Full Speed Ahead

I know it's been a while since I've blogged here, I've mostly been on Facebook so if you want the very latest info in development click on the Facebook link to the right.

Last week one of our business partners pulled out and has meant the end to our 5m elevation data products but it's not the end of our work.

This last week has seen some really heavy work going on with Ultimate VFR Xtreme Oahu with extremely intense watermapping taking place, and I have to say, inland waterways with changes in elevation and rocky outcroppings sure do provide a challenge.

We're now about 45% complete on the final watermapping process and estimate that we should be finished with the photoscenery for Oahu in the next few weeks.

Can we give an exact date? No, it's simply too hard to do given that inland waterways are inconsistent across tiles, one tile will have no water, one tile will take 1/2 a day to work on like this monstrosity I mapped yesterday.

The level of detail over such a broad area is something that I don't believe has ever been done before for Microsoft Flight Simulator. Here's a few development shots to show what we're doing.

Following on from that we have a new team member on board helping to build Ultimate VFR Guam. Progress is at 95% as of last night and the sample from a few days ago shows how the progress was at 50%, there's only 1/2 a tile to go with watermapping, then follow up quality control and blendmasking, all of which should be relatively quick.

Onto Ultimate VFR California and Utah. Right when we were a day or so away from release, our business partner who had provided water maps for the state notified us of their decision to scale back their operations as they've gone through massive downsizing and restructuring in the last year with over 70% of their workforce slashed, unfortunately they've had to make the hard decision to do the same with their partner program.

This was a huge disappointment to us as we were really ready to start rolling out the datasets, however, this has actually worked to our benefit and we believe we have now found data that meets our standards and if all goes well, Ultimate VFR Utah and Ultimate VFR California should be back on track within the month, as our priority right now is completing Ultimate VFR Xtreme Oahu and also getting Guam out the door. Guam will be a freebie for all who have purchased photoscenery from us before.

So now I need to get back to rendering, Oahu is calling me and we have a very good outlook for the days ahead.