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Moving Along...

Been a long week and a half since coming back from Guam...

We've downloaded a whole new state's worth of imagery in the last few days for a mini project, we're about to finalize NEXTMap® ProMesh™ France and Texas and then move onto the remainder of Europe...

We're in the process of re-hand editing all of ProVFR Oahu with full watermapping and we'll be launching something special to make our development process more interactive...

We're also preparing for our trip over to Singapore to take care of some unannounced business and it looks like being a very exciting time...

The 50% of sale is about to wind down as we are approaching our goals and are getting close to new releases...

More news soon, haven't been able to blog this last week due to food poisoning but am almost recovered after a few days off sick over the weekend...

30m ASTER GDEM Follow Up...

Having done further research on the datasets, there's many problems with the ASTER based datasets that will require automation to be build to do analysis and fixing of the datasets...

For now many developers are thinking it's best to hold off on building any datasets with this data until the anomalies are fixed...

We'll continue to look at the data and see what may be useful or not...

Back from Guam, next stop Singapore...

Just another update, I arrived back in the Philippines from Guam on Monday and am recovering from the trip and am also now preparing for press releases and for the upcoming trip to Singapore regarding some exciting technology for 3D visualization.

In light of the business trip to Singapore we're running another 50% off sale so we can raise some extra funds to invest in new drives for the new datasets we're expecting within the next couple of weeks.

Thanks again for everyone's support, I'll share more about the Singapore trip as wisdom and agreements allow...

P.S. All DVD backups were sent out from the USPS in Guam via flat rate priority mail on Saturday, so they should arrive in 2-3 days for the USA and 6-7 days for international shipments.

In Guam...

Aloha from Guam simmers...

I'll re-update the store website as soon as I get back if I don't get a chance to get to it while I'm here...

If anyone has any questions I'll be available via email at support AT fsdreamscapes.com

48 Hour Sale - 50% Off NEXTMap® ProMesh™

Aloha Simmers,

We'd like to thank everyone for their support for the last year and a half and are running a 48 hour 50% off sale on all NEXTMap® ProMeshT products.

We also have some very exciting things happening at FS Dreamscapes and in the next couple of weeks we have business meetings in Guam and Singapore and possibly Australia as well as being able to complete NEXTMap® ProMeshT Europe within the next month or two.

So for the next 48 hours we're running a 50% off sale in order to help these meetings become solidified as well as generating funds to invest in new drives for the terabytes of data we're expecting for the remainder of NEXTMap® ProMeshT Europe.

Thanks again for everyones support and we have much more news and data to release in the weeks ahead.

Mahalo,
Dean Mountford.
FS Dreamscapes.

FS Dreamscapes Latest News

I know it's been a while since I last blogged, and this has primarily been due to many things happening at once that hasn't allowed me to catch my breath long enough to post an update here. Standby though as we'll be ramping up our communications in coming weeks and months.

First of all we're excited to say thank you to everyone who has supported us this last year and a half. Many of our customers know that the foundation of our business is in order to help people in the Philippines break free from poverty. 2001 statistics showed over 40% of Filipino's were living below poverty and has either stayed the same or worsened according to media reports. In 2008, with the help of our customers, we started sponsoring Melanie, the eldest of six sisters and who's mother is in Hong Kong making very little money to support the six girls while the father does not support the girls at all and has a problem with alcohol.

We're very happy to announce that through the sponsorship of FS Dreamscapes Melanie has now graduated her nursing degree which would not have been possible if it had not been for the support of the FS community. We'll share more about Melanie's graduation in an upcoming post.

In light of Melanie's graduation, we're continuing our support of her and have also decided to start setting up a scholarship fund sponsored by FS Dreamscapes to help her other 5 sisters continue their education and have a chance for a future they would not otherwise have. Sometimes the girls don't even have $1 for food between them, and this is something we want to help change. We'll share more about the scholarship program as we develop it's infrastructure.

Also in our news is that Dean is headed over to Guam for a few days at the end of June to investigate moving the main hub of operations to Guam from Hawaii. Guam is only a 3 to 4 hour plane flight away from the Philippines and allows us to continue our humanitarian efforts in the Philippines while reducing the need for trips to the U.S. mainland and will also allow us to ship mail in batches from Guam as needed. No more worries about the Philippine Mail service.

NEXTMap® ProMesh™ Italy, Maine & Arizona have been released to the FS Dreamscapes online store and we'll be sending them out to the other online stores within the next week. We are just putting the finishing touches on the new layout for the product description pages and are working on new documentation for the products.

