Well, we had our MVP artwalk. I think it went well.
We had two stop by this year: Nick Whittome and Dr. Geoff Cohen. Nick has a blog here (also on the blogroll). There are other MVPs who cover the products ACES makes (FS,CFS,and TS), and they can be found here, and here. I call them out to thank them for the work they do (gratis) for both MSFT and for our customers. Thanks.
To learn more about the MVP program see this.
My build was buggy, but other artists had great stuff to show. It was a treat being able to show them what we've been working on. CENSORED showed pretty well, judging from Geoff and Nick's reactions. Nick wanted to know more about CENSOREDand seemed pleased when we told him CENSORED and CENSORED. Both MVPs had their jaws on the floor when they got to see CENSORED. Especially when they learned that Aaron paints them by hand, not just by retouching photos. I thought the CENSOREDS also showed well. The work Adrian and John did on the CENSORED was super cool. Of course I'm looking forward to Rick's work on CENSORED and am excited for Darren and Dave's version of CENSORED Pete and Kevin and Chris do great work with all of the CENSOREDs.
I hate to not mention Marvin's CENSOREDs E-man, Derek, and John have been CENSORING CENSOREDS really well.
If the CENSORED and CENSORED, then CENSORED CENSORED CENSORED CENSORED, (I hope!)
Nick did make sure to hammer home the need for MSFT to work more closely with our modding community. He's a part of scenerydesign.org a user community dedicated to modding Flight Sim. A lot of good work has come out of that site, and I'm sure we can expect to see more in the future. Maybe I can convince our Technical Art Lead Adrian to stop by and lend a hand...
While crusing the scenerydesign.org's forums I did come across a fellow whose work I've seen before. He seems to be a really nice guy. He's built what looks to be an impressive Autogen Annotation tool, and is giving it away for free.
There's just one problem, and really, it just drives Nick's point home. This really nice guy, who's spent a fair bit of effort making free addons for FS, this guy, he hates us:
"It also became obvious to me, looking at autogen tiles provided with the FS2004 package, that the Microsoft scenery designers had other tools at their disposal besides their own Annotator program as they clearly define neat and symmetrical rows of houses that would be impossible without additional functionality as I've included in this program. Microsoft should be ashamed of itself for not recognizing that after-market scenery designers are what keeps this wonderful product going so strong and their own corporate greed and paranoia is against their own best interests. It is because of this animosity I've garnered for MS that there is only one limitation to this package being completely free for use. Under no circumstances is anyone employed by Microsoft allowed to use this program without contacting me and negotiating usage fees. "
The problem is, of course, is that what Art wrote up above, it just isn't true.The tool available here, is pretty much exactly what we used to annotate the terrain textures for Flight Simulator 2004. The only difference is the tool that we released as part of the SDK was actually improved over what we used for producing FS 2004.
Functionality was enhanced based on user feedback from our Beta program.
Our history of silence and lack of engagement fuels some real (and in this case I believe totally undeserved) anger with the very users we're happiest to have. Hopefully our more recent attempts at foster community (like these here blogs) will help our future prospects.
On a side note, I did contact Art a few months ago, explained the real deal to him (as I was one of the four people who had the task of using our version of the Autogen Annotator on an almost daily basis), and hooked him up with our Beta guy.
Hopefully he'll contribute his skills and insights to our future projects. (and maybe then he'll soften his stance [:)] )
I came across Art's new site simulatingart.com today, and the anger and animosty he showed above is gone. The site I referenced still has the quotes above though.
Lesson? Open and honest communication can work to change minds.
And
Once something gets out into the web, it might as well be in stone. Which makes doing it right the first time extra important...
The art team is gearing up to give a tour to the current crop of MVPs interested in what the ACES team is up to.We call these tours artwalks (like a "gallery walk"). In the normal course of development, the team does one artwalk a week, with 2-3 artists showing off what they've done in the last couple of weeks. Today we're doing an all out every artist tour. Should be fun. I love showing off what we're working on. Especially to people who are under NDA. [:)]
Actually, the whole campus is doing stuff for our MVPs---> Major Nelson
Speaking of MVPs, the folks over at Bungie are bragging, err talking about their space again... To be sure, they sold a lot of copies of Halo, so they probably deserve what they've got, but it's things like that that cause people to write MSFT with a $ sign.
I have to tell ya, that aint what it's like around my neck of the woods.
I work next to a gravel pit.
No, really.
Don't forget. We're hiring...
http://fsinsider.com/jobs.htm
If you look at the section on the right hand side you'll see that I've linked a few FS enthusiast sites. They're amongst (if not actually) the biggest such sites in the US.
