like every other apple product ever made)

X-Plane on the iPhone?

DO NOT WANT.

;)

-lotus

The future of aviation?

2008-09-14T18:06:00.000-07:00

While browsing on TED Talks, something I do often, I ran across this talk given by Burt Rutan, the designer of Space Ship One and Voyager (among dozens of other high performance planes) where he discusses his views on the future of aviation and spaceflight. It's a truly interesting 20 minutes. I also can't disagree with his opinion on the greatest aircraft ever made. You get one guess as to what that is. ;)

He also talks about something that's bothered me for many years now, the fact that the past decade was the first time in modern humanity's history (discounting the dark ages) where we've allowed some incredible technologies to lapse with no superior replacements on the horizon.

By the way, if you haven't been to TED.com before I highly recommend setting aside a few hours to spend there one day. It's a video record of a conference that is held every year in Monterey, where some of the best and brightest gather to exchange ideas on how to shape humanity's future into something amazing. Some heady and hope inspiring stuff. Given the state of the world I always find the talks on this site immensely uplifting, and occasionally feel as if I'm witnessing the formation of a real world Galt's Gulch. ;)

Enjoy.

The Rush of a Lifetime

2008-08-26T03:47:00.000-07:00

Wow, how do I sum this up?

Saturday was my first flight in an L-39. It was, quite simply, the pinnacle experience of my life so far. When I jumped out of a plane a few years back over Australia I thought that nothing could ever top that experience, the pure euphoria that skydiving provided.

I was wrong, so very very wrong.

Thanks to a wonderful guy by the name of Tyson, I had an experience this past weekend so utterly profound and life altering that it puts that jump into a very very distant second place.

The flight started at Burbank airport in southern California and finished at Brown Field in San Diego. The stuff in the middle I just don't know how to put into words properly. I was given the chance to do what I have done in flight sim for 20 odd years, for real. I still can't wrap my head around it all. We did formation flight with another L-39, aerobatics, insane rolls, canyon runs, some extreme low level flight, and Tyson was kind and trusting enough to hand me the controls for about half of the flight.

So what's it like to fly an L-39? Well... its just like driving a Lotus Elise... in the vertical. The aircraft is just incredibly responsive to control input. There is no lag, no play in the stick, the slightest input elicits an instant response from the airplane. It's not the fastest accelerating or highest flying jet ever made but *wow* can that thing ever corner. In canyon runs and inverted passes over ridgelines we regularly hit 4-5G, and even with a G-suit it is just an utterly intense experience.

While I didn't experience even a blip of motion sickness or nausea at all, I found the first few aerobatic manoeuvres extremely disorienting. All of my previous real flying experience was absolutely worthless in this regime, and so oddly enough I found myself doing the same thing I did during my only in-flight emergency some years ago as PIC of a Cessna 172: I convinced myself I was back in Flight Simulator. Is that bizarre or what? Once I did that though I started keeping my head steady, using the canopy frames as references, ignoring the massive sensory assault from my body, and I was then able to stay perfectly oriented in any flight attitude. And then, insanity of insanities, I was handed the stick of this awesome little fighter.

I did several rolls, both barrel and aileron, as well as inverted pulls up the sides of mountains, over ridges, and back towards the ground, and a couple of truly wild canyon runs. To describe that experience as exhilarating just doesn't cover it. He also trusted me with landing the thing, giving me the opportunity to do a couple of touch and go approaches and despite a little apprehension on my part at first I found it incredibly easy to handle on approach and flare. In fact, believe it or not, I'd say it's actually easier to land than a 172. I'm not sure whether it's the airplane's 8000lb of inertia or its brilliant flight controls, but it's just gorgeously stable on approach.

I'm still digesting and analyzing the experience, but what I do know is that my new friend Tyson is one hell of a good pilot. He's one who knows his aircraft's limits and his own extremely well and doesn't step beyond them. He and his wife Anjuli are also incredibly gracious hosts and I feel very lucky to have met and gotten to know them a little.

And so with that, I'll just let some pictures, and more importantly a video, do the talking. The video link is at the bottom of the post. It's a little large, around 190 mb, but it covers some of the best 20 minutes of our 80 minute or so flight. I wish I could have recorded more of the aerobatics, I didn't have enough hands, or free brain cells, but it will definitely give you a good idea of what I experienced. I apologize for the shakiness of some of my footage. It's not the L-39 handling turbulence badly, quite the opposite, that plane just laughs at rough air, but rather my inability to keep my damned arm steady with such G loading, not to mention a diet of pure adrenaline. ;)

Secondarily I now have enough photo reference and personal experience in the L-39's cockpit to make one killer VC haha and a much much more accurate flight model. Back to work!

Tyson I truly can't thank you enough for your generosity. Thank you for one utterly amazing weekend mate. What a rush. I wish I could bottle this feeling.

Enjoy!

Lotus' L-39 Flight Video Download

190mb, approx 20 mins

Just for kicks...

2008-08-19T14:27:00.000-07:00

I do actually play stuff other than FSX... shocking eh! Every now and then it's great to just load up Medieval Total War 2 and break some stuff in massive fashion.

In this case the Germans learn what kind of damage a group of totally outnumbered English longbowmen can do... given the advantages of a narrow river crossing and some nasty stakes in the ground. ;) My first MTW movie, hehe. Enjoy.

The nuts and bolts of multiplayer performance in FSX...

2008-08-07T06:26:00.001-07:00

Okay so I've been on something of a crusade when it comes to multiplayer framerates for quite awhile. Anyone who's flown online with me for more than, oh, five minutes, has no doubt heard me bitch about it, and well I haven't exactly made too many friends on this topic over at Avsim's FSX forum in recent debates, but eh, what can ya do? It matters to me because I haven't flown singleplayer for pleasure since October of 2006, not once. There is simply no going back. Not that I ever did much single player flying in FS9 either. It doubly matters to me because if I get less than 30 fps locked I get a little grumpy. ;)

Anyway in my quest to make the L-39 as lean as I possibly can I've been drawing on all my previous game art experience, but I've also been doing a lot of searching and reading on the peculiarities of FSX when it comes to the subject of performance. Torgo3000's blog, and the incredible well of knowledge provided by the very kind people who post at fsdeveloper.com in particular have been very enlightening to me. One of the things I've noticed though is that the issue of draw calls seems to be everyone's favourite whipping boy lately when trying to explain why one model performs better than another. I've seen quite a few developers on various forums pretty much state flat out that polygon counts just don't matter anymore, that it's all about the draw calls now. That kind of statement quite frankly worries me a bit because all of my previous game development experience tells me that just the opposite is true, and that's what I intend to talk about here.

By the way, if you're not interested in a somewhat technical little article about why your FPS always seems to head straight for the single digits in multiplayer then stop reading now! If you are though, or feel that the statement made by one Avsim forum member, that "FSX multiplayer flyers are little more than second class citizens in the eyes of most developers" is true, well, then please read on.

Personally I don't think they consider us second class citizens, rather I don't think most of them have really considered us much at all. There are happily some shining exceptions to that statement though, and not the least of which would be ACES themselves, in their valiant efforts to keep every kind of user happy at the same time.

So why should addon developers consider us you might ask? Well, because multiplayer, in my opinion, and no matter the genre, is *absolutely* the future of PC entertainment. If you're a diehard singleplayer flyer then you'll no doubt disagree with me, but multiplayer is the great feather in PC gaming's cap, and is something that the consoles have yet to even remotely compete with. Multiplayer experiences are growing in popularity at an insane pace, and singleplayer ones are starting to sit on the shelves in a big way. That trend has been going on for years now and is only getting stronger. If you don't believe me I'd recommend you look at the unbelievable popularity of a little game called World of Warcraft. ;) Yes, love it or hate it, the world's most popular and financially successful game contains no singleplayer mode whatsoever. Humans are social animals, give us a chance to play with others rather than play alone and we're drawn to it I guess.

However, on today's hardware, making something work efficiently in a multiplayer environment, massive or not, means dredging up some old school 8-bit era thinking and ingenuity when it comes to graphics, and doubly so when considering FSX content. I've been trying to do just that with my Albatros and in the process I've been doing a lot of comparing and testing, trying to find out just what is it that really kills framerate in FSX. I was pretty surprised at some of the results, so I hope you find what follows interesting.

Ok, so, the new whipping boy: draw calls. The easiest way to sum them up is that FSX needs to break airplanes into chunks when processing them and sending them off to the video card for rendering on your screen. Most game render engines try to make assumptions about parts of a model in order to avoid checking every single property for every single vertex, which is very time consuming and slows performance. If a number of polygons (triangles) share identical properties then it can batch process a whole pile of them together into one big draw call, rather than a bunch of small ones, thus using the available bus bandwidth more efficiently and resulting in higher framerates. That's the general idea anyway. Something about that idea has been bugging me though lately so I decided to do some investigating using a wonderful tool called DrawCallMonitor made by FS guru Arno Gerretsen.

Now, a couple of disclaimers. First, neither this tool nor the numbers I'm going to show from it can tell the whole story about a particular model's performance. There are many other factors that play into it such as the number of textures applied to a model, their sizes and bit depths, and about a million other little issues. However the three biggest players in FSX performance are draw calls, triangle counts, and texture vertices, and that's what the tool does deal with. I'll explain a bit about each later on. I'm also not counting the performance hit from virtual cockpits and gauges or anything else here. Everything that follows is strictly concerning external aircraft models in their highest LOD form (such as you encounter in multi-ship close formation flight), and only the most basic properties of them. However, having said that, everything I'm going to talk about also applies to virtual cockpit models.

Second, I have picked eight small aircraft from my hangar to compare, and in the interest of fairness and peace I've designated them with letters A through H. They range from single engine props to small fighters and warbirds, and one helicopter. The military aircraft involved in the comparison are in their clean configurations, ie: no weapons or fuel tanks, in order to keep things as fair as possible. In each case they are aircraft that I love to fly and have logged dozens or even hundreds of hours in. All are true FSX compiled aircraft and all are of extremely high visual quality both in shape and textures.

