I've "gone aero"

Being a professional aerospace engineer, the idea of having an "Aero" TLD has been on my mind for a while now. So I finally treated myself and registered www.brisland.aero for myself.

Feel free to pay the site a visit - and feel even more free to drop me a line to critique the content.

Oh my God!

It has been months since I last posted! Not that I have had nothing to say, but more due to the fact that I have been busier than sin! Betas all over the place. Repaints - well, a few. Job hunting too and now I find myself eligible for a .aero TLD.

So watch out folks - Eagleskinner could be going .aero - but that domain will have to be more along my professional status - with some sim-work thrown in for good measure...

Anyways... this was just a post to let you know I am still alive and kicking.

Area Alpha - One Man's View

(This is not a "commercial review"; just some subjective feelings from a Beta Tester)

Originally I chose to volunteer to "fly beta" on this particular area, because the original Vancouver addon had a great little "read along" adventure about Chuck Merryweather. OK, his adventure poaches a bit of the neighbouring terrain, but I had flown that area quite a lot in FS9.

Was the FSX version going to live up to it?

Yes! Cubed! And then some!

But whoa there, don't take me at face value. Let's look a bit closer and deeper into FSX and it's new features first.

FSX can cope with a far greater tree density - Vancouver "outlands" just happen to be very "treed". Point one to FSX for a greater level of detail.

Next, the meshes. Again, FSX can handle a far greater LOD than FS9 did. You go flying low around the FSX version of the Vancouver hinterland, and you are going to be low - in some rather realistically unpleasantly steep-sided ravines in places. Point to FSX

You want crazy flying? In the "9" version I would set a strongish wind from the town and land a Beaver or later the DO27 on the helipad at the Grouse Mountain lodge. In the "X" version I have discovered the ski slope nearby. More fun even, than Courchevel in France. Point to Vancouver and X for "original landing sites"

Visuals. I am not a real world pilot, although I used to be one - gliders - and have collected a few chopper hands-on hours as perks of the job as well. FSX isn't there yet, but the visuals are so much improved, that old pilot habits are coming back. When I approach a new field (well, any field now) I find myself looking for the visual clues to landing. They aren't there yet, but the flight experience is going the right way. You find yourself looking a lot more respectfully at the scenery. Point to X again

Over the past few weeks of testing, I have clocked up over 100 hours day and 25 hours night on both a modern "fast CPU" PC and my "slower" one. Microsoft have "paid the ferryman" after the FSX launch disaster and fixed it with SP1. A lot of other wise folk have added tweaks to our knowledge base. You really do have to "work" with FSX to get your rig enjoyable - it was a lot easier in 9. Point to 9.

The Vancouver scenery is addictive! See above - so many hours collected and I still have not had enough of the scenery! The landscape is simply perfect for bush flight. There's "wild country" to land in - start up your Tundra-tyred Beaver and fly up a river - there's plenty of gravel banks to use as a landing site.

Someone (Erich) posted this video as a very surprised member on Simflight and asked "Whe re in the X world can we do this?"

In a couple of days, this guy is one guaranteed Vancouver customer! There's plenty of places to do that in the Vancouver scenery.

This is not the place to plug someone else's addon, but I am going to anyway. Hi Fi Sim have brought out Active Sky for FSX and X Graphics. Add the three programmes together, and you really get one hell of a bundle. The Vancouver hinterland is absolutely amazing when the weather closes in. Misted valleys, haze, city grot - it's all there. Simply amazing!

Praise over! What can I say against Vancouver Plus?

A fair bit actually. But nothing that can be directed against the Sandmann / Patch / FSAddon team. There are still some limitations within FSX that cause strange overlaps between the MS scenery and the FSAddon textures. Roads break off in places up in the woods. Sometimes scenery floats past in the sky (well, trees) - this is caused by having your settings really high. As you change views, the PC will forget to redraw some tree objects and you'll have floaters for a while, until the next scenery re-draw. Some object alignment is a wee bit off (there is still some object placement inaccuracy in the sim itself it appears) - but if you're a "normal" flyer, you aren't going to notice much.

One thing about this scenery addon... it's going to save you money for a while. How so? You aren't going to want to buy anything else for quite a while! (Even if you do go and get the Hi Fi sim stuff)

I'd like to comment more about this marvellous addon, but I don't have the time - I want to go fly some more!

This is a "must have" with all the bells and whistles!

Eta Beta Pi

...or "To Beta or not to Beta?"

I really have been remiss, haven't I? How long has it been since my last post? Months? Seems like it.

The trouble is, so many exciting things have been happening, so much is going on, FSX has finaly been tamed by SP1 and we are nearer to DX 10 Graphics. A couple of months ago, you could have chased me up the garden path and back again - Fly FSX in very high detail mode on my PC? Not on your Nellie!



