Mirror, mirror.. who is the most miscellaneous of them all?
Today sees the addition of two former ACES team members to the blogroll. Sure, they've left the team, but they're still near and dear to our hearts...
Bruce Williams is first. To many, Bruce was the public face of ACES for a long time. An avid pilot and instructor, he has a website (and business) here: http://www.bruceair.com. Be sure to check out the site, especially the part devoted to Flight Simulator, and the section containing his in-flight videos.
Second, Todd Laney. Todd was one of the graphics whiz kids whose command of voodoo code allowed for some cool stuff for Flight Simulator and Combat Flight Simulator (including a last minute10 fps boost on CFS 2.0 that saved the day). Todd was responsible for Tick18. Scenery designers will know what I'm talking about. ;) Basically, Tick18 was a hack Todd created totally in his spare time (part of the reason it was never fully baked), and love it or hate it, the hack provided for some neat stuff. Todd now spends his time at Whistler, and with the MacOS, creating Widgets. I use the WSDOT traffic cam widget on my Dashboard at home on my G5.
Speaking of the G5... no sooner than do I break down and buy a new box (after six years), does Apple release this. Doh!
Over at Flightsim.com punas1 has a feature request list. My favorite is this one: "Double the price."
I see some neat things on the horizon, or just released for FS2004 : new Netherlands scenery, PDX area airports, and a new Georender. They follow a trend of using aerial imagery to form the basis of a highly realistic unique scenery area. It’s been interesting to watch the march of progress as aerial imagery—real good imagery--- becomes available. Terraserver was great five years ago, but it was all black and white. Getting better now though…
When I started we had to use photos taken from planes, and that was a real mixed bag. Now we have all sorts of stuff, MSFT’s Virtual Earth, Space Imaging, and Google’s offering.
I really wonder what products like Google Earth’ll will help to come into being. For example, rice paddies have always been hard to do right in Flight Sim. Asian, European, and American versions are very different from each other, and there used to be next to no source available. Google earth (client edition based off of the old Keyhole product) has tons of imagery for East Asia and rice paddies. What’ll that lead to? Dunno, but it’ll probably be good.
That reminds me. My buddy Robert sent me a comparison of FS and Google awhile back. Take a gander:
http://noghead.blogspot.com/2005/08/microsoft-flight-sim-2004-vs-google.html
http://digg.com/gaming/Google_Earth_vs._Flight_Sim_2004_Comparison_(Pictures)
Don't forget, I'm hiring.
Pwn3d!
