Phil Taylor, new (as of July) Senior PM for Graphics and Terrain in Aces Studio, which produces the Flight Simulator series, has become active on his blog. He’s reprinted his famous AVSIM post, and there’s some interesting bio info.
Here’s a few shots of Carcross. Myles in Whitehorse has kindly done some photography for me, and as soon as the temp gets above -35C, he’ll do some more. There’s several more buildings around the airfield.
These scenery will be part of Holger’s upcoming Glacier Bay version 2 for FS9. Vehicles are from Lars Hoyer’s package, with textures edited by Holger to reduce loading times.
The pics are:
1. Carcross Tagish First Nation Project Office (immediately adjacent to the CFA4 runway)
2. Carcross station of the White Pass & Yukon Railway
3. The derelict Carcross Hotel and Matthew Watson General Store
4. An overview of the area, including a bit of the railroad leading into town. Note the “World Famous” Carcross Desert in the background. (world’s smallest desert, they say)
Victoria+ has been in beta for a few days now, and in the next day or so we’ll test compatibility with an alpha version of Don Grovestine’s CYYJ. The next beta version will have some minor issues fixed, and include the installer/configurator.
The new upgrade is now available. Exisiting users should sign on to their simMarket account. (You should have already received instructions via email). Before installing V1.1, be sure to run your current version configurator (1.0) and Restore Defaults for Uninstallation. Then uninstall V1.0. This is no longer necessary once V1.1 is installed.
New purchasers can get the product here.
Vancouver+ Version 1.1 has been finalized. Thanks to the hardworking development team, and particularly to our swarm of diligent testers, and Francois at FSAddon, our distributor. When the ecommerce update process is complete I will post the link. Existing users will find additional buildings (the Melville, Bentall V, Park Place, Flying Beaver, Space Museum), the SkyBridge, additional floatplane traffic including new DHC-3 and DHC-6 models, new repaints for floatplanes and helis, more birdies flying about, and many minor improvements and bug fixes. This upgrade is free for V1.0 owners, and new purchasers will get all features. Here’s some links to screenshots in previous posts:
CYPK, downtown and the Flying Beaver
Park Place and the Macmillan Space Centre
And with the completion of that upgrade, the beta team has now got it’s teeth into the long-awaited Victoria+, a major upgrade to the Victoria/Southern Gulf Island series.
I’ve seen lots of great videos recently on YouTube. But I’ve always been suspicious of sites that have sleazy banner ads. I noted to day that YouTube is going one step further: when using the search function, 5/6 times rather than getting what I sought, I was presented with a cheesy flashing banner, “You’re the 1,000,000th visitor! You’ve won a Free* laptop! Claim within 080 [insert countdown counter here] seconds!”
For fun I clicked the link, and indeed if you sign up for spam, plus 6 trial offers of various products, and get 2 households that you refer to also sign up for all that junk, they claim they’ll send you a laptop.
Now I’m ignorant of the law, but isn’t telling lies in advertising illegal? (Yes, I was the 1,000,000th visitor many times today!)
I’m not impressed YouTube.
Here’s a cool view of North American planes in flight. Quicktime needed. The colour-coded aircraft is my favourite.
I’d heard good things about this FSX review, but it took a while to ingest it! It’s quite extensive, in 5 parts. One caution: the links in some of the parts seem to be flaky, and a page often came up 404 Not Found. Going to the parts I could access, and linking from there eventually got me all 5 parts.
How frame rate/frames per second (FPS) affects the user experience appears to be highly subjective. Some folks are quite content at 15 FPS, while others (like me) find 30 FPS only marginally acceptable and prefer 40 or more. I think that pretty well everybody accepts that stutters (inconsistent FPS) is a bigger problem and that a smooth flow (even at low FPS) is important.
Further, FPS is likely only going to be an issue when there is fast movement on the screen, so in FS9 or FSX this might occur during sharp turns. If flying heavy iron, low FPS is not nearly as much of an issue.
