FS Dreamscapes

Server Maintenance

2011-09-26T07:59:00.000+08:00

We'll likely have our server going down in the next couple of days for maintenance and it may be down for a couple of weeks.

Will port the server over to a new location as well as we're no longer able to support a dedicated server due to the high costs and low volume of sales. So that will also take place in the next couple of weeks.

Due to the dwindling size of the FS community I've decided to go back to the land of Television full time and move FS Dreamscapes to more of a community based group. Am still figuring out the nuts and bolts of it all but I am still working on Oahu and Ultimate VFR USA coverage, however if things continue as they are we might need to consider shutting up shop after we finish up our current projects.

For all who have prepaid for products don't fear we will be providing ongoing support and providing you with what we have advertised. This is a tough time due to the world economy spiralling out of control but we are still committed to what we have started. We might look at selling our technology or freelancing with other developers in order to see our vision realized.

More news to come soon...

Ultimate VFR Xtreme Oahu - Beta/Preview Build 4

2011-09-06T18:14:00.004+08:00

We've uploaded a build for Ultimate VFR Xtreme Oahu which is Beta/Preview Build #4 and is available for all pre-order customers of Ultimate VFR Xtreme Oahu.

The build only covers 60% of the island and requires the previous build to be installed, however we are anticipating being able to finish up the entire island's water mapping (hopefully inland waterways won't bog us down), within the next couple of weeks.

The beta/preview #4 build includes basic autogen vegetation as well as watermasking for the island. Water flattens and other vector scenery items are not as yet built as we need to complete the whole island's water mapping before those elements can be completed.

Also one more thing...

We have given everyone who has pre-paid for Ultimate VFR Xtreme Oahu a free copy of Ultimate VFR Guam to say thanks for your support and hanging in there with us. It has been a much bigger journey than we ever anticipated but what we will bring you is way beyond what we ever envisioned at the start...

We're also prepping new forums, unfortunately we've had to nuke the old forums as there was way too much spam starting to happen and a lot of the information was way out of date. They should be up and available shortly. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause but we figure it's best to do a refresh on our forums.

Ultimate VFR Guam

2011-07-28T00:06:00.000+08:00

Ultimate VFR Guam is almost complete. We just need to revise a few things, remove airport plateaus and build in road traffic more fully. Guam is looