I've been at Microsoft, working on video games, for 10 and a half years. For 10 of those years I've worked on one Flight Simulator title after another, lastly holding the Art Director position for ACES studio-- makers of Microsoft Train Simulator, Combat Simulator, Flight Simulator and now ESP. I've met and worked with great people, and I'm proud of the work that we've done.

All things change though, and so it's my happy opportunity to tell y'all that I'm leaving Microsoft (my last day as a full time employee will be Friday December 21, 2007) to pursue my first love:

Fine art.

I realize that may induce a few 'hunhs?!!?' in the audience, but before I started pushing pixels around, I was a traditional artist.

So, yep. I'm going home to paint pretty pictures, and hopefully to sell enough of them to buy food and pay the mortgage.

I of course have a website:

http://www.jasonwaskey.com/

And while I haven't been blogging regularly here, I have been doing a bunch of blogging here:

http://jasonwaskey.blogspot.com/

Please stop by, and take a look. Sign up to have paintings delivered to your e-mail inbox as I post 'em!

Heck, while you're at it, buy a couple! :)

Happy Trails,

Jason Waskey

 

PS

I'll still pop up at ACES now and again to do some side work for the studio, so y'all haven't seen the last of me yet...

 

 

*Lyrics

 

 

I'm not back yet.

But I did clear out some of the comment spam. ugh.

A blogpost, that I might add, which has nothing to do whatsoever with free money in any way shape or form.

In the bunco squad we call this "bait and switch."

Sim-Outhouse got a few screenshots of FSX the other day, and one of the fellows who frequents over there (MCDesigns; aka "Michael") noted...

"Still concerned with the prop blur on the bell..."

...which is in reference to the fact that the Bell 206B we model has two blades, while in the screens it looks as if it has four. You can see a different version of the "more than two blades effect" at the FSInsider site. In the example just linked, it would appear that there are five blades...

So what's up with that? In an image from the previous version of FS you can see that we modeled  the two blade effect. (hat tip to Avsim for the image).

Here then is the repy I gave to Michael:

"Hi Michael,

We've done several versions of the Bell over the years, and one of the things that's felt particularly anemic to my eyes has been the prop effect.

We've always used a two prop blur effect, and the thing is, it just doesn't look like what you see in real life. Sure, when you see a photo of a 206 prop, you see two blades.

We've tried a few different effects, and have settled on the effect you see reflected in the shots floating around. I know that it looks a little off in a static screenshot, but I hope you'll like the result when it's in motion, in the sim."

So what do you think? Should we model to what people might expect-- the reality as seen from a photo? Or should we err on the side of what we think looks more real in action? I think that there are valid reasons to do both, but at the end of the day customer expectation has to play a part.

In the next couple of months I'll get some video out that shows the effect in motion, and that should help folk make up their minds. But in the meantime, don't be afraid to chime in. What do you think?

PS:

Here's Michael's answer:

"Very true Jason, a real pic looks pretty much like 2 blades with even less of a blur than in the current texture and when spinning, looks like the new blur. I am a heli fanatic and have repainted nearly every model that has been in FS since FS2002 and the rotor blur has always been something I am very critical off. If the new one is still based on a texture, then we can alter it for personal preference once it's released, so no worries."

And you can read the whole thread here.

 

Niniane's had a blog around for a while now, I just keep forgetting to add it to the roll.

I was reminded of Niniane's blog by former ACES team member Steve Lacey (wow! now there's a blast from the past!) who sent along this link:

http://www.valleywag.com/tech/google/niniane-the-google-blogger-156128.php

 

 

 

 

I'm hoping we get more than one post out of this fellow...   :)

http://blogs.technet.com/p-12c_pilot/archive/2006/02/21/420153.aspx

 

Also added to the blogroll (and Lacey has been moved to the alumni roll)

 

 

 

This time over at Sim-Outhouse...

 

http://www.sim-outhouse.com/sohforums/showthread.php?t=14412

 

 

This time over at Simflight.com

http://forums.simflight.com/viewtopic.php?t=49582

(notice how I started naming the screenshots with a little more info?)