Okay, on with the data!

First up, draw call counts. Like I mentioned above, the aircraft is broken into chunks based on parts of the aircraft that have identical properties. By that I mean materials really. Each time you change the material from one type to another, say from matte to chrome on the same object, you're forcing a new draw call. As far as I know FSX has a total budget of somewhere around 5000 draw calls (very system dependent), which includes your aircraft's VC, AI/multi traffic, clouds and scenery. The seemingly generally accepted theory is that the more draw calls a model makes the more demands on the hardware it has, and the slower the model performs... or does it?

Ok, so at first glance aircraft D should be the highest performer, and indeed it is, but, as you'll see in the stats to follow, D has a lot more going for it than just a low number of draw calls. Based on draw calls alone Aircraft G might seem to be the worst performer of the bunch. Ah, but just wait, the plot thickens, or thins, or whatever it is that plots do...

Next, polygon counts. This is pretty straightforward. An airplane is made up of triangles. The more triangles it has the more rounded and refined it looks from all angles. Although the concept of 'size' in computer graphics really has no meaning at all, it does matter in a simulation, since you're going to end up with really large aircraft next to really small ones fairly often. The bigger physically an aircraft is the more polygons it's ultimately going to need to make it look comparably smooth. That's why I've chosen only small size aircraft to compare. Okay, so how many triangles does each contain?

Okay, so now things look quite a bit different. Aircraft H which had a low draw call count turns out to have the greatest number of triangles and Aircraft G which has a high draw call count has only a slightly above average number of polygons. Now the numbers are going to be a little unreliable as all of these models employ visibility tags to show or hide parts of the aircraft at various times. So not all of the polys in each are displayed all the time, but most are.

So let's look at the final count, Texture Vertices. Now basically texture vertices are a combination of the number of vertices that make up the polygons of the aircraft and the number of independent uv coordinates attached to them, which can be shared or not depending on how the airplane is texture mapped. Without getting too technical, the number of texture vertices (when compared to the number of polygons) is a very very loose indication of how efficiently texture mapped a model is, how many vertices share their uv coordinates. The real things we're looking at here are the number of texture vertices a model has in total, but also the ratio of the texture vertices to its polygon count. Anyway I say it's a very loose indication because it doesn't tell the whole story, not by a long shot. Every aircraft has its own unique texture mapping problems, and every artist tends to tackle them differently. Some of those problems simply can't be avoided due to an object's shape. But here you go...

Now, for better or worse, this is where these aircraft all start to show their true colours I think. Based on my own experience in multiplayer with each aircraft it's the texture vertices graph which most accurately portrays their respective performance hits when flying in close formation.

In order to prove to you that I'm not loony (or maybe that I am) I've done a series of tests on each aircraft, using an identical flight situation in which the cpu/videocard load caused by all other elements of the sim are negated to the maximum extent possible. The tests are done using nothing but a camera platform in slew mode, no user aircraft is loaded. The test is over the middle of the Pacific Ocean under clear skies and all scenery settings are at minimum. Multiple copies of each aircraft are placed in a closely spaced array via FSRecorder tracks. The test literally is this: How many copies of each aircraft can I have on screen at once and still maintain 30 frames per second?

Below is a screenshot of what the test looks like. For the keen, only one of the tested aircraft contains LODs and textures with mip maps. In that case I compressed the view to force each copy on screen into its highest LOD and mip state.

And the results? An almost exact mirror reflection of the texture vertex and polygon counts. The fewer polygons and texture vertices an aircraft has the higher its real world performance. In the graph below Aircraft H is the one to look at especially since it had a below average number of draw calls but a very high poly count. If polygons don't matter anymore then I should have been able to get quite a few more H's on screen before suffering in performance. In real world use I usually can't even have ONE type H aircraft on screen without dropping to single digit FPS. Conversely aircraft G with its very high draw call count should cause a lot of performance damage but in real world play with high settings I can usually have at least 3 flying with me.

The bottom line? Texture vertices and polygon counts still seem to be quite a bit more important to performance than they're being given credit for lately.

Once you put virtual cockpits (which are often far more damaging, and to be fair, necessarily so, than external models), gauges, flight models, scenery and all that back into the equation you can pretty much knock two to eight planes off any of those formations if you're trying to keep 30 fps. In the cases of aircraft C and H you're looking at major reductions in scenery settings to get even one on screen along with your own aircraft and still keep a decent framerate.

So when comparing the stats against real world demonstrated performance it seems that draw calls aren't quite the big deal they've been made out to be, at least for aircraft. Do they matter? Definitely. But having even an incredibly low number of draw calls doesn't let you get away with murder in the polygon and texture vertex count departments. For scenery, which concerns thousands of objects at once rather than just the few which make up an aircraft, I can see this kind of test panning out very differently, but the poly count there still matters a lot too. For airplanes though it seems that texture vertices are killer #1, followed very quickly by total polygon count, and lastly by draw calls. Texture vertices are entirely dependent on poly count though. There are a lot of mapping tricks that can be used to get the texture vertex count way down, even with a high poly count, but the bottom line is that the more efficient the model is polygon wise to start with, the easier everything is on the CPU. Highly clever mapping techniques aside, when the poly count comes down so do the texture vertices for the most part, and the knock-on effect in performance improvement, as demonstrated by aircrafts A, D, and E, is simply enormous.

There is also another area where a high poly count alone can kill your performance and that's real time shadows. The ground shadows cast by aircraft in FSX are calculated straight off the polys themselves and the more of them you have the more performance you lose. In case you don't believe me just load up your favourite high end addon aircraft, turn off the aircraft ground shadows in your display settings and watch what happens to your framerate. ;) This alone, or any two pass render effect (water, bloom) makes a strong case for efficient modeling, or at the very least for the return of low-polygon proxy shadow models.

Where a low draw call count on a plane does seem to make a noticeable difference though is in a scene completely over-saturated with autogen. In that kind of situation it starts to show some advantage, but at that point an average user's FPS is so low that the sim is all but unplayable anyway.

Here's a final graph (I promise!) that shows all the stats together normalized. Poly count and Texture vertices are best viewed as a unit in how they relate to each other. When you compare those though to the draw call counts and each aircraft's actual resource demands in the sim, you see the story I've been trying to tell. :)

My system's specifications are important to this last graph:

Intel QX9650 Penryn (@4.0 ghz)
4 GB DDR2-1066
Nvidia 8800 Ultra 768mb (not overclocked)

(please click to enlarge, it's hard to read)

The other large performance killer that I haven't touched on above is the size and bit depth of the textures applied to each model, and these can have a dramatic effect. In the cases of the aircraft I tested, with the exception of aircrafts D and E, all have similar texture sizes and bit depths, ie: between five and eight 1024x1024 DXT5 base textures applied, as well as matching bump and specular maps, and a number of smaller subsidiary textures. Aircraft D has a much lower number of textures than the others and aircraft E has a much higher number. The interesting part there is that both D and E are high performers, with dramatically different texture loads, E using nearly 5x the texture space of D. This is mostly due to their mapping and low polygon counts I think, with the remaining difference coming down to D's exceptionally low number of draw calls.

By the way there's a plane in my hangar, a freeware one actually, that is 350+ draw calls, 141,000 polygons, and 230,000 texture verts. Oy! How many of those can I have on screen in multiplayer and keep 30 fps? Umm... none! :)

So why 30 FPS specifically? It's because I consider it the 'magic' number when it comes to flight model fidelity, especially concerning aerobatic and helicopter flight. Any less than that and fine, accurate control becomes difficult. 30 FPS is also magic because it's one of the few framerates that properly synchronizes with the standard (and rather lame I might add) refresh rate limit of LCD monitors, 60hz/FPS, and as such is relatively stutter free. The next highest available synchronized framerate is 60 FPS, and it's going to be a little while before we see that kind of performance as standard in FS I think. :)

In closing, it turns out that polygon counts and their associated texture vertices do actually matter, a heck of a lot!

If you're a developer and reading this you're probably thinking by now that I couldn't care less about what singleplayer flyers want, and you'd be right, I couldn't! Kidding of course, I do actually care, a little anyway. :) However, consider this: Both player types want performance, badly. You need only to browse any FSX forum for two minutes to see that, and if you build a plane for multiplayer flyers first, you suddenly make singleplayer flyers very happy too. In doing so you give them the ability to crank up their scenery settings by several notches, and singleplayer flyers, at least the low and slow crowd, aren't looking at a plane three feet off their wing like we do, they're mostly looking at the ground.

Is building stuff this way harder? Yes, and even after doing exactly that for EA and Namco for eight years I still find it challenging. Do you have to sacrifice quality to do so though? No. There are tons of low poly modeling and mapping tricks you can employ. Is it worth the extra effort? I certainly think so.

Anyway if you made it this far, cheers for reading. Sorry for the abstraction of the graphs, I did the best I could with them. :)

Less is more. (except frames per second of course)

Multi for life.

-lotus

Can I have your thoughts?

2008-08-03T02:28:00.000-07:00

Well with the bulk of the external model work done I'll soon be digging into the real meat of building what I hope will be a fantastic airplane for FSX. I'm making the kind of airplane that I really want to fly myself, but I also recognize that my views and opinions are a little, shall we say, 'extreme' when it comes to flight simming. :) So I'm asking for a little help from you from a user's perspective. If you have the time I'd appreciate your input!

Below are a few of the basic questions and decisions I'm facing as I start working on the flight dynamics and avionics etc, and I'm curious for your opinions.

1. Ground handling: The L-39 has a very untraditional steering/braking system. Unlike normal tricycle gear aircraft it has a castoring nose wheel with no direct steering control. Steering is handled through differential braking much like a taildragger but even that is odd as the aircraft does not have dedicated brake pedals. The brakes are actuated through a stick mounted trigger and differential pressure is controlled through the rudder pedals. This makes the L-39 extremely tricky to handle on the ground for the inexperienced. So...

