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Take a Little Trip, Take a Little Trip With Me To the cool, cool water of the semi-pirateless Caribbean . . . In reality, my only excursion to the region was a week on St. Martin / Sint Maarten for my honeymoon, most of which was spent lounging at the Sunset Beach Bar on the beach, the one with some of the best airplane watching anywhere in the world. (For those familiar with the island that know of Orient Beach - find your own link - the answers to your three questions are "Yes", "No, are you kidding?!?", and "Unfortunately, mostly wrinkled old German men.") First thing Monday morning, however, I'm going to have to make a virtual return to the area, this time to take a look at the presumably fictional Cabo Cay, thanks to one of the more interesting and original Flight Sim add-ons to come out in recent memory, Smugglers of the Caribbean. A few bits from their press release: "Smugglers of the Caribbean - Cabo Key" is an add-on package set in the Caribbean on a small uncharted island just north of Havana. It is part 1 of a multi part series of add-on aircraft my friend, flight sim texture genius and fairly new Horizon pilot Justin Lamb sent me the link, my first thought was that maybe my other friend Bill Lyons (creator of some of my all-time favorite add-ons) had finally turned evil or been replaced by a Bizarro version of himself. (Bill's add-ons always include a boat or a car, some great scenery, etc, but they tend to involve roughly 100% less smuggling.) If anyone has a clever religious metaphor that they're not using about how and why the Lamb made me think of the Lyons, let me know. Otherwise, lets call it coincidence and move on. Anyway . . . My second thought was how strange it was that they'd happened to use one of our rejected marketing slogans, inspired by the new FSX missions system we've been working on: Flight Simulator X: Something to Do. My third thought was about how excited my friend Jim (not that one, the other one) is going to be when he sees this. (It's not Orient Beach (with or without the wrinkles) Jim, but it is a step in that direction. Give my love to Donna!) My fourth and final thought, so far, was the absolute unadulterated (pun intended?) joy I will feel when I submit an official Microsoft expen$e report (product research) on Monday for €25, payable to Pimp Aviation. I can't wait to put these guys on our Beta.

A lot of people have posted wish list threads and sent in suggestions for things they'd like to see in the next version of Flight Sim. Most of us that work on it do the same thing. Our internal wish lists usually, but not always, start with bugs that were postponed from last time. One of the individual features I was most heavily involved with on FS2004 was weather. In fact, tdragger blames me for the ugly way that visibility layers interact with terrain. I fought for that, and, yes, I'd do it again, because, bad as it was, it was better than not seeing anything at all . . . which was the only other choice. The fact that tdragger, as the program manager in charge of weather at that time, was the only one with the actual authority to make the choice to go with my recommendation is inconvenient, and I won't bring that up here . . . Instead, I take my share of the responsibility with pride. Fire away! Anyway, Blogger-in-Chief Jason Waskey just sent me back an old email of mine in which I listed, hastily, my personal "Top 10" (that naturally goes to 11) wishes for weather in FSX, and suggested I post it here. How many, if any of these changes will we get in this version, or the next, or the one after that? I can't say. When I say I can't say, I don't mean it like I can't say big words like "deoxyribonucleic", "obtufiscation", and "mayonnaisse". I also don't mean "I could say, but I won't, because I enjoy keeping secrets". I mean I can't say because A) some information hasn't been announced, and 2) for some of these, I just don't know yet. With all that baggage put out there, here's my Weather Wish List, in no particular order: “Real” overcast – full on 8/8 coverage with no holes. Better interaction – visibility + terrain. Gradual transitions in and out of visibility layers. Multiple visibility layers. Improved precipitation curtains (ie, no more curtains.) Falling precipitation affected by wind. No more impostors (2d "walls" of distant clouds that we draw when 3D cloud percentage is less than 100%), even on low-end. Fog when METARS demand. Rainbows. Wind smoothing ala FSUIPC. Better forming / dissipation effects for clouds. Time will tell, but wouldn't it be nice . . . ?