I wonder where they'll pop up next...  ;)

As we move into the six month of ACES team members writing blogs and interacting on Flight Simulator user community boards, I thought it appropriate to point people to this gem from Guy Kawasaki (former Apple evangelist):

http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/02/the_art_of_crea.html

(found via Scoble)

For an entertaining read, check out the comments...

 

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70179-0.html

 

We released some new screens of FSX lately, and as I read over the reactions, one of the things I see are folk asking for shots of this and that. I'd like to take the opportunity to point out that we're not done yet! :)

We try not to show stuff off in our screens that isn't representative of what we expect to ship.

I'll quote an exchange I had with a nice fellow at Sim-Outhouse:

I wouldn't have to kill you, just disable any ability you have to communicate with the outside world.

Not all features are complete. The feature set is pretty much frozen. There will be user feedback wrapped into the product (via the beta program) before FSX hits the shelves. Not all content scheduled is complete, but some areas are more complete than others.

There are tweaks being done across the board.

Nowhere near all new features have been dislosed yet.

Cheers,

Jason

http://fsinsider.com/screenshots/default.htm

 

 

Remember the coyote I talked about in this post from September: http://blogs.technet.com/pixelpoke/archive/2005/09/30/411829.aspx?

Well I think he may have followed me home. I saw another coyote about two blocks from my house.

I live right in the heart of the city...

Happy Valentine's day...

http://www.allsaintsbrookline.org/celtic/saints/valentine.html

I hate reusing titles, and I've used the one up above (Testing, testing, 1.. 2... 3... ) before. But ah well... I'm lazy.

Sometimes Mike Gilbert (tdragger) and I talk about various posts we intend to write. Mike, being both a better write and a faster typist, usually beats me to the punch.

He's got one of those that we've talked about here. Go read it. Great post.

Anyway, in the comments section, Nick Landolfi, who is taking a game software development class, said:

"My impression was that there was only one test plan, and its purpose was to test the finished product. I never realized that there could be multiple test plans for individual features, or feature sets..."

I thought it might be interesting to talk about how that applies to at one of the art areas.

From the visual side, we've seen a real jump in what we're able to do to make things look more like their real world counterpart.

We saw a pretty big jump in visual quality from FS 95 to, oh, say, FS 2002.

But with the advent of more stuff (exteriors, transparent parts, interiors, more vertices, extra textures, new shaders, etc.) being available to simulate objects on screen, the accuracy of what we do also has to increase.

In FS 2002, much of the beginning and middle part of our visual aircraft development process was left up to individual artists. This gave us a mix of quality and visual accuracy in our models and textures. When we got to the end game, we saw a lot of bugs. Enough bugs that what we shipped was not representative of what we were capable of shipping.

So in FS 2004 we instituted some new procedures, one in particular meant that Test (QA) got involved in much earlier stages. We decided to establish mini "test milestones." First off, we'd have a test pass on the source we were using. For FS 2004 this managed to catch the fact that we were planning on modeling the wrong engine variant for the Ford Trimotor we were doing. This saved us a bunch of time later on-- changing a modeled and textured item takes a lot longer than doing it right the first time, and heaven forbid if it means that you have to ship the bug because it was too late or too risky to change.

Next steps up tested the unskinned model, the textured model, the animations, and then finally the LODs.

This adds some extra time to the art development process, but cuts down on bug fixing later, and raises the quality and consistency bar across the board.

Take a look at the default aircraft we shipped in FS 2004.

There are some aircraft that we carried over from the previous version, like the 747, 737, Bell 206, Cessna 172, and a few others. They didn't change visually from the previous version (aside from some repaints).

But the new aircraft that we did, they're a lot better. Compare the Lear in FS2000 to the Lear in FS 2004. Take a look at how nice the DC-3 is.

Now apply the same process to Flight Simulator X's default aircraft... 

And a note for those among our users who never fly the default aircraft:

Raising the bar on the default aircraft raises the bar for everybody. ;)

 

.