One reference: http://cas.umkc.edu/comm/faculty/Gutenko/papers/PURSUI.HTM states, “Thomas Edison had determined to his satisfaction that film should reproduce frames fortysix times each second in order to be completely free of flicker and discontinuity of motion (Brownlow, p.284). Through unpublished experiments conducted at the joint Trumbull/Paramount Pictures research division of Future General Corporation, Trumbull determined to his own satisfaction that an effective maximum frame rate should be sixty (Smith, 1984):”
Look at fast action on a large movie screen (at 24 fps) and see how jerky it looks. Most film and video is limited to 30 fps, and they are quite correct, the brain will accept this to some degree as reality, expecially as this has been the standard for decades and we are used to it. But immersion is quite different, and subjective. I can certainly tell the difference between 30, 40, 60 and higher fps. It looks smoother and more natural, at 20 fps it’s very distracting. Other folks are clearly happy at 20 or even 15.
I’ve heard some say that the scenery detail is much more important for their immersion, and they will gladly tradeoff FPS for detail. Your monitor is a factor of course too; if it has 16ms response time, it likely cannot render above 60 fps anyway.
The bottom-line is that how much frame rate affects the enjoyment of the sim (or any game) is in the eye of beholder.
Phil Taylor, Senior PM for Graphics and Terrain in ACES Studio at Microsoft (which develops the Flight Simulator product) has posted an extensive explanation of some of the issues which the team is grappling with, including performance. Further, he has chosen to fully engage with the community (even the trolls!) in a constructive way.
Recently some of the developers on the team have shown up at www.fsdeveloper.com to provide useful advice and hints for developers.
It’s a brand new world.
EDIT: this thread at AVSIM has gone AWOL. A copy of Phil’s statement was posted at SimFlight.
A non-techy friend asked me to check into computer prices, so I built a system on dell.ca, then thought I’d get an answer to a simple question by trying the Dell chat feature. After no wait, here’s the dialog that ensued. Insert 10 seconds to 1 minute or more for each Dell response.
Jon>Does the E521 have a network connection for a high speed modem?
Dell>Welcome to Dell Canada Sales Chat. My name is Joe. I’ll be your personal sales advisor today. I’m reviewing your question and typically respond in 20 secs or less so please don’t go away.
Dell>network card is already available
Jon>included in the system price then?
Dell>what is the base price of the system you have chosen to configure
Jon>$668
Dell>would you using dial up for Internet or high speed
Jon>high speed likely. I note the option for 56k modem is clear
Dell>We would encourage you to use my SALES REP EXT <number> on the SHIPPING ADDRESS page while placing an order ONLINE so that we could get you the order confirmation and the Tracking number right away and expedite the order
Dell>how do you want to pay for this purchase
Jon>not ready to order at this time, thank you. Just wanted to confirm that the system could connect to a high speed modem.
Jon>If so, that’s all the info I need today. Thanks for your help.
Dell>you can save my sales rep number if you are ordering in future you can mention so that i will be your authorized dell representative
Jon>alrighty, I cut and pasted it for future refernce, thanks
Dell>Welcome to Dell Canada Sales Chat. My name is Joe. I’ll be your personal sales advisor today. I’m reviewing your question and typically respond in 20 secs or less so please don’t go away
Dell>Sorry that was not for you
Jon>oh, Joe, what will be the shipping cost for that system?
… and I waited a minute or two without a response before deciding to click on the FAQ button in the browser window that spawned the seperate chat window. The response: This will terminate your chat. Click OK. No option but to terminate.
What’s even more fun is that the chat dialog shows the time of each response, but using a special warping function that made it look like I was getting a fast response (dell responses were clocked at 5 seconds or so, when the reality was 10 seconds to a minute or more), while attributing the long time for the Dell response to me! Most interesting.
I haven’t included the reps name or ID in the above dialog, because this isn’t about one rep, it’s likely about a system that overloads the reps and drives them to close the sale with a frantic zeal that ignores all else.
So the next step? Find another vendor that pays attention, or give Dell a call. I won’t be needing that sales reps number though ….