Take the poll

Free Poll by Blog Flux

2. Performance: I'm building the L-39 to be as performant as I can but I don't intend to sacrifice quality along the way which means I will have to make some compromises between the two here and there. Ultimately though I'm considering doing a very stripped down extra low polygon external model specifically for formation teams or for those who have mid or low range systems. It won't have a lot of the fun stuff like bump and specular mapping but it should be *extremely* easy on the cpu, hopefully allowing up to 10 Albatroses on screen without murdering the fps. It is however a lot of extra work to create, so...

Take the poll

Free Poll by Blog Flux

3. Avionics: I intend to recreate the L-39C's cockpit (front and rear) as accurately as possible but when it comes to the gauges I do have to balance functionality with the prospect of actually getting the airplane finished in this lifetime. :) So...

Take the poll

Free Poll by Blog Flux

4. Flight model realism: The L-39 is a relatively vice free airplane by all accounts, except for one little thing: the engine. The standard engine fitted to these aircraft is extremely slow to react to throttle setting changes. The engine takes roughly nine to twelve seconds to reach full power from idle after a throttle slam. As such these planes are largely flown using the 'boards' (airbrakes) for speed control. So once again it's realism vs usability...

Take the poll

Free Poll by Blog Flux

And that's it for now, thanks for your time! If my options didn't cover your opinion on something or there's some facet of addon aircraft you think is missing or whatever please let me know in the comments.

Cheers,

-lotus

Foop!

2008-07-18T03:59:00.000-07:00

Well I'm back, at least in body if not mind yet. The only problem with going somewhere as nice as Iceland for a month is that it's kind of a bummer to leave it. I miss it a lot. Anyway I'll save my comments on the country and my little adventures there (mostly near misses of sheep during driving in the fog) for later, but here's a little video of my travels for you if you're interested.

A month of photography in the world's smartest (and least polluted) country compressed into 7 minutes.

Aside from photos I brought back the Icelandic Sagas, translated into English, a couple of funky lava rocks from some very special places, some approach plates and an Icelandic VFR chart (yes I know I'm a geek), and one thoroughly bruised rib courtesy of some slippery boulders in Isafjordur.

Anyway crank er up and enjoy but please be patient, it may need to buffer a bit, it's a somewhat largish flash movie.

-lotus

Poof!

2008-06-12T18:38:00.000-07:00

Not much more to say than that. :) I'm off to visit with the Elves (and to see nature's worst flying machines, Puffins, in action), so see you all in a month!

Back around the 16th of July.

-lotus out (big time)

Which way to Bratislava?

2008-06-08T17:14:00.001-07:00

Well I have a little time to kill before I head out on my trip so I figured I'd do up another paint scheme for fun. This one's for the Slovaks. :)

Here's a few shots of her cruising over the Tatra Mountains.

So.... I made a video.

2008-05-28T07:13:00.000-07:00

Scary huh! Almost forgot how. ;)

I recommend watching the high res version, obviously. To see that you'll have to click on the actual movie and watch it directly on Youtube. I don't know how to embed that version. Anyway, there should be a 'watch in high quality' link when you get there.

Hope you like it!

Night and Day...

2008-05-25T21:08:00.000-07:00

It's kind of amazing what a virtual sledgehammer can do for the realism of an aircraft. ;)

Second paint is now done, a Czech Air Force low vis scheme, and when I said it would be weathered and well used looking I wasn't kidding hehe. Unfortunately screenshots don't really do this one justice. When you roll or pitch the plane you can actually see the irregular shading on the individual rises and valleys between the fuselage ribs and wing spars, skin wrinkling as well. :)

Enjoy!

One point frickin oh baby!

2008-05-22T19:22:00.000-07:00

Woot. The first pass on the external model of the L-39 is now complete. Everything is textured, everything is animated, everything works. Sweeeeeet.

There are many little tweaks yet to do, and I'll be revisiting several textures and improving them over time, but most of that will come after I tackle the VC. I have a couple weeks before I'm off to Iceland though, so I'll probably do up another paint, something perfectly opposite and complementary to the immaculate C-GOZA. The real plane I replicated with this paint scheme is so clean you could cook your burgers in the tailpipe and use the ailerons for plates. Next up will likely be a low vis (and heavily weathered) Czech air force camo scheme.

Anyway, it's Stella time! Here are some pics of her finished v1.0 form. :) Man do I need a good night's sleep!

A day completely off the hook...

2008-05-16T21:34:00.000-07:00

Ok, I haven't had too many days in my life as interesting and amazing as today has been so I feel compelled to write about it and hopefully not bore you. So I'm up all last night working on the L-39's fuselage, placing rivets, and lemme tell you there are a LOT of them haha. So I wrap that up sometime in the wee hours and figure, well, I'm up, I may as well stay up and watch the dawn, as has been my pattern lately.

I start checking my various emails and I have one from a fan in Sweden who says that I'm in a magazine... umm... what? Turns out PC Gamer Magazine UK/Europe had an article this month on flight simulation and my films and I got a specific mention in it, how cool is that?! Unfortunately it's damned near impossible to find the UK edition here in Canada, we only get the American one, so if anyone has access to a copy please let me know, I'd like to buy one from you. :)

So that's how the day started... and then it got really neat. I left a comment on a youtube L-39 vid several weeks ago when I was first looking for good reference on the plane. It was a video of a guy and his wife flying an L-39 in formation with another, set to a great soundtrack by one of my favourite artists. I don't leave comments on vids very often, but I felt compelled to for some reason and basically said that life didn't get much better than flying an L-39, with a pretty lady in the back seat, and wicked tunes on the sound system.

Three weeks later, today, he emails me out of the blue saying that he'd been feeling a little bit flat lately, and my comment made him realize he had a lot of great stuff going on in his life, and thanked me for it. I messaged him back saying that the reason I'd watched it in the first place was that I was making an L-39 for FSX and was having a rough time finding a real life example to photograph for cockpit reference, and sent him some shots of the plane's progress to date.

So, it turns out he's an FSX fan as well, and he replied that I'd be more than welcome to photograph his plane, but that I couldn't possibly make a realistic handling L-39 without firsthand experience flying one, and so I should visit him and take a ride with him in it.

Ummm.... lemme think about that for a s... OK!

So thanks to this amazingly generous and cool guy I will be heading to California in July, right after I get back from Iceland, for what will likely be the most utterly fantastic single aviation moment of my life. He's also arranging for me to get cockpit photos of two other Albatroses owned by some friends of his, in order to get a really good cross section of the various cockpits these planes have. Man, I can't wait!

And just to top that off I had my second lucid dream ever this afternoon whilst napping. The last one I had was five years ago, on my first of ten nights spent in Israel. Quite fitting really considering the spiritual power of the place. Anyway, if you've never had one, they're the kind of dream where you actually realize you're dreaming. You essentially wake up still in the dreamworld, and can control your environment. Very very trippy, and very very cool. :)

So thanks Karma, for one truly interesting and wonderful day!

As an addendum my computer is being a sulky twit and may have blown two ram sticks, again... and you know what? I couldn't possibly care less. :)

-lotus out.

The fun begins...

2008-05-11T13:40:00.001-07:00

A *week* of solid twelve hour days spent UV mapping and I'm surprised my mind is still intact. Man that was annoying, but neccessary.

And now that work starts to pay off. Bloody hours to properly map the nose, and this is the result after just 20 minutes of texture painting. :)

Memorex:

Not Memorex:

-lotus out

First, pants.... then shoes.

2008-05-05T01:08:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the title, it's late, couldn't think of anything better.

So I'm now on to the part that just about every 3D artist hates with a passion: the texture mapping. Not the textures themselves, they're fun to paint, but actually generating the first version of them and mapping them onto the model... shoot me now.

If you've never done this before then here's an idea of what it's like. Imagine you emptied a bowl of sugar onto a piece of paper and had to line up all of the individual grains into perfect rows on an outline of a picture... one at a time... with tweezers.

It's kinda like that. In my case there are 12454 grains to place, ugh. It's mind numbing beyond belief haha.

On the plus side I'm thinking of future repainters from the get go. All of the textures I'll include in the paint kit for the plane will be clearly marked and laid out, and will include guides for where objects overlap or are recessed inside each other, right down to the vertex. Lining up a custom camouflage scheme on this, should someone be so inclined, will be cake.

And finally, last night I got the front seat pilot converted into a skinned mesh with a bone structure and now have him animated doing all the usual things, moving the stick, throttle, rudder pedals, and a couple other fun things. :) When I get them both animated I'll toss up a little movie of 'Ace & Gary' as I've taken to calling them, hehe. This is a breakpoint in the model though. Up until the skinned mesh pilot the L-39 *could* have been made into an FS9 plane as well as an FSX one. No longer. FS9 can't handle that. Good riddance flat earth sim!

-lotus out.

Evolution...

2008-04-30T09:36:00.000-07:00

She's come a long way baby! ;)

The L-39's external model is almost finished now, just need to create the pilots and add a few asymmetrical parts, such as the apu exhaust, vents, and such. Apart from the obvious additions of weapons and a cockpit with finished ejection seats she picked up quite a few other new bits during my recent nights of insomnia. At least something benefits from me living in the twilight zone. :) It now has integral boarding ladders, gas struts for the canopies, air brakes, and even trim tabs, all of which are animated.

And all that in exactly 20,000 polygons. That's less than half the poly count of the Acceleration F-18 and less than a third of the number in the average addon fighter. Hell, it's less than the default Bell Jetranger! :) It's exactly as many polys as the RealAir SF260 Marchetti actually, the least cpu intensive aftermarket plane ever.

Adding the pilots will bring it up another 2k, but this is going to be one very smooth performing plane in multiplayer. You won't have to wince and say a little prayer for your framerate when someone brings one of these, or two, or three, or six, into your session. That's one goal achieved, detail on a budget, now, just a few thousand more hurdles to cross. ;)

Cheers.

-lotus out.

We've got a pulse...

2008-04-23T21:38:00.000-07:00

From a blank screen to an actual functioning aircraft in FSX in a little over two weeks, I must be nuts. :)

I'm also quite tired haha.

She's alive and kickin' though, and has working (and quite detailed) undercarriage, ailerons, rudder, elevators and a very rudimentary placeholder flight model. Have a look...