 

We recently got permission (in the last 3-4 months or so) to both blog and reply in some small way in the forums of Flight Simulator enthusiast websites. Because I already have a a lot of work to do, :) I find it hard to do both with regularity.

Anyway, since I'm lazy, I thought that I'd post an answer I gave at a thread over at Avsim as a new blog post. So forgive me if you've heard this one before... :)

Some background; as part of our announce during CES, ACES released 60 or so screenshots showing various degrees of development on Flight Simulator X. You can see many of them here:

FSX screens

Like a lot of what we (MSFT in general, ACES in particular) there were mixed results .(mostly very positive).  A couple of shots showing a wet airport environment...

1 and 2

...got some attention, some good, some negative.

A thread over at Avsim is indicative of the sort of comments that were seen about this particualr feature. For those who don't want to wade through the thread, here's my reply to a customer who wasn't so impressed...

Bob,

I know that it's a bad idea to argue with customers, but I'm going to do a little of it anyway.  :)

Let me put up a bit of a disclaimer:

You and every single other customer is entitled to your opinion on every aspect of what we do. You've got every right to like, love, and or hate the things we do in each version of Flight Simulator.

I realize and recognize that you can't convince someone that they like something that they just plain don't like, and I aint gonna try.

Anyway, allow me to respond. :)

To set your expectations: What you've seen in the released screens as far as the "wet" surface effect is effectively what we're going to ship.

You’re not the only person who has commented negatively on what’s been seen so far (there’ve been a bunch of positive comments as well), but I figure your post is a good place to stake an answer. To put the screens in the proper context, I'll say that the precipitation settings seen in the shots are set to the very highest level-- that's the [b]most[/b]"reflective" the scene'll get. (The effect increases as precipitation does) The time of day in this and the other shot is later in the afternoon, so the sun is relatively low on the horizon, which gives a bigger specular effect.

Having seen a heck of a lot of wet concrete and asphalt in a variety of conditions (light drizzle to heavy downpour), at different times of day and season (we do live in the Pacific Northwest after all), I'd disagree with you about both the amount of reflection and resulting specularity with overcast conditions. To be sure, light is diffused by overcast conditions, but it is [b]not[/b] totally blocked (it doesn’t become night). Instead there exists a spectrum of fully diffused and partially diffused light conditions that are hard to capture in real-time CGI. We have to settle on a solution that covers a broad range of the real world possibilities.

 

A few samples to show that you can have pretty hot specular, and/or high reflection in a variety of wet conditions:

 

http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~mhtang/dscf0052.html

http://www.concreteparking.org/pervious/PC%20benefit-%20alternative%20to%20costly.htm

http://www.ramblers-wilts.org.uk/050519l.htm (bottom of page)

http://www.airliners.net/open.file/0935078/M/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/79999807@N00/1199840/

All show varying degrees of specular/reflection effect on overcast days.

That being said, I don't disagree that hazy/overcast days change lighting conditions-- they do. If we were building a track or level based game and there was an overcast scene we'd massage our environment to match our desired effect. With our current open ended, go anywhere, any time, have conditions change on a regular basis, world we often have to accept less than optimal solutions so we cover the broadest scenarios.

You are also correct that there are shadows being cast by all objects in the scene. As you can see in one or two of the examples above, overcast conditions don't necessarily get rid of shadows-- it can make them more indistinct, but not necessarily [i]gone[/i]. We (MSFT) have discussed and investigated trying to dynamically modify lighting/shadow conditions based on cloud coverage, but it's a pretty big kettle of fish to tackle, and it's not going to happen this time. Like nearly all things we do, there will be some mechanism by which you can adjust or delete the effect if it truly bugs you that much.

I realize that based off what you wrote that you are likely to be disappointed with our upcoming release in this regards. I figure that you'd like to know that now as opposed to being disappointed later.

Cheers,

Jason

Perusing Roy's blog, I came across a brand new free flight simulator: New Sim

My best distance record was 78 feet.

I have no idea how I got that, as the best I was able to do after that (consistently anyway) was 68-69 feet.

The guys at Sim-Outhouse find the best links...