Well first of all, the pundits have been coming up with all sorts of FSX tweaks - Fiber Frame Fractions, Max Autogen Trees or Buildings per Cell, Texture Bandwidth... FSX was improving already before SP1. Now SP1 is here and the difference is staggering! I can fly in X at 15 to 20 FPS no problems.

"Huh, I hear you say, "I get 50 in FS9 all sliders right..."



Well, FSX is a LOT heavier on our systems. 2500 Trees 1200 Buildings, most sliders way up towards the right... and 15 SMOOTH Frames / second. I can live with that. The scenery is so much improved now and the payware addins are really coming up trumps in ways we really didn't think about six months ago. And planes...

Don't get me started folks! The airplane market for FSX is amazing. Freeware, Payware... it's all there and more than there was this time last "iteration" - at least that is the feel I am getting. It's also been so busy in the scene, that I have even started pulling a few FS9 planes across, like my beloved Christen Eagle. Anyway, where have I been? Well, I can safely tell you about a couple of Betas closed - First of all, there was the Aerosoft Beaver and the Helgoland scenery.

The Beaver is really an update based on the FS9 paints. OK, there's far more paints for the Beaver X now, but it is still basically "poor" in the paint sense. Instead of fully implementing the FSX paint techniques to the full, Aerosoft have chosen to do a simple adaptation of the FS9 skins. No, don't get me wrong, the Beaver is a great value-for-money payware. It's just that I have been spoiled by some pretty damn good FSX painting recently.

The Helgoland Beta was an amazing experience. The trouble is, my most recent Beta invitation is Helgoland to the power of ten! If you thought Helgoland was good, you wait till you see the jaw dropper "xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx" Sorry! I can't tell you. More to the point, there's another Beta I am on - "yyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy" and that is even more stunning! Folks, you are in for a HOT summer.

And then there's Vancouver X - go visit the FSAddon site and have a peek at THOSE previews - and take a drool mop for your keyboard!

Then there was another little project I had started to get involved in. This little darlin' is amazing! A pity that it is not going anywhere. I did some paints six months ago, bu the dev team has not yet managed to pull the chestnuts out of the fire yet. But just think! This plane will have a level of detail hitherto unknown in the FS world. We're talking up to 800 and more pixels per foot resolution in places and rivet heads that can be modelled - and not just painted or bump mapped.



OK, let me see about som images to pad out this post...


There you go - business as usual. Don't forget to go explore my Photobucket... loads more there. Have fun!

Stits and Farts

Yep, this blog is moving along in stits and farts...

Again it's been ages since I last posted - but at least I have an excuse folks. But who cares? I just hope you are enjoying this as we go along. Anyway, what's my latest escapade? Let me see now...

I quit my old job, moved house, am settling in to the new town and job, started some fitness training - the trainer is a distant relative of the Marquis de Sade - I've almost sorted all my baggage out after the move and my main PC
is online again. That sums it all up I think.

Anyway, I've been invited to join the Aerosoft Catalina Beta Test team - an honour and a pleasure! It'll be a while before anything useful comes from that, but she is looking great already. As for the fun side of sim flight, well I had a session over New Zealand doing a dog fight with two Spitfires. That was fun. Otherwise there's no real news to report.

Enjoy the scenery...

And this makes three

Third post in two days! What's all this? Well, this is a predominantly graphical post to show another series of pictures.

That recorder module is fun, but I am still not "cutting it", as they say. I can get aeroplanes in the same "lump of sky", but true formation is still eluding me. Personally I'd be the bad workman and blame my tools... I "need" a wraparound six axis full motion simulator so that I can really "feel" where I am in this simulated 3D world.

But I managed a reasonably close straight and level with nine BAe Hawks today. I set up one plane straight and level, locked in the autopilot for heading and altitude hold, let the plane settle with the throttle at the top detente (Saitek X52, you can feel an interim "3/4 throttle" position) and then saved the flight.

Using the recorder module I now let the plane fly on for six minutes. Right, I now have six minutes of steady straight and level flight to work with - should be a piece of wee wee to set up a sequence, no?

No!

Even starting the module on record with traffic and the two planes overlapping, you very soon end up drifting up or down or off the track.

More practice is needed - and next time I'll do it without FSUIPC and turbulence :) :)

And then there is a spate of entries

Well, a second one in just a few days that is :)

First of all: big surprise, my blog is read! I just noticed a comment and I also checked the stats counter...

But most important entry in the blog today is:

I HAVE FOUND THAT ELUSIVE YETI!!!