I'll also add that recording my own aircraft with FS-Recorder is a truly bizarre experience hahaha.

Cheers!

-lotus out.

On a lighter note (literally)...

2008-04-15T18:38:00.001-07:00

I keep forgetting to link this one. In case you missed it, this is absolutely brilliant! One of the funniest and most creative little videos I've ever seen. Gotta love the Kiwis. :)

The Purist...

2008-04-14T17:36:00.000-07:00

So DB (and Pebble) sent me a link to a little video featuring my favourite plane, a trailer for yet another game bearing Tom Clancy's once great and currently totally sold out name, and though visually striking, it got me thinking once again about the topic of realism in aviation media. Just what in the hell is wrong with it anyway? Is it now some kind of disease or something to be avoided? And why exactly do console flying 'sims' exist? It seems like their sole purpose is to give people the hollow illusion of grandeur... and to completely and utterly annoy me.

Have a look:

Okay, overlooking the fact that they got the Rafale's engine nozzles completely wrong, have any of these guys ever BEEN in a plane? Or I dunno, maybe seen one fly at an air show? Here's a couple of inconvenient truths for the makers of this 'trailer trash':

1. Surface to air missiles have a burn time of just a few seconds. The reason pilots fear them so much? You can't see them coming!
2. The 25 - 100lb warhead they carry does NOT create a fireball the size of a city block when detonated. Sorry.
3. You can't see the hud data on the outside of a helmet mounted display.
4. The Rafale doesn't even HAVE a compatible HMD system. That hogwash is currently the domain of the world's ugliest aircraft: Chuckles the Strike Fighter (F-35).
5. If the guys on the ground are in such trouble, why are the pilots walking casually to the plane?
6. Americans, in a Rafale? Hahahaha! Like THAT'S ever going to happen.
7. GBU-12 Paveways don't have rocket motors.
8. He pulls vertical to avoid the missile yet in the next shot it impacts terrain? Are there mountains in the sky in this game?
9. He passes by his target on the MFD before releasing his bomb that's not supposed to have a rocket motor? Ok, so the not-bomb now has to turn around 180 degrees to hit the target? Good luck with that.
10. H.A.W.X. is a really really really stupid name.

I guess this means I can't make fun of Ace Combat 6's stupidity anymore eh, since there's a new bottom to the pile. Oh wait, I can. AC6 can suck it too.

Ok, now this would all be just fine if their written propaganda amounted to something like this: "It has the flight dynamics of a dumptruck and the realism of pong, but it's pretty to look at and you can blow shit up."

But that's not the case of course, their accompanying hype drones on and on about the realism and systems modeling, yadda yadda. Newsflash guys... It's a console and you're flying with a d-pad, so you can just stop with that nonsense. End of story.

Realism is not a dirty word. When used properly it creates this little thing called 'believability'. It also leads to improvements in knowledge and skill. But oh wait, console users, I forgot... They want to LOOK cool, and FEEL cool. They apparently aren't too fussed about actually acquiring the knowledge and skills required in BEING cool.

Oh and lastly, how dare they use a Habu quote at the start of that rubbish.

Grrr. Rant over. Felt good, as always. ;)

-lotus

The 'Lump' takes shape...

2008-04-13T03:01:00.000-07:00

Remember that somewhat aircraft-ish looking picture in my previous post? Well she's come a fair ways in 4 nights of work. I dare say she's almost looking like an L-39 now. Check it out...

She's currently clocking in at around 4500 polygons. To put that in perspective the default Douglas DC-3 in FSX is around 15000 polygons and it renders *incredibly* quickly. Granted there's no cockpit, pilots (expensive!) or gear wells yet, and all the linkages are missing, but I'm hoping to get the external model done in less than 20k polys if I can. If that's doable and I don't go too nuts with the textures it should pose a very light hit in multiplayer. That's my primary goal anyway. I want this plane to be as suitable for large formation/display team flying as the Marchetti is.

Back to the grind! :)

Dusting off some very old skills...

2008-04-08T01:38:00.001-07:00

Well, I've decided that I've reached the point where I must dive into my only remaining unexplored bay in the great ocean of content that is FSX. I've made scenery, made movies, edited just about every damned thing in FS that can be edited, gone to great lengths to improve the flight modeling and performance of planes made by others, and so... I'm making a plane of my own. :)

This plane: the Czech Aero Vodochody L-39 Albatros, the world's most popular jet trainer, in use by some 30 air forces.

As Bilbo Baggins said of his departure for Rivendell, "I've put this off for far too long." ...and I have indeed.

The modeling and texturing are second nature to me, just have to dust off the synaptic connections formed during seven years of game art creation. The gauges however, well, that's going to be a big adventure as I'm starting from pretty much zero there.

Here's where I'm at after the first night of work... (clicky)

Why the L-39? Well, a couple reasons for that. It's a relatively simple plane, mostly steam gauged, it's light and nimble which are traits I enjoy, and lastly no one's made a decent one since FS2002, which is a shame. I'm pretty sure ACES planned to include one in the Accel pack, but they just ran out of time to do it.

And just in case those reasons aren't sufficient: the French rapper MC Solaar flies one, and that makes it bloody well cool by default, haha. :)

Enjoy...

And worry not, I haven't abandoned the Rafale vid, not by a long shot, it *will* get done. I am however rather brain fried on several parts of it and need a mental distraction, in this case a monumental one.

-lotus out

The hangar doors have opened...

2008-03-31T10:21:00.000-07:00

It's out. Finally. Enough said.

Get. :)

www.realairsimulations.com

200K for Vectors?

2008-03-28T00:32:00.000-07:00

So the unstoppable farce actually made it to 200,000 views tonight. I'm pretty blown away.

My sincerest thanks once again to the crew that helped pull it off, Pebble, Mark, Eric, Flagstaff, Sidra, Lyn, Mugar, and Dustoff. Thanks also to those who left some really amazing and inspirational comments on the movie. I truly can't tell you how much I've appreciated those. :)

So, having said that, here's my little homage to everyone else, the ones who left a stupid, demeaning, or perfectly incoherent comment on it, or asked one of the two questions that invariably results in me adorning my forehead with keyboard imprints: 'wut dat song?' and 'wat hapend to teh othr jet?'.

This my friends is just for you lovely lovely youtubers. :)

Enjoy!

(oh, and be sure to crank it up) ;)

Courchevel on the ground...

2008-03-25T03:23:00.001-07:00

Man I love Top Gear. I *hate* TV yet I adore this show. Even better when it's a 'best of' vid set to one of my favourite tracks like this. Nice remix too! :) I draw huge inspiration (and ideas) from the videographers and editors who work on this series.

And yes I know it's nothing but car porn but it still rocks. ;)

Enjoy.

Chase the Sun Tour complete!

2008-03-22T22:33:00.000-07:00

Well done all! We fought disconnects, we fought weather, we fought the laws of physics and we won! The Chase the Sun Blackbird Round the World Tour was a great success.

First, some stats:

Total legs flown: 12
Total distance covered: 23930 NM
Total flight time: 17 hours 23 minutes
Total trip time: 22 hours 15 minutes
Average speed: 1378.5 Knots
Longest leg: 2373 nm, Kashi - Assab, 1 hr 35 mins
Fastest leg: Rochambeau - La Mesa, 1480 knots avg.
Highest speed attained: Mach 3.37 - 1999 knots ground speed
Highest altitude: 84500 feet

Bottles of Stella Artois consumed: 46 (approximately)

Habus destroyed: 0 ;)

The circumnavigation record we had to beat (including refueling time which is factored into trip time) was 36 hours 14 minutes set by the B-1B in 1995. I'd say we fairly well kicked its ass. ;)

Again, great job guys, that was one hell of an effort! I'd mark that down as a serious FSX accomplishment. I was thoroughly impressed with your mastery(s) of the Habu by the time we wrapped up. :)

Thanks to everyone who participated, and my apologies to those who suffered many disconnects and lag. I wish FSX multiplayer was a little more robust than it is, but we made the best of it.

Pics below!

-lotus

Blackbird Air Miles and Rewards points...

2008-03-14T13:33:00.000-07:00

If you've been cruising along with us in the Blackbird round the world tour, or are planning to join us for some of the final legs, please download this file, there's a little present in there for you. :)

Reward File Download

When you get the zip file, extract it into the following location:

(your main FSX folder)\Rewards\

Overwrite your "sandbox_rewards.rwd" with the one in the zip file.

Don't worry it won't mess up your current or future flight rewards or logbook in any way.

Many thanks to Pebble for putting all the hard work into something you will see at some point soon. :) After the run I will post how to collect your reward if it doesn't happen for you automatically.

Cheers,

-lotus

Sound familiar?

2008-03-13T11:27:00.001-07:00

At least FSX gets a nod. ;) It's the Zero Punctuation review of Crysis, a game I hate and absolutely refuse to play on principle. Why? Simply because all the problems FSX SP2 has with Nvidia hardware would be solved in a bloody heartbeat if this game didn't exist. It's a long story. Anyway I LOVE this guy's reviews.

Enjoy!

From totally out of left field...

2008-03-08T05:48:00.000-08:00

Ummmm...

I don't really know *what* to make of this, but I figured you guys would want to see it.

It's an FSX movie, I think. Actually I don't know what to think. It's awesome, it's odd, it's clever, it's boring, it's cute, but maybe most of all it's ummm.... huh? :) Normally within seconds I either love an FSX movie, dislike it, or am ambivalent about it, but this is the first one I can't even begin to make up my mind about.

See for yourselves, I'm curious to hear what you think of it. It's kinda like Tinfish meets Navigator meets me meets Spice. Every movie these Things to Come guys have done for their scenery products (Edwards AFB in the Acceleration pack in this case) is a little out there, but this one... They definitely put a *lot* of work into it, that's for sure.

K, I'll shut up now, have a look. :)

Shoulda coulda...