NEXTMap® ProMesh™ coverage for the rest of Europe including France, Spain, Denmark, Austria, Switzerland, Portugal and the Czech Republic will be available in the very near future. NEXTMap® ProMesh™ Texas is also close to release.

DVD Duplication of Beta backups are available now through the store, with the upcoming trip to Guam it's a good idea to order dvd backups now so that we can send them out via U.S. mail which should be cheaper than Philippine Mail. We'll refund any change by the savings from using U.S. Mail rather than Philippine mail.

Programming has been on hold for watermapping of our photoscenery products while Karl has been transitioning to a new full time position in North Carolina. He was previously volunteering at a position in Kansas City, and also has started upgrading our programming software to be VB.net compliant. We're now gearing up to add the final routines into our system to be able to finalize watermapping of photoscenery. We've also been working towards autogen systems as well and are close to finalizing our nightlighting technology.

We'll have more news coming out soon and we'll share the story of Melanie's sponsorship and graduation as well as our planned scholarship program for her sisters in an upcoming post.

We have also been working on something that has been top secret which we'll share when the time is right.

Aloha and Mahalo.
Dean.

Developer's Note...

I want to divert for a moment from the actual development process to write about life as a developer...

I've been involved in flight simulation since my childhood. My first flight simulator experience was on a 727-200 simulator when my father was flight crew for the airlines. I literally grew up around aviation, on airport tarmacs, on the flight decks of Boeing 727s, 737s and 767s as well as airport observation decks and on the inside of flight crew briefing rooms and more...

During my teenage years I learned to fly in the Royal Australian Air Force Cadets and won the Wing Commander Agnew Shield for being the best student pilot in the state. I was preparing to become an air force pilot but life soon took me in another direction into film & t.v. production when the global recession of 1989-1990 hit. In the coming years I worked on movies and t.v. shows such as Flipper, Beastmaster, The Lost World, Swimming Upstream, Hildegarde, Silent Predators, C.S.I., Travel The Road, Big Brother Australia as well as working in the news at CBS, ABC and CNN. The experience in film has translated into image analysis work for flight simulation. The use of 3D graphics, alpha channels, color correction, image analysis and correction all translate to my work in flight simulator terrain database generation...

My background in film has given me a lot of experience and knowledge about color temperatures for daytime and nightlighting, image and color correction, codecs and compression and optimization of images for clear display with the least amount of load on GPU, CPU and hard disk access. Working with alpha channels, bump maps and other raster based image work are also skills learned over 20 years in film and television production...

Since my early childhood I've been working on projects for Microsoft Flight Simulator, some of my early FS4 work was uploaded to the old compuserve file library, and later compuflight.com/iup and eventually flightsim.com when it hit the www. Some of my early work involved panel design, aircraft re-texturing, scenery re-texturing, vector scenery design, elevation data work and finally modern day high resolution elevation and imagery raster and vector generation for flight simulation...

Today home users expect a level of fidelity that until the last couple of years has been virtually unavailable to high end simulations, and even today FSX eclipses some of the Level-D simulator visual systems that airlines run. A lot of the work we've been doing lately has been getting feedback from high end simulation companies impressed with our work, and we are excited about it too...

To draw a comparison between FSX visuals and some of the COTS visual systems available to airlines shows a level of quality and fidelity that is fairly neck and neck, but the price difference is significant. Take for example an airport, the average cost for a home based simulator user is about $10-50 depending on quality and detail. Compare this with airports for Level-D simulators where the price is around $10,000... Home FS users definitely have a good deal...

Today what Microsoft has given us is a simulator that was so mature that it was ready for prime-time scientific, real estate, and military applications FSX is essentially the same as ESP. This means that the level of fidelity is so high that taking real world scientific and GIS data and developing databases for real time 3D visual display is so good that it has had the science and industry very excited. Unfortunately Microsoft has dropped the ball on the opportunity to develop the systems further which means other real time 3D visual simulation platforms are needed in future...

For the home based flight simulator community though FSX has given us a world in which we can enjoy a world rendered with fidelity even above and beyond what is possible in Google Earth. No other current widespread home based platform allows a user to fly in a virtual world with up to 7cm per pixel horizontal post spacing for imagery and up to 1m horizontal post spacing for elevation data.

The level of fidelity is also so high now with FSX that many of the new add-on aircraft from companies such as Flight 1, Carenado, PMDG, Eaglesoft, Level-D and many others meet or exceed the modeling for COTS simulator systems. Home simulator users have really come to expect more than what even science and industry has available to them, and some expectations from home based simulator users have become a out of balance with the state of current technology...

