It's the little things...
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...