I try and peruse them everyday. Somedays I spend more time than other days, but I do try and stay abreast of what the community's up to. Every now and again though, I'll find a site that I've never seen before. Today I came across flyawaysimulation.com. They seem pretty big, claiming a little over 60,000 registered users. Their forums are active enough, and there's a particular post there with 1524 replies...
Looks like I have a little homework to do tonight. :)
I came to flyaway from here. Looks like X-Plane and us have some new competition (and maybe another one here?) brewing...
very neat.
Who am I?
I've posted an article on the navigation pane...
Looks like a link from yesterday's post is behind a sign-in firewall. Here's a brand new link regarding the weather system and all its glory in Flight Simulator 2004.
One of the neatest things about working on a product that delivers the whole planet is seeing how our users explore it.
Simflight.com runs a monthly screenshot competition with varying themes, that show some of that off.
I think few people realize that what we do is very special indeed. There are some games out there with great graphics and beautiful environments. The thing is, it's stagecraft. Very very very well done stagecraft. The lighting is for the most part pre-rendered, you can't roam freely thoughout the whole world. You're basically limited to a set area--- a track, like in Forza (also very pretty).
We go a little further.
If you were to leave FS running 24 hours a day for a year, you'd see the sun track across the sky, the light change, shadows on the mountains creep across the landscape, real world weather appropriate to your location sweep across the sky, the sun set, the moon rise, and the leaves on trees (and the grass on the ground) change with the seasons. You could set an aircraft on autopilot with unlimited fuel, and all that'd happen while the landscape rolled beneath you.
Except at the poles. We don't handle the North or South Pole very well (at all). Everywhere else though.
Sure, some of what we do is generic. It has to be. The planet's pretty big. But we do try and build as much randomness into our systems as possible, or at least make such systems extendable. A good example of that being our weather system. We implemented a set of 10 skys, with differing lighting values, so days would look different. Sometimes it's subtle, sometimes a little more dramatic (like sunsets).We introduced a brand new volumetric cloud system that has built in randomness at runtime so the 3D clouds looked a bit different everytime you see 'em.
As much as we do though, our users will go further. It says we've done our job right when you see stuff like this.
If you check out the link above, or something like this, or this, or this, you'll see a lot of third party after market products (aircraft and scenery). Good stuff.
Of course having said all that about how I think we do a great job with our generic stuff, I'll be the first to admit this looks phenomenal. We do much more limited areas of aerial imagery for various parts of the world but it'd be great to do the whole shebang that way...
Maybe someday.
There's a thread over at Avsim thinking about new features for a new flight simulator version (they didn't specify if it'd be a MSFT version or not), and while there's lots of interesting things being talked about, there was one off handed remark made that I've seen echoed over and over again --- no... not about the flight models, and yes I do know that's a hotbed of discussion --- about a previous version of FS (2000), and how it had moving lights on the roads at night, and why don't we do that anymore (two versions later)?
See, the funny thing is, the moving lights feature was a total afterthought.
A developer who was working implementing roads was playing around with how the texture was applied, and discovered he could cycle the texture, and at night that made streetlamps in the texture move, and voila... moving traffic at night! Now, never mind that there was no moving traffic during the day, most folks on the team thought it was pretty cool, so we threw it in the product.
So what happened?
Well, the technology we used to lay down roads in FS2000 was totally unsuited to our newly enhanced digital mesh used to make mountains. Caused all sorts of problems, and lots of people complained (rightly so) about how the two interacted (or failed to interact).
We fixed that problem in the next release (FS 2002), but the tech used no longer allowed us to take advantage of the previous night lights hack. No one on the team was happy about losing the lights, but the possible solutions were all pretty much too expensive (at the time) in dev and/or processor time.
Six years and two versions later people still wonder about it.
Now, I won't get all afternoon school special and say "the moral of the lesson is..." 'cause I'm not sure there is one. You need to leave room in your schedule or design for serendipity and innovation. You also need to be mindful of how present day choices may have longer lasting impact or consequences. Would we make the same decisions again? Probably.
they were pretty neat...
I'm the art lead for ACES studio here in MGS. Our studio is responsible for the Flight Simulator, Combat Flight Simulator, and Train Simulator franchises.
I've been in the games industry for a while now (link) primarily as a painter (or pixel poking as I call it), and have spent nearly all my time involved making various versions of Flight Sim.
I come from a traditional art background, and spent several years as a freelance illustrator and comic book artist.
I still paint and draw, and my work can occasionally be seen in galleries across the United States.
Return to the pixelpoke blog homepage here.
Testing part deux.
If this is the first post you're seeing, it's 'cause I managed to lose the real first post.
Hmm. I'll probably look awful dumb when they both show up...
Still testing