In short, as a developer when we get emails from people we've graciously allowed to be involved with a beta process for free and we start receiving emails demanding an immediate release when technology is still being developed full time behind the scenes, that's when a developer starts asking if it's even worth supporting the entertainment based community. When our heart and focus is on level-d quality products and bringing those to home based flight simulator users far below what it costs on a high end simulator we start asking, is it even worth our time to support entertainment based flight simulation?

At the end of the day, the answer to that question is still yes, because the number of real world pilots using Microsoft Flight Simulator, X-Plane, Flight Gear and other simulators far outweighs the 'vending machine generation' culture who are used to sticking a coin in the slot and getting an immediate return. In this day and age, there is no sense of 'delayed gratification', or giving up of something good to receive something better...

With VFR+ Utah and ProVFR Oahu there are many factors that have to come together including obtaining high quality and accurate water data, for Utah obtaining a second layer of source imagery totaling 60+ GB of data, new image analysis routines need to be built and implemented into routines. Image analysis for vegetation and autogen is also something that needs to be developed, we have technology we are working towards that will allow us to plant virtually every tree on the planet in it's real world location to a RMSE accuracy of +/- 1 or 2 meters...

Once those are done, once we implement those routines and are able to finalize automation of those processes, then end users will see exactly what it is that we've all been waiting for.

The other thing that we're doing here at FS Dreamscapes is working on a cash basis. It does take time to develop a cash only basis business, sure we could go out and get business loans and expand rapidly, but that type of rapid expansion business model is one that has fast initial growth but growth tapers off and when an economic downturn happens it becomes unsustainable and leads to businesses failing. This is happening all across the world, but particularly in the United States right now. In comparison, cash only based businesses grow slowly initially, but then see rapid expansion once the business is established...

We're now at one and a half years since starting up, we've been very thankful for all the support and encouragement we've received in that time. The patience and belief in what we're doing is something we are extremely grateful for. We are planning on giving a thank you gift to all of those who have supported us in our VFR projects and have been with us during the early growth and development of our technology...

With VFR+ Utah the datasets we're generating, thanks particularly to Brian's skills and research, not even the FAA or Jeppesen have the accuracy of data for the remote strips that we're building into the scenery. In fact our VFR+ Utah data is currently being utilized for a crash investigation in Utah that so far is a mystery as to why the aircraft involved went down. The feedback from FAA crash investigators has been very positive...

So all in all, we're moving forward. I've always been involved in home based simulation as well as being involved in high end 3D visual simulation. As a developer I want to support the FS community both commercial level-d simulators as well as for home based users...

Nightlighting & Updates

Utah's nightlighting initial test pass is almost complete, next is finalizing details and processes before going into full production.

Nightlighting Alpha Build (note, minor street lights not yet included, also reflectance maps not added in yet)...


Our software development tool is close to completion for automating watermapping for mass production of USA wide 1m photoscenery, the final stages of our tools are being built now. This is a process that takes time to code and work out the processes, until the appropriate stages are done that has to wait.

Due to the massive amount of data being released by Intermap since completing USA wide elevation data acquisition we have decided to focus primarily on the 5m elevation data through the end of 2009, while at the same time refining our photoscenery processes and completing Utah and Oahu photoscenery packages to the standard we are aiming for...

Autogen is something we're close to making an announcement on but we have a few more steps in research and development that need to take place before we can say anything further...

We tried to post an update to our blog yesterday but had to delay until today due to connection problems.

Work is definitely ongoing on both Utah and Oahu VFR projects and the CPU's are all running at full speed. If we're silent on the blogs it means that we're working extra hard in the background and haven't had time to update the blog, it also means that we likely have technology we're working on that will be revolutionary but we can't make any public announcements on as it's not the right or appropriate time.

NEXTMap® ProMesh™ Texas Update

NEXTMap^® ProMesh^™ Texas is coming along, almost close to completion and we're expecting her to be completed just before the weekend...

Below is a comparison of the resolution from FSX Default France/Italy to NEXTMap^® ProMesh^™ France/Italy...

FSX Default:

NEXTMap^® ProMesh^™ France/Italy:

FSX Default:

NEXTMap^® ProMesh^™ France/Italy>:

One thing that can be very clearly noticed in the default FSX SRTM based terrain is that there is a good shift of several hundred meters/yards east... This can cause mountains to be mis-aligned when used with photoscenery. NEXTMap^® ProMesh^™ data provides accuracy to RMSE +/-2m horizontally and +/-1m vertically (with an average vertical error of between 30-60cm vertically)...