Gone Tropos? There was an interesting post in the new FSX forum on AVSIM the other day expressing hope that the airport environments in FSX will look as good as those seen in a promotional video for commercial flight simulator builder CAE’s Tropos visualization system. A link to the promo video can be found here. The full thread can be found here. Like a number of people on the Flight Sim team, I’m very familiar with CAE products. I’ve flown a number of their simulators, we’ve even had the chance to meet some of their team members. As can easily be seen in their promo video, or firsthand, if you’re lucky, they do beautiful work. The first time we saw the Tropos promo, a lot of us on the team essentially echoed the sentiment on the forums – I wish we could (or were going to, had time to, could guarantee our customers had the hardware to) do that! The video shows some fantastic features – layered fog, smog, great runway / taxiway textures, wonderful falling and blowing snow, gorgeous ice effects on runways, and landing light effects that, because they use a real light map and not just an overlaid night texture like we do, are seemingly perfect. And you can’t overlook that wonderfully fluid performance, even with the compression artifacts in the video clip. Let's set aside the fact that CAE’s products sell from 20 to 50 units a year for somewhere around eleventeen trillion dollars, they have a lot more computing power and storage than we do and complete control over the hardware, while our products sell . . . more than that, need to run on some pretty ridiculously low-end hardware, and, after a year or two, can be had at Wal-Mart for about the same price as a case of State Fair Corn Dogs (the official Corn Dog Of NASCAR). We'll also ignore the fact that CAE builds a number of airports for familiarization purposes in excruciating detail, while we build . . . all of the airports in the world and everything in between in varying degrees of excruciation. Not to mention the fact that CAE gets to walk around the tarmacs of said airports, taking pictures and even measurements, etc, while we . . . buy books, snap photos on business trips, and stare at pictures from places like Airliners.net and Windows Live Local. With those things comfortably cloaked in denial, there is one additional disclaimer: I think CAE does spectacular work. They deserve every dime they make, their products are fantastic. I am a fan. The paragraphs that follow reflect neither the stuff nor the things of the Microsoft Corporation, especially its lawyers. The subsequent ramblings are intended simply as an intellectual exercise, and must not be used against me in a court of law. Bearing all of that in mind, I decided to take a short break from testing the animation of the float retraction system on the FSX Goose, and watch the CAE promo video again, this time, as a tester. My inner skeptic (who lives just across the hall from my inner pretentious b**tard) just couldn’t automatically accept the premise that their stuff is “better”. So, I took a look with a different assumption – how would I improve on it? Did they make any mistakes? Are we doing anything “better” than they are? I gave myself half an hour, watched the video a number of times, and this is what I came up with: Their sun effect is static and it tends to look cold and small – our new “bloom” is much prettier, and I think even our FS9 sun was more credible. The sky doesn’t change color during the accelerated sunrise scene – the lighting changes so it gets brighter, but it starts and ends a maybe-oversaturated blue. We couldn’t get away with that, at least not without bundling a copy of ActiveSky in every box. Their clouds are flat, 2D, FS2000 era sprites. Ours . . . aren’t. Aircraft shadows are extremely heavy, and dark, almost black all the time and don’t lose intensity in fog (in other words, they do this just as badly as we’ve done it, but our shadows at least aren’t as heavy to begin with). Not all of the aircraft and ground vehicles cast shadows – it looks like they’re not rendering shadows when the viewer’s angle to the vehicle gets too close to zero. Some static ground objects don’t cast shadows either, but some do. Shadows remain fixed underneath those aircraft and ground objects that cast them – they don’t move or change size based on the position of the light source (the sun, in this case). Shadows don’t interact with other lights properly either – the taxiway lights get darker and harder to see when they are in an aircraft shadow, and the headlight lobes of the ground tugs and baggage carts actually draw underneath the aircraft shadows. Speaking of shadows, there’s no self-shadowing of the aircraft – you can watch the sun shine “through” the vertical stabilizer when the Emirates A380 taxis on the icy runway. We haven't modeled self-shadowing in any released products either . . . (Note: I hate to seem so obsessed with shadows, but we shipped FS2000 without aircraft shadows because not everybody who was in a position to make decisions agreed that it was a problem that needed to be fixed. We ended up having to release a patch, which has a dramatically higher cost (in time and resources) than people realize.) The surrounding terrain is using some pretty low-resolution DEM. Summer and Winter, but what about Spring and Fall? And Hard Winter? Certain ground objects have no night textures at all. Specular lighting, but no reflections on aircraft models. In FS9, we did reflections in chrome, for example, using an artificial environment map. Edited to reflect Jason's comments below. Gorgeous bump-mapping and specular, but again, no reflections, on the icy runway. No touchdown smoke (we could probably afford to give them some of ours since we use too much.) No articulated bogies on the A380 landing gear. They’re supposed to do that weird A380 “hang forward” thing. There’s something wrong with the way they’re animating the compression of the landing gear as well – watch the bit where the Emirates A380 lands very closely: at the moment of touchdown, the airplane jumps and seems to be forcibly repositioned. It looks to me as if the simulation engine is taking into account a compressable landing gear, but that’s not reflected in the animation. They could use some more variety in their trees. I don’t remember the numbers, but in our building, in the hallway just down from the restrooms, we have pictures on the wall of all of the currently available Autogen trees. There are a lot of them. Aircraft control surfaces don’t move – no flaps, no spoilers, no fun. If ours didn't, my work this week would have gone a lot faster. Landing lights don’t cast a beam in the fog (watch the 747 land in the snow). It's arguable whether no effect is worse than an ugly one . . . Great snow trails, but where’s the spray from the wheels? Taxiway lines are inconsistent – some areas are really smooth, in other areas, if you look closely, they’re really faceted – just a few straight lines with hard angles making up a curve. Overall, I’d say subjectively that our best is pretty close theirs, and our worst is a good bit better. No sloping runways . . . I know, I know, but I couldn’t resist. I guess Austin still wins this round. So, what’s the verdict? Will FSX look better than Tropos? In some ways yes, in some ways maybe, and in some ways no. After looking at the promo video with a more critical eye, I can say that, in toto, it’s definitely not a slam dunk in favor of CAE, even discarding all of the disclaimers I laid out at the beginning. When all is said and done, however, I haven't proved anything here, other than the highest truism in software: there's no such thing as "zero bugs." Most importantly, of course, I’ve based my observations and opinions entirely on some pretty limited information, but I’m not the first flight simulation fan that’s ever done that. And that's one area in this imaginary and slightly irrational competition between us and them where I'm happy to say we win, hands down: we have orders of magnitude more dedicated, enthusiastic, and passionate customers than they do.