2008-03-06T23:54:00.001-08:00

I actually considered putting one of these in Vectors, as Alphasim made an Orlenok Ekranoplan awhile back, but I couldn't find a way to fit it into the story and have it make sense... not that anything in it did anyway. ;)

Good thing someone else took care of that for me! Got a laugh out of their attempts to traverse land with one, with mixed results. ;)

Cheers to Pebble for the link.

Much better...

2008-03-01T21:08:00.000-08:00

Ok leg two of the RTW trip went much much better than the first. So staying out of gamespy worked and helped the lag immensely. Aside from a little garbled comms here and there it was perfect, good job all. I'll be sticking with this direct IP method for the rest of the RTW sessions, thanks for your extra effort in that. It paid off. I've posted the info for the next session on the sidebar to the right, and will do so for each subsequent leg from now on instead of writing posts.

Cheers and see you there! (We'll probably take a few days off after this next leg, let the wings cool and all haha.)

PS: Stats for the Honolulu - Wake Island leg were 1993 NM covered in 1 hour 27 minutes for an average speed of 1374.5 knots. ;)

-lotus

First leg success + changes...

2008-02-29T20:55:00.000-08:00

Ok, the first leg of the RTW journey, from Beale to Honolulu, went relatively well. We do have some *mega* lag issues though, so here's what we're gonna do for the next legs...

First, I'm not going to host the session on gamespy for the future legs, just too much interference going on there I think. I will host them on my lan mode only and you will have to connect directly to me. Sorry but I'm near the end of my rope with GameSUCK these days, Peb is too. To connect: go to LAN mode at the main multiplayer screen, (do not log into gamespy), then select 'connect directly' and enter this IP address: 24.80.85.220

If we all refrain from connecting to gamespy for the session it should free up a ton of bandwidth, and a side benefit is that we cannot be interrupted with private message requests. Text chat in the session will still work fine though.

The next session is at the same time tomorrow night, Saturday March 1st at 7:00 pm PST.

Second, please turn down your graphics settings as low as you can tolerate and set your frame rate limit to a value you can always hit easily, even in dense scenery. When your cpu becomes starved of free cycles this kind of lag is what happens in multi. Also please keep any other internet background tasks closed, like IM chat programs, browsers etc. Thanks.

Cheers, and thanks to everyone that came along, and see you tomorrow evening as we continue on to Wake Island and possibly Kadena AFB in Okinawa. The Wake Island run is quite short.

By the way, we completed the first leg from liftoff to touchdown in 1 hour and 40 minutes for an average speed of 1296.4 kts, not bad! :)

Wingview that Mr. Airliner Pilot. ;)

-lotus out

Small fixes for the Alphasim SR-71 (FSX)...

2008-02-27T08:50:00.000-08:00

For those coming along on the world tour, and who have the 2007 version of the Alphasim SR-71 Blackbird, but are seeing some reflectivity issues in the VC, I have a fix for you here. For the tour remember that you will need to have downloaded and installed the Blackbird multiplayer model fix from the Alphasim website, which is accessible through your store account there, from the same place you originally downloaded the SR-71. You must download and install that first if you haven't, and then install the fixes in this post.

There are two fixes in the zip below. The first is a modified aircraft.cfg file which forces all of the SR-71A variants to use the multiplayer model, not just one. This will preclude your system crashing should someone bring in a version other than the multiplayer one. You will lose such things as the starter cart and air-stairs, but you can always change them back later. It is those extra model features that caused the multiplayer crash in the first place.

The second fix is a modified panel.cfg file to address the VC gauges, which in SP2/Acceleration have some material issues. If you're seeing some gauges as either transparent or reflective in the VC, this panel.cfg should fix that.

I did not include paths in the zip file as people often have different layouts for FSX, so you will need to navigate to the appropriate folders and overwrite your files manually with the ones in the zip.

Paths:

The aircraft.cfg file goes in:

(your fsx folder)\SimObjects\Airplanes\ALPHA SR-71A 2007\

The panel.cfg file goes in:

(your fsx folder)\SimObjects\Airplanes\ALPHA SR-71A 2007\Panel\

Replace the files there and you should be good to go.

These fixes are only for the SR-71 "A" model. We will not be flying the B/trainer version. (too slow!) :)

DOWNLOAD AIRCRAFT/PANEL PATCH HERE

I know that Alphasim is coming out with a full FSX/SP2 patch/upgrade for the Blackbird, but I have no idea when that will be ready. These fixes will keep you flying until then. :)

-Lotus out

Habu World Tour!

2008-02-25T23:50:00.000-08:00

Well guys it's time to separate the real pilots from the wingviewers.

Here's the deal. Starting at 7 pm PST, on Friday the 29th of February, the Lotus Films crew is going on a little trip... all the way around this rock. The interesting bit? The bit that sets us apart from those Avsim/Flightsim/Simouthouse round-the-world pilot wannabes?

We're doing it in the most amazing, sinister looking, fastest, and entirely bloody unforgiving aircraft ever made, the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird. Specifically Alphasim's amazing version of it. This is the Uma Thurman of the aviation world. She's gorgeous, and she'll put a knife in your throat for so much as looking at her funny.

Two years ago Pebble and I did this trip in RealAir Spitfires, an incredible journey. It took us 76 legs and the better part of a year to complete. This trip is only 12 legs, and it's going to take a week or two. However, given the challenges we're facing those twelve legs are going to be anything but mundane.

The sessions will have the standard name but I'll be putting a note in the session info when it's a Blackbird RTW leg and so please check that info and plan accordingly if you want to come along. SR-71s, whether freeware, the Pilot's version, or Alphasim (the BEST) are welcome. If you have an XB-70 Valkyrie that is also acceptable. Simgameit aircraft however will not be accepted, nor any other fighters etc. Blackbirds only, Valkyries in a pinch.

If you would like to join us in this epic journey please click the link below and read the entire post *carefully*. If bringing the Alphasim SR-71 please pay special attention to the multiplayer model notes in the post to avoid crashing your system. In it I also outline the procedures we're going to be following as we'll be endeavouring to make this trip as realistic as possible within the limitations of FSX.

Lotus Films "Chase The Sun" SR-71 Round The World Tour Info

Cheers, and I hope to see you there! If you have comments, questions etc on the flight plan or aircraft, please ask them here in the comments on this blog post.

You have 4 days to practice. ;)

-Lotus out (at Mach 3.28)

Trailers are stupid...

2008-02-19T08:03:00.000-08:00

No I don't mean the boxes pulled behind pickup trucks, though they're mighty stupid too... bane of all sports car owners (who should own the road by default thank you very much).

No, I'm referring to the recent trend where people have been making actual trailers for flight sim movies. Ok, a trailer for a two hour long film makes sense, kinda, but for a five minute long one?

Stupid. Flat out.

So in the interest of putting yet another notch in my cherished Belt of Hypocrisy(-6 to character rolls), here you go!

I tried to make it as cheesy as possible, complete with excessively dramatic and overused 'trailer music'. (ie: great music from an older film because the composers for the actual film the trailer portrays are too damned lazy to get anything done in time) ;)

By the way, the new vid is taking bloody *forever* to make because, hardware and cloud issues aside, it features my favourite aircraft of all time, and unlike all my other films where I make many compromises, I absolutely refuse to cut any corners on this one. I've already tossed out an entire hard drive worth of shots because they just damned well weren't good enough. For those who have been waiting patiently for the next production, thanks, and hopefully it won't take too much longer! The amount of behind the scenes work going into this one is pretty insane and I've had to learn quite a few new things along the way. :)

Rafale. One fighter to rule them all...

Bonus points if you can tell me what recent trailer this music was used in! (hint: Svalbard)

And...

2008-02-18T23:33:00.000-08:00

Since I'm on a little internet/grammar/spelling/behaviour rant ( don't worry, it'll be short lived) I figure I'll pass on some wisdom from the gents at Penny Arcade, one of the greatest web comics ever and one which never fails to start my morning with a good laugh. ;)

www.penny-arcade.com

Check it out, they're geniuses.

Some days...

2008-02-17T13:13:00.000-08:00

... I really wonder. Below are this week's comments on "Courchevel - An FSX Movie". If the youtube community has taught me one thing ( other than that the once beautiful English language has officially deteriorated into little more than grunting via keyboard ) it's that no matter how plainly obvious the answer to a question might be, it'll be asked anyway, and frequently...

even if the answer is written...

directly in front of your face...

...multiple times.

Sigh. ;)

Fight's on!

2008-02-13T03:55:00.000-08:00

So what to do when you're kinda brain fried working on the next vid, and your favourite aircraft maker shows up in your multiplayer session because he's kinda brain fried on gauge coding and wants a break?

Dogfight of course!

David Brice, the head honcho at Iris, popped into my session with his new Pilatus PC-9 beta (which I was just about to try out myself at the time, thanks David) and so why not see what the lighter and sexier version of the Texan can do? ;)

David got the upper hand early on with a smart reversal when I lost sight of him (yeah, even with my track-ir no less, ugh) but I managed to chase him down in the end after quite a protracted low level lufbery (stalemate turning fight). David's a good sport, and that was just way too much fun. :) Incidentally I owe all of my dogfighting skills to the twelve years spent with the often frustratingly unkillable Pebble on my six. Anyway, I had FSrecorder running the whole time and here's how it played out... enjoy!

By the way the PC-9 is just awesome. Pop over to the Iris Simulations forum and check out the incredible cockpit night lighting especially.

Joining my multiplayer sessions...

2008-02-07T13:08:00.001-08:00

So since I've had several requests lately from people here and on youtube about joining my multiplayer sessions, I'm going to run passworded ones from now on and give you the password here. I'll post it permanently on the sidebar to the right as well. Please read this entire post before joining though.

My sessions will still be called "Rafale21 VFR" since that's what the regulars are used to, and the password will be: lotus (lower case). The sessions are always in the free-flight lobby when I'm online, well, when gamespy is working anyway.