Car facing a 747 backwash - Google Video

To Owen Hewitt. Proud new father.

It appears that Blogger is down, but try this link at your leisure...

http://owenhewitt.blogspot.com/

 

Congrats O!

Caught your attention, didn't I?

:)

Based off much of the feedback seen from our autoresponded alias: tell_fs@microsoft.com,

and at forums like those at Avsim, Mike Gilbert wrote a very nice article: Where Am I? that's worth a look.

Even if AI aircraft isn't your bag, he does dive in to how both our systems are interelated, *and* how some underlying assumptions we make when we create features can limit us.

Is that "bad" coding?

No.

It's what you *have* to do. We have to edit both complexity and realism to maintain a balance between what's real and what's possible----like trying to run at Frames Per Second, as opposed to Minutes Per Frame, which is fine for Pixar when they render, but not so much for Flight Sims.

Not everything boils done to that kind of choice. We're limited by all sorts of things--- time, resources, data, money. What is amazing is what we're able to accomplish even with those limits.

And heck-- we do improve all systems and features, on a regular and steady basis...

One final shout out for this post.

While this is a book I've enjoyed tremendously ( The Mother of Storms)

The real mother of storms is to be found at the link below:

http://www.extremeinstability.com/storms.htm

Found via Sim-Outhouse

I've posted this in one of the main Flight Sim user forums (Avsim), but haven't seen an answer. Any takers here?

Anybody have any images of a ski retraction lever?

Preferably from a Maule, but anything from a single prop'd be helpful.

Thank you so much in advance,

Jason

...I knew him, Horatio.

As a good deal who follow the ACES team members blogs are aware, team members Steve Lacey and Joe Stacy are off to join the scary world of the start up.

Steve's been pretty cagey about exactly *what* they're up to, but both are smart fellows. Don't be surprised to see them become Secret Masters of the World.

Good luck guys!

 

 

 

Although the ACES team members are pretty much stuck here in Redmond (with one or two telecommuting exceptions), we build a product that simulates the whole planet. Team members come from all over, and we've done a lot of world travelling, but we still spend an inordinate amount of time doing research on the web.

Recently Flight Simulator has seen the number of people who do terrain texture add-ons explode. I think a lot of that has to do with the amount of aerial and satellite imagery coming on line. When I started (way back in the Dark Ages) I had to make a trip to Juneau to go through a company's archive of a million or so aerial images. I then had to make my selections based off looking at reversed negatives, and a few weeks later we got color photoprints. Contrast that to what's now available, and you can understand the renaissance Flight Sim is undergoing.

It's not just terrain of course, it's also landmark objects. So it's always nice to come across great reference sites that show a bit of both:

http://www.arounder.com/

 

I recently went to the optometrist to get my prescription updated, and if you have glasses or contacts, I'm sure you've gone through the little dance: "Okay... which is better, the first one? or... the second one?" as he or she flips through various lens strengths until you find your sweet spot.

The new version of Flight Simulator is going through the same sort of thing, as far as our terrain system goes. Since this is an area near and dear to my heart, I'm happy get a new prescription, so to speak.

In the coverage of Flight Simulator X seen in the February 2006 PC Gamer magazine they mention a 16X increase in terrain detail. Where does that number come from? And what does it mean?

Well, in previous versions of Flight Simulator (like the current version Flight Simulator 2004) we used 256 pixel X 256 pixel sized squares that cover roughly 1 kilometer square area of space. That represents a resolution of roughly 5 meters per pixel.

From altitude that's not so bad.

It looks a bit like this from a hundred meters or so:

5 meters per pixel (256 X 256 textures)

If we move it up a notch and use a 512 pixel X 512 pixel image to represent the same 1 KM of space we see a lot more resolution:

2 meters per pixel (512 X 512 textures)

By going all the way up to a 1024 X 1024 image we get 16 X the resolution (16 256 X 256 images fit into one 1024 X 1024 image):

1 meter per pixel (1024 X 1024 textures)

 

So which would you choose, number 1, number 2, or number 3?

Not sure?

Why not take a look at all three in this link (~500k file) :

EYE CHART