I can't remember exactly when I installed the Lukla scenery, but I have been up Kali Himal so many times I just can't remember. Today I thought I'd have another atempt and lo and behold, I departed Lukla in my EC 120, looped round to the south, headed east and then north. Flew past Kali Himal and did a right turn up a likely looking approach for the mountaineers and there he (?) was, right out in the open...

Where has it all gone? Time that is...

First blog this year - and the years nearly over already! It's been a funny old start to the year, has this one. Job worries, health worries, various mid lifers - you might know the sort of things. You know, the ones where the only answer is "Sh*t happens".

And it certainly has for me... Car crash too.

Although one of the "events" must have been a bird of paradise one...

Because despite an adverse start to the year, I am now getting a fresh start in a fresh new permanent job and even if this is a very positive move, it does mean a lot of extra work with all that house hunting and packing of boxes. Ah well. New job, new town, new friends...

Anyway, this is just a short post to let anyone who does read my musings know I am still alive.

Of Specs, Bumps and Other Practical Things

On the principle that a day without learning something new is a day wasted, I guess I am now entitled to "Prof. Emeritus", because I have been learning like Billy-O. FSX has done some interesting new things for us painters, and not all of them nice. A texture set for an aircraft now has up to four sheets. OK, the emissive map we don't need to touch (those are the "night textures"), but now we have specular lighting and bump mapping to play with.

"Ah well," the pundits might say, "you don't need to create a new bump map or specular when you repaint a model." and this is generally true - if the people who made the plane also made a sensible bump and spec set.

So what, in simple terms, is a "Spec" and a "Bump"

Let's start with "specular" and say a prayer of thanks to Wikipedia, because the answer is pretty easy:

Specular reflection is the perfect, mirror-like reflection of light (or sometimes other kinds of wave from a surface, in which light from a single incoming direction is reflected into a single outgoing direction. Such behaviour is described by the law of reflection, which states that the direction of outgoing reflected light and the direction of incoming light make the same angle with respect to the surface normal; this is commonly stated as θ_i = θ_r.

So... is that all clear now? No? I thought not. Nor for me. Oh the quote makes sense enough, but what does the specular image do in FSX? Why do Microsoft's default aircraft have such funny hued images as their "Specs"?

Let me see now, metal reflects differently to plastic or glass or a silvered mirror... OK... and a red surface reflects differently to a green surface... Riiigggghhhht... (google gooogle goooogle...) I found one interesting reference somewhere, where the author wrote something like "I have found the best specular for me is a 180 shift..."

...and it was that "180 shift" that finally got me going in the right direction. Whoever it was, he (or she) was talking about degrees, and 180 means opposite - as in the opposite side of the colour wheel, as in colour wheel in your paint program. For those fashion conscious among you - think "complimentary colours". Look in your graphics program and you'll probably see a section where you can edit the colours, and one of the options there will show a circle with options to pick out different kinds of complimentary or opposite colours.

Anyway - I don't want to make this too long. Just suffice to say that the specular component of a texture set defines how the model shines. A polished paint surface will reflect white light as white light, so your specular needs to be "180 shifted". A slightly matt (satin finish, for instance) surface will add its base colour to the reflected light. So here you'd need to tone your spec image differently.

So for shiny airplanes, all you need to do is to flatten your image and then shift the colours by 180 degrees.

That, in essence, is what it's all about - finding the right section of the colour circle and shifting your specular image to suit. There is more - brightness for one thing. A spec image also carries an alpha component, which is not like the alpha we know from FS9. No, in FS9 the dark part of the alpha means more reflectivity. It's the other way round in FSX for the specular. A darker alpha for the spec map will make the reflection less harsh and a lighter one... well, let's put it this way - if you have too harsh an alpha for your specular, you'll end up seeing all the polygons on your model.

Lord, so many words already and I still haven't gotten anywhere. My suggestion is to read the SDK and try to remember. Here's what I have written on a note pad on my desk:

Specular - a two part image (base plus alpha). Shift the base colour by 180 for reflected light. Make the alpha channel grey scale. Experiment with different values of light and dark until you find some you are happy with. My values - 180 clour shift, 35 - 50% lighter for the colour image, save copy as-is but grey scale and use as alpha

Bump map - "flatten" a copy of the texture sheet (remove things like text, logos, emblems and other parts of the skin that don't usually have depth). Go to your "effects" section and choose the "Emboss" effect. Not too high. Select target colour to "greyscale" - that way the height map separates out into thre channels - RGB. MS have declared that the red channel is used for the alpha, so click off the blue and green channels and make the red into an alpha channel (grey). Back to the RGB channels and flood fill RED with black colour. Then flood fill the BLUE with white. Switch on all channels again and you are left with a blue toned image, just like the microsoft bump maps.