I'd love to leave my sessions wide open as I enjoy meeting new people, but ever since Acceleration came out it's just been a disaster every time I do. For some reason the only thing most kids know how to do in FSX is jump in an F-18 and spend an hour buzzing my head. It really gets old. ;) Going with passworded sessions will circumvent the 'friends only' issue as I know it can be difficult to locate my name in the lobby if trying to private message me. Anyway you will need SP2 or Acceleration to join my sessions, and *please please please* have a microphone, I really don't enjoy typing while flying, and often just don't have enough free brain cells for it haha.

For those who haven't flown with me before, I have no rules in my sessions other than politeness to others, in both verbal comms and in flying style, which means flying into others or being a pest won't be tolerated. I'm an anarchist in the strictest sense of the term which means I absolutely hate rules, but those are two I have to keep for everyone's enjoyment. ;) Also, note that if you bring an airliner in you should be prepared to be poked, prodded, and generally made fun of for doing so. ;) You'll mostly find us flying fighters, warbirds, general aviation, or helicopters. I used to be quite into running ATC, and I may yet again one day for kicks, but formation flying is most often what you'll find us doing.

Honestly our non-filming sessions aren't uber-exciting since most of my friends and I play FSX simply to unwind, relax, cruise around and see some pretty sights, but we do have some great and often highly philosophical discussions along the way. Either that or we just blab about meaningless crap, depending on how many bottles of Stella are involved. :)

As a final note, all of our flying group's members are adults, so if you're under 18 our sessions are really not for you. Our discussions enroute can end up on mature topics and that's a freedom I will be maintaining in my sessions. That means that with few exceptions anyone under 18 years old will likely be asked to leave. Sorry, but that's the way it is.

Anyway, if you'd like to fly along with my friends and I (and you're over 18 haha) then please feel free to pop in and say hi if you see my session up. Please also let me know your Youtube name if you've left any comments on my films, so I can put two and two together. I don't expect the password to change unless the aforementioned screaming 10 year olds in F-18s start showing up. :)

Cheers, and hope to see you in the skies!

-lotus

A peek behind the curtain...

2008-02-04T05:26:00.000-08:00

Nope, not another preview, but a blog post about a little road trip I took on Friday, back down to Seattle, to visit the wizards themselves, ACES Studios. Paul Lange, the lead designer on FSX, invited me over for a tour of their shop and to meet the FSX team, and I have to say I was highly impressed. I'd had the pleasure of meeting Hal and Mike Singer at the Avsim conference but it was great to meet Paul and Phil Taylor and many of the other team members and see the shop itself. And before you ask, yes I got a look at some FS11 stuff, and no I'm not saying a bloody word about it, sorry. ;)

What I can tell you is that they're a seriously cool bunch and I was really impressed with everyone I met. Their passion for flying is simply indisputable. Unlike any other game developer I've worked at or even visited, these guys and girls really do care about what they make. I've been in the business long enough to know the difference.

I'm not sure what struck me more, seeing the truly *insane* amount of aircraft paraphernalia and models on every wall and desk (and floor) or the single unopened Flight Simulator 1.0 box I saw in a glass case. That was quite a moment, had to sort of stop and stare at it for a minute. Thanks Bruce Artwick, we all owe you one. :)

We spent a lot of time talking about FSX and the future of flight simulator and I was really surprised at how many things we agreed on, right down to recent addon aircraft we like. Despite the limits imposed by current hardware and systems their vision of where the software could go is pretty cool and far reaching, and while I can't talk about the bits they're working on for the next version I can say that there's going to be some pretty serious wow factor in it if things go according to plan. Even at this very early stage in its development I was impressed with what I saw. Secondarily I had a little bit of a "cult hero's" welcome there from several people which *really* threw me off. I have a few fans at Aces it seems and I found that quite humbling haha.

Their place itself is quite nice actually. Externally it's your typical business park type layout, though at least they have real trees all around it (are you listening San Jose?) but inside it's anything but dull. Bright, spacious, airy and colourful, lots of windows, plenty of toys around and a very complete hot cafeteria (good calzones!). They have quite the art collection of screenshots on their walls as well, many of them by Mango and Cell, two of the best FSX still photographers out there. I also had a look at some of the art in Train Sim 2.0 and found myself remembering a time when I was very young, a rare moment long ago when trains were actually cooler to me than aircraft. :)

Yeah, ok, that didn't last, but I can see that project being a fun alternative for their art team for awhile especially. I can tell you from personal experience that you can burn out on game art pretty fast if you keep doing the same damn thing version after version, year after year. Franchise games are particularly hard on artists and programmers, so for anyone who thinks they should forget this train stuff and get back to FS, think of it instead as a working vacation for them, good for their well being and by extension for the well being of Flight Simulator.

So my thanks to Paul and the Aces team for a great and highly informative afternoon. It was pretty awesome to meet the people who make a product I've been addicted to for over 20 years. ;)

I didn't even get stuck at the border for three hours on the way home as I usually do. Maybe Canada Customs finally located their brains.

Lotus out.

You have GOT to be kidding me...

2008-01-31T03:16:00.000-08:00

I... I can't stop laughing! When I first heard of this thing I thought it was a joke. Unfortunately it isn't. What is this? Retirement for wingviewers? Autopilot too fiddly and complex now? Can't see the wing any more? Fear not dear airliner sim pilot, we have just the thing for you!

BUS SIMULATOR 2008!

Notice the clever use of the FS font style?

If I could stop laughing I'd probably cry.

I'm staggered, seriously. I mean W T F?

On the plus side they actually have billboard ads for cigarettes in the... I was going to say 'game'... in the... umm... thing. When's the last time you saw a 'sim... thing' be so refreshingly politically incorrect? ;)

Riveting gameplay! Get on the bus! Get off the bus! DRIVE the bus! OMG, too fast! NO... not THE BLURRIES! HAHAHAHAHA.

In case you think I AM joking, and let me assure you I am not, click the link below... if you dare. ;)

www.bussimulatorgame.com

Still laughing too hard to sleep.

-lotus out.

I solved the most annoying of all SP2 bugs!

2008-01-30T20:30:00.000-08:00

Woot, go me! :)

Spent six days coming up with a solution for that ridiculous cloud flashing crap we keep seeing over cities and around airports. Tested by Pebble and confirmed working. Hells yeah! Now I can get back to my video work without cringing every time I fly near any kind of settlement.

Here's the procedure, I posted it on Avsim for all to benefit from:

The Fix for SP2 Flashing Clouds

Flying at ZERO feet AGL...

2008-01-24T11:05:00.000-08:00

Just to shake things up from all the Flight Sim stuff, I figure I'll show you a little something that I like to get up to whenever possible. In case you wondered where the 'lotus' in Lotus Films came from, this will give you an idea.

This film covers a day spent blasting around the Seattle International Raceway at some pretty insane speeds, around 150mph on the main straight. It's an incredibly fast track with some truly challenging curves, including one very daunting downhill chicane. I'm in the gunmetal blue Lotus Elise, my mom (yeah, my *mom*) in her silver Lamborghini Gallardo Spyder, and even my uncle came out, nicking a white Elise for the day. The love of speed is hereditary in my family. ;) Great fun and absolutely exhausting!

Enjoy.

Unstart at 80,000 feet...

2008-01-24T06:51:00.000-08:00

Well lookie here, my first hardware review. It's gonna be a thorough one too! It's a motherboard comparison between the Gigabyte X38-DQ6 and the Asus Maximus Formula! Ready?...

<------CRAP.

<------AWESOME.

Whew, stellar review eh! Yup my brand new Gigabyte motherboard had a meltdown on me, so I've been out of the loop for a few days while it got replaced with the excellent Asus one. Turns out the Gigabyte board wouldn't run 4 gigs of ram, umm, at all! Brilliant! Well done guys.

Pebble of course is boggled by the fact that whilst Lotus strives to live on the bleeding edge of PC technology he's always shocked when he finds himself actually bleeding. ;)

One Last Teaser...

2008-01-18T06:59:00.000-08:00

Now that the star of the next film is in place it's time to let you see her. :)

(click image for full resolution version)

The Dassault Rafale M is, in my opinion, *the* sexiest aircraft ever created by human hands. This particularly gorgeous model, created by Thor's Hammer of Dijon, France is not publicly available nor will it be for quite some time, so please don't ask where you can get it. However he has graciously allowed me an exception specifically for the making of the next film. :)

The image isn't photoshopped but is actually a still from one of my test shots, which I've been working on for four hours straight, and given that it's now 7am I need some damned sleep!

I wasn't kidding about that '3am' thing in the header. ;)

-Lotus out.

Things to come...

2008-01-12T04:28:00.000-08:00

Well I've been getting quite a few people pestering me lately on when the next movie's coming out, which I must say I'm pretty humbled by. The concept of having some fans wasn't something I'd ever considered when I started making FS films haha. So thanks for that!

Anyway, here's a little teaser of something I'm working on. It's just some test shots, and the final film will likely feature neither this plane nor song, but it'll give you an idea of the 'feel' the next film might have. ;) This is however a small part of what's going into it. I'm not giving everything away hehe.

This is the first time I've released any kind of work in progress for one of my films, outside the group of people who help me make them anyway, so we'll see how this goes. Also I'd greatly appreciate it if this video does not leave my blog. Links however are fine, thanks. :)

The aircraft: Alphasim's fabulous Saab JAS39 Gripen.
The place: Austria.
The gist: Pure joy.

Enjoy!

Lament: The Deleted Scenes...

2008-01-10T14:21:00.001-08:00

Well after getting this new system I decided to do a little house cleaning and ran across a number of clips from when I was working on Lament. More than any other film Lament was an absolute nightmare to edit down into a single song. I ended up with just a ton of extra footage that I had no place for in the final cut.

So here's all the stuff that was left out, yup, an entire movie's worth haha.

Enjoy!

In case you're curious, the song is 'Bombs' by Faithless.

The Beast Within...

2008-01-09T09:11:00.000-08:00

As of today Lotus Films (the hardware portion) has a new home!

I did a minor trade-up this week, from a core2duo 6600 to... THIS...