I am an attention miser (perhaps a distant cousin of Heat and Snow) . . . . I tend to pay it out in very small doses (as my friend Knat said in her brilliant article, How to be Distracted, "Hey look, a squirrel"), measure the value of things in my life by how much attention I'm willing to spend on them (my only real fear is of being bored), and, if there is attention changing hands anywhere in the neighborhood, I'd prefer to be at the center of it. Since I was a teen-ager, from my early, star-making turn as Silas Ezekial Dobbins (you certainly remember the catchphrases of 1985, "I lak-a-you!" and "Heckfire!") in the Enumclaw High School production of Felicia Metcalfe's thoroughly non-ground-breaking farce, Off The Track and the vocal performance of Simon I still wonder how your engines feel) that helped rocket three friends of mine and me straight to the upper middle of the Western Regional KEY Club talent show, I've rarely missed an opportunity to let people notice me. (I also rarely miss an opportunity to use long sentences and short paragraphs, as my friend Roy points out here.) November 21st was no exception. NBC, the network that once tried to boost summer viewership with the mortifying "If I haven't seen it, it's new to me!" campaign, airs a show hosted by singer Amy Grant called Three Wishes. It is a reality show of sorts, but unlike so many others, it is thoughtful, engaging, upbeat, and, as reluctant as I am to say it, even heartwarming. Like most of the best shows of the type, the basic concept is simple, and could have been written by a four year old: "Nice people do nice things for other nice people, and at the end, the pretty lady sings!" Unfortunately, most television networks are run by three year olds. This, combined with the fact that A) I actually like the show a lot and 2) NBC airs it in the television dumpster known as 9:00 on Friday night, guarantees that the show doesn't stand a chance. As a matter of fact, the most recent, and most important episode (because I'm in it, but I won't mention that until the paragraph after next) is the last one of the season, and very possibly the last one ever. Thankfully, NBC (pronounced FOX) has ordered up a mid-season replacement, Most Outrageous TV Moments. Television about television, skipping straight to the outrageous parts, without all of that irritating plot, context and production value to slow you down. This is a proactive move on NBC's part to meet the FCC's mandate that all television must be broadcast in ADHDTV by 2007. Speaking of ADHD, I'm digressing. Back to November 21st. The producers of Three Wishes came to Microsoft because one of their segments centered around a smart and well-spoken young man called Kiyaan who wanted to be CEO of Microsoft for a day. Like any sensible visitor, after wallowing for a half hour in our secret money room, he headed straight for the Games group. He went to a couple of meetings, and even sat down with Bill Gates himself for a few minutes. At one point, word went out that they wanted some footage of Kiyaan bossing around a lab full of testers playing Xbox360 games. Even though most of us don't work in labs (my office has windows, with a view of the parking lot, but, sadly, not of the gravel pit), and this, the day before the console's launch, was actually the first time I'd ever personally played a game on the 360, it was only right that I should be involved. So, short story long, I sat and played PGR3 while the cameras rolled. When Kiyaan walked in, I was actually the only one to talk to him, so they ended up shooting some of our interaction specifically. My new ten year-old boss offered some thoughtful insights on how he would approach testing a racing game, while my mind meandered around thoughts like "I wish I would have shaved this morning", "I wonder if I'm holding the controller upside down", and "What's my motivation?" The episode aired last Friday night, December 9th, and, unfortunately, exactly all of my dialogue was cut. If you know just when and where to stare at the screen, you can still see me, sitting right behind Peter Moore as he gives Kiyaan his very own Xbox 360, a day early. I'm sure, however, that the excised footage will be restored in the DVD Director's cut - I'll be in my trailer, holding my breath. If the episode happens to air again, it's worth watching for more than just my performance as a blurry set piece - one of the other segments coincidentally finds a kid, as part of his wish to go to Space Camp (the place, not the movie that Lea Thompson used to warm up for Howard the Duck, thankfully), flying zero-G parabolas in a 727, courtesy of my friend Peter Diamandis and his Zero Gravity Corporation. Otherwise, you might catch me as "big guy with beard" in a rerun of the now-defunct Discovery Wings Channel's documentary Flight Sim - click here to see the commercial we got out of the deal. Or maybe even my unforgettable stint as "Jeff the bad guitar player" on Tacoma, Washington's own Spud Goodman show in 1985. I really helped turn that show around - a scant12 years after my appearance, Spud landed both Weird Al Yankovic and Louie Anderson . . . You're welcome, Spud. It doesn't really matter what you watch, so long as you're paying attention to me. I'd like that . . . .