This is a seriously *insane* little, err, big machine:

-Intel QX9650 Penryn 45nm processor (3.0 ghz stock)
-Swiftech high flow water cooling system with two 120mm fans.
-Gigabyte GA-X38-DQ6 Motherboard
-1.4 Terabytes of sata-2 storage goodness
-Big arse case ;)

The bits I'm keeping from the system that's carried me through 11 FSX films...

-Nvidia 8800 Ultra 768mb
-2 Gigs 1066mhz DDR2 Corsair Dominator ram

I'd forgotten how much I hate reinstalling windows and all my software, but so far everything's going well. My totally unoptimized copy of FSX is running a little faster and considerably smoother than it was on my highly stressed out core2duo. That old system was running at 3.4ghz, 54 degrees C, and was about as tweaked as a raver on his 5th pill. This thing is humming along at an amazingly cool 27 degrees. That's 4 degrees above ambient folks... not bad!

I'll post some performance comparisons once she's at 100% and I've had a chance to learn how to overclock her properly.

I just need to come up with a name for her. I think she deserves one. Suggestions are welcome!

-Lotus out.

Music and Flight Simulator videos... Lotus' do's and don'ts....

2008-01-02T08:35:00.001-08:00

I figure it's time to talk about music, specifically as it pertains to flight simulator videos. Every now and then I take a long wander through the new FSX arrivals at youtube and I am consistently stunned by the utterly terrible and cliche choices in music in them. So few people ever give any thought to this and it bugs the shit out of me.

So let me give you a quick rundown of the best and worst musical choices one can make when composing a flight simulator video.

The top 5 WORST tracks to choose:

1. Anything from 'Top Gun'. Never EVER EVER EVER use "Danger Zone" or anything else from that musical abomination of a film. Kenny Loggins was NEVER cool... EVER. Same goes for anything from 'Iron Eagle', for the reasons stated above. And yes, that includes Queen's only good song ever, "One Vision", ironically used in the Viper simulator scene. ;)

2. "Learning to Fly" by Pink Floyd. Just... don't... do... it. Thank you.

3. Hip Hop. It is an extremely rare video that can pull off anything flight related with a rap/hip hop soundtrack. Not a diss on hip hop, I quite like a lot of it, it's just that rap culture and aviation go together like strawberries and lard. The only video I've ever seen that actually managed this was Scott221's "Lose Yourself in Lock On". Absolutely brilliant. Check it out on youtube.

4. Country 'music'. I shouldn't need to explain why. It isn't music. It's an insult.

5. "You're the Conversation" by Chris Corner and Sue Denim. This is an absolutely fabulous track and I love it to death. It is also entirely OFF LIMITS. It was written for and accompanied the greatest single aviation moment ever filmed in history, the Alphajet Alps flight in 'Chevaliers du Ciel'. It is sacred. It should never be used by anyone for any flight sim film. Nothing can match the original scene it was used for and to imitate that would do nothing but cheapen that incredible moment of aviation art.

Top 5 GOOD music choices:

1. Pretty much anything electronic, specifically house and trance. Aviation is high tech at its best and I feel it deserves a high tech soundtrack. Exceptions to this are anything by Morel. If you don't know who that is then count yourself lucky.

2. Anything the editors of 'Top Gear' use for their shows. These guys are the absolute masters of matching music to visuals. I take great inspiration from their work.

3. Anything with passion. If a song sounds like it was a labour of love to create it's probably going to work well.

4. Anything you haven't heard before. I'm serious. The more mainstream a track is the more likely I am to mute it or kill the video entirely. If you haven't heard it before then it's likely few others have either and it will give your video a fresh feel.

5. When in doubt, go instrumental. Unless you have a story you're trying to tell through images and music then lyrics will just mess with peoples' heads and divide their attention. If you want to show off the visuals then don't confuse people by making them think in language at the same time.

For reference, here's that perfect aviation moment I was talking about.

-Lotus out.

Aircraft Review: Flight1 Pilatus PC-12 for FSX

2007-12-26T00:06:00.000-08:00

Well aside from spending a lot of time making videos, I also fly a lot just for the hell of it, which I guess is the point of flight sim after all.

So, starting today I'm going to do a quick review of any new aircraft I buy, and since I just picked up something truly fantastic, I'll start with that.

Short review: The Flight1 FSX Pilatus PC-12 quite simply KICKS ASS.

Full review:

If you don't know what this plane is then I'd recommend checking out its specs on Wikipedia. It goes by the nickname "The Swiss Army Knife" and it is very deserving of that moniker. It's a single engine turbine powered 8 seat go frickin' anywhere and FAST airplane. It'll do 270 knots at 30,000 feet and land on any surface in less than 700 feet. It is the ultimate "Courchevelian".

The flight1 model of this beast for FS9 was pretty good but the FSX version of it improves absolutely everything by quite a margin. The VC is one of the best I've ever seen and boasts RealAir quality smoothness in the gauges. The avionics are a truly complete set and are just excellent for IFR work. The night lighting in the VC is also quite beautiful. Any developer that takes the time to backlight gauges perfectly for night flight, thus not requiring me to use the dome light, wins.

The flight model is spot on and has one rare quality among single engine props made for FS: The vertical stabilizer's twist/incidence actually perfectly counteracts the torque of the engine at optimum cruise speed, just as it should in a real aircraft. This seems like a small thing but short of the RealAir Spitfire or Iris Texan II, I've *never* seen a developer get this part of a flight model right. Even RealAir's own SF260 doesn't do it correctly, amazing as that plane is.

The external model is equally beautiful and the textures are sharp and clear. The bump and reflection mapping are also just about perfect, not too shiny, not pitted or overdone in any way. The soundset is, well, soothing. I love the sound of that turbine in cruise, and all anciliary sounds are custom made and well done. Only sound that bugs me is the autopilot disconnect alert as it is just a little too loud. Easily fixed. The thing that stands out most about this aircraft is its consistency. The VC, flight model, sound, external visuals, avionics and gauges all feel as if they were carved from the same block of granite. That kind of consistency in quality both technical and visual is very very rare. Most planes excel in one or two areas and fail horribly in others. This is quite an exception. By the way it comes with 5 repaints. Three of them are rather 'corporate' looking (and you know how I feel about THAT shit), but at least two are refreshingly funky. ;)

Basically I love everything about this plane and I highly recommend it as a purchase. If you want an SUV for the sky that can cover 1200nm without refueling and look *damned good* doing it, then this is the plane for you. Keep in mind that I'm a fighter/warbird/helo kind of guy, so for me to say all that about a large general aviation aircraft means I'm particularly blown away.

On the issue of framerate performance I expected it to give much more of a hit than it did, and I have to say that the hit is much less than the FS9 version's was. I do recommend that you have at least a dual core machine for flying this thing though. Those gauges do take some cpu power to run, but the configuration program it comes with allows you to disable the FO's multifunction displays, and that buys you quite a bit of fps back, around 4 or 5. It degrades my FPS no more than say the Iris Tomcat does, so that's pretty good considering its complexity.

The only real negative I can bring up about this plane is that it won't work in shared cockpit mode, but that's something we've come to expect from aircraft with such complex gauges. There is hope though, ACES recently released the data to allow developers to synchronize local variables in shared mode. Fingers crossed.

The only bugs in the mix are a slightly annoying beacon flashing effect in the VC, a somewhat difficult to read lower GPS panel in certain sun angles, and a slightly odd interior reflection map on the windows. As well I found the default eyepoint position in the cockpit more suitable for a Hobbit than an Elf, but again that was easily fixed. None of these little issues are showstoppers mind you. This bird lives up to its hype and is totally worth the $30 asking price!

Verdict: Buy it right the hell now.

Here's where to get her:

http://www.flight1.com/products.asp?product=fsxpc12

-Lotus

The dumbest peripheral EVER...

2007-12-23T06:32:00.000-08:00

Ok I've seen some *really* stupid peripherals come to market in my 20 years of flight simming. The Aura "interactor" comes to mind (a backpack with a subwoofer in it), followed by the nearly equally stupid bass kicker chair. Seen some really stupid joysticks too, but THIS piece of junk takes the absolute cake. The only person who'd ever buy such a thing is the sort of 'wingviewer' who sits at their PC with a captain's hat on and refers to their wife/girlfriend as "stewardess".... once.

The price? $1200 USD!

Here are some other flight related things $1200 will get you:

1. An intel QX9650 Penryn 45nm processor, and blistering FPS.
2. A whole ton of quality FSX aircraft and scenery addons.
3. About oh... NINE *real* flying lessons.

Even Airbus (aka boring airplane makers), and just about every general aviation aircraft manufacturer thinks yokes are stupid! Are you listening boeing? For the record the goddamned STICK (not yoke) goes on the right, the throttle on the left, the engines in the fuselage, and the missiles on the wings.

Yeah I know, it's *just* a controller and I'm an opinionated bastard. :)

Lotus out.

Group photo!

2007-12-19T23:28:00.000-08:00

I've been wanting to get around to this for a while now but FS-Recorder was giving me grief over it. No longer, beta6 fixed it. I proudly present the members of the Lotus Films actors guild. :)

Enjoy! (click on image for full resolution shot)

100,000!!!!

2007-12-08T00:33:00.001-08:00

I can hardly believe it. When I started the month long project that was to become "Vectors" I thought it might do well, but I never imagined it would hit 100,000 views.

It is so very Stella Artois time. ;)

My thanks go to everyone who gave their free time and effort to the movie and to everyone who watched and left a nice comment, not to mention Aces and the addon makers like Iris and Alphasim who gave us the fine simulator and aircraft needed to pull it off.

Cheers all!

(downs Stella #3...yum)

Unity: Remixed

2007-12-01T15:13:00.000-08:00

"Unity", being a commercial video, used licensed music of course. However, had I been able to choose from *anything* in my library to accompany it?... ;)

The video is rather large (17 mb) so it may take a moment to buffer. Enjoy!

Damn I love Sweden...

2007-11-26T23:05:00.000-08:00

This has absolutely nothing to do with flying but I'm totally smitten by this video and song. Can't explain it really, I just love Sweden, all of it, even if it means random attacks by gangsta gnomes in Stockholm. ;)

Stella Artois, Airplanes, and the Lofotens...

2007-11-24T20:57:00.001-08:00

So what happens on my server after we've had a few pints and find ourselves cruising around northern Norway in FSX? Well, if we stumble upon an airport with a 1200 foot runway like this one in Svolvaer... :)

Pilots: Futureflyer, Juliet, Scooter, and Flagstaff.

Hollywood Dogfighting...

2007-11-20T10:19:00.000-08:00

Awhile back Pebble and I were asked about the possibility of doing some previsualization for a film in which a sport plane was to be chased by a fighter through downtown Los Angeles. Happily I accepted the task, primarily because one thing I loathe is seeing unrealistic aviation in hollywood films. If you're going to do it, do it correctly guys. Personally I think 99% of the technical directors in LA should be shot, they wouldn't know realism if they were sucked into a jet engine, but that's just me. ;)

Anyway, although that project never got off the ground, I learned a ton in the process of making this film, which demonstrated the realism we could achieve, at least in flight paths. Vectors wouldn't have been very good at all if I hadn't taken this on first, and unlike that film there's no trickery here. Enjoy!

Pilots: Pebble in the Turbo SF 260 Marchetti, Myself in the F-18.

Music: Gardner & Thomas - Propaganda (love this frickin track!)

The Iceland Project...

2007-11-16T04:35:00.000-08:00

Yup, I'm making FSX scenery now too. :) Iceland... the land of Irish Monks first, then Vikings, and now the most beautiful women in the entire world... by far. I've seen most of the world, so trust me when I say that. ;) It's the land of the Elves for me, loved every second I spent there a few years ago, and it is by far the most neglected country in all of FSX, so I felt it was time to give it an upgrade. It's roughly the size of England and Wales put together, so it's not something I'm going to finish anytime soon. I've been learning to use FSXKML, which I have to say is one seriously elegant tool. It interfaces almost directly with google earth (can't believe I finally found a use for that stupid thing), and once you get your head around their interpretation of SDK scenery work, it's quite easy to use. I have the entire coastlines finished for the country, in very high resolution (what a zen experience it was tracing those out!), and I'm now working on lakes and rivers. After that I'll be tackling the landclass, ships, marinas etc, and all of Iceland's 200+ lighthouses. Given Iceland's insanely variable climate the landclass part is going to be interesting.

Slartibartfast would probably just laugh at me, but here's a preview screenshot of the Akranes peninsula so far, work in progress is on the top, default scenery on the bottom.

Lastly a fun fact for you: The oldest surviving democracy in the world is not the United States believe it or not. It is in fact Iceland. Amazing eh? Their fully democratic parliament, the 'Althing', was founded in 930 AD and functions virtually unchanged to this day.

Okay, just what is it about TNCM anyway?

2007-11-04T01:47:00.001-07:00

Lately I've been noticing a *lot* of Princess Juliana airport FSX videos on Youtube. I scan the new arrivals daily and I keep noticing this one damned airport showing up again and again and again. I blame FlyTampa. What's the fascination?

Here's something fun to try. Search youtube for "FSX+TNCM" (the airport's icao code).

148 videos!

Now search for: "FS2004+TNCM'

299! WTH!

Can someone explain to me why there's such a TNCM fetish among simmers? Yes it's a pretty airport, if airports can be called that, yes people can get blown over by jet exhaust and wake turbulence on the beach short of the threshold, yes it's in the caribbean, and yes I know it was pretty much the only airport in the FSX demo, but COME ON. Do we need 447 videos of Juliana? No, we don't, one would have been sufficient really.

There... are... other... airports.... 27000 of them in fact.

Rant over. ;)

-Lotus

Back to the fun stuff...

2007-11-04T01:07:00.000-07:00

So Acceleration adds a moving carrier eh? Too slow! Beat em to it a couple months ago. The following movie was our first attempt at landing on a moving carrier in FSX. No big trick you say, carriers could move in FSX before. Yeah they could, but they weren't synchronized in multiplayer, and they still aren't, even in Acceleration. This one however is. It's pilotless and it's doing about 35 knots off the coast of Wellington. Don't ask me how, it's witchcraft. ;) Enjoy. Oh... and the poor soul in the Texan who had *obviously* never landed on a carrier before shall remain anonymous, for now. I'll blackmail him with this video at some point, hehe.

Accelerate or Decelerate? Get the addon or not?...

2007-10-31T18:38:00.000-07:00

So here's my rundown of Acceleration after a week's hard use. For anyone who's on the fence about it, read on, I'm going to give you a comprehensive list of the plusses and minuses.

Accelerated (the good stuff):

-DX9 Performance is definitely up. New autogen batching etc worked well.

-The F-18 is great overall. The hud kicks ass, sooo nice.

-The P-51 is there. That's all. I don't like em.

-The EH-101 is there. See above.

-The water rendering options are waaaay better. Low 2.x is just water. Mid 2.x is reflected clouds only (yay), High 2.x reflects clouds and terrain but not autogen (yay!), and Max 2.x reflects everything. That's how it should have been set up from the start.

-Multiplayer Fixes, LOTS OF EM. Canopy/exit animations now show correctly in multi, as do airbrakes and tailhooks. Awesome. Been waiting for that for six years. Landing gears no longer get out of sync when someone appears to pass through terrain. Wicked.

-Multiplayer lobby screens no longer jump around like a jack russell terrier. You can actually select a game or add people to your contact lists without feeling like you're playing whack-a-mole. Nice one.

-The Missions are great, assuming you can get the EH-101 which is used for most of them to behave like an actual helicopter (see below).

-Smoke effects no longer detach from your aircraft at low altitude.

Decelerated (the not so good stuff):

-DX10 is a disaster for most people, myself included. Could be FSX, could be drivers, could be Vista, could be all of the above. Whatever it is, help is needed urgently.

-Flashing clouds. It doesn't happen often but clouds aren't as stable anymore on quick track-ir movements.

-Landclass issues. I've seen fields of crops on the PEAKS of the alps, not in the valleys. This is with default landclass data, so either Sp2 models some extremely ambitious farmers or something's seriously porked there.

-Sloping water/rocks bug is back. They fixed this in Sp1, but the 'Thames river bug' is back in Sp2. That's going to put a small dent in my Iceland vector project.

-Vsync is no longer available through the fsx.cfg. It can be forced in the driver in DX9, is totally hosed in DX10. That's a DX10 showstopper for me right there. No Vsync no play.

-All sorts of texture problems, even on correctly compiled pure FSX aircraft. Most of these can and will be fixed, either by users or developers. I'll fix the ones I care about.

-Light effects on the external models can cause all sorts of weirdness texture wise in the VC. On my SR-71 the afterburner lights turn my artificial horizon into a mirror...umm... Haven't even begun to figure this out yet.

-The EH-101 flight model... is.... crap! To be remotely flyable it has to be run on lowest realism settings. It wanders, the engine surge, hovering is hopeless. Keep an eye on the guys at Hovercontrol, my bet is they'll fix it before the developer can.

-F-18 Afterburner effect is a cartoon in motion. I can and will fix that. The rear landing gear is ridiculously high and out of proportion to the chord line of the aircraft. Again I think I can fix that. Just what photo were they working from I'd love to know.

-The P-51 sometimes catches fire in multiplayer for no reason, even with engine damage disabled. It also has some sound issues when two of them are in a session.

-SP2 multi is not backwards compatible with SP1 multi. Doesn't bother me, but the lobbies are looking a bit like a ghost town at the moment, we'll see how it goes.

That's it for now. Overall I like it... I think. ;)

Format C: never felt so good...

2007-10-30T01:53:00.001-07:00

Back in action! XP rocks I have to say. Vista is... umm... how to put this nicely... unfinished. To put it honestly though, it's crap. When their own Windows Media Player in it can't even play movies of their own Windows Media Format without screen tearing one has cause to worry. That was my first indication that things were not about to go well. The other was the bird that smashed into my window and died just after I installed Acceleration. That was the moment my week of insanity started. Next time I'll pay better attention to the universe's little signs. Oh well XP wasn't exactly awesome until about 2 years after it was released, so I have high hopes for Vista. Some parts of it are really quite elegant.

I'll never refer to XP as 'bloatware' again that's for sure. Compared to Vista it's a lean long distance runner. Anyway, Vista rant over, it's great to be back and able to make movies without feeling like I'm about to have an epileptic fit from all the stuttering. At least I'm ready now for DX10 if and when they actually get FSX working properly in it. On the plus side I have an 8800 ultra now and a wicked new 700 watt PSU. On the downside I lost an entire week of my life from fighting with a single piece of software. I guess I must like it or I wouldn't bother. ;)

Aside from the DX10 debacle Acceleration is actually pretty good. There are lots of silly little problems with it like any release, and some I can fix myself, some I can't. Not gonna worry about it though. Overall performance is up even in DX9 and that's what counts. The F-18 is quite well done and easily has the *best* HUD ever made for any version of FS. I'll be finding a way to knick that and put it in the rest of my fighter collection right away. At least they fixed my #1 gripe with FS since 2002, and that's gear synchronization in multiplayer. Make one mistake and they got out of sync for the rest of the session. There's no excuse for not fixing that for SIX YEARS when it's just a simple variable type change (Toggle -> Boolean), and would take them all of about 2 seconds to do.

While fixing that they also managed to fix lots of other sync problems, spoilers, canopies, tailhooks etc. Go ACES! They're copping an absolute thumping on the various community forums over this DX10 stuff though. I really wouldn't want to be in their shoes. Never seen so many threads locked in one day. The people are that pissed. They've spoken, they want an SP2a. I hope ACES delivers just that. I think they might have to. If these are the final code bits for FSX then the multiplayer community could very well be split in two: Those who can't deal with Sp2's issues and those who can, and that I think would be pretty sad. :(

Fingers crossed.

-Lotus out.

Firewha?

2007-10-28T17:48:00.000-07:00

Oh yeah, Firefox. Forgot about that one. They like to do things differently, really just to annoy anyone struggling with their basic html skills. ;) Movies should be now working in browsers other than IE. Sorry 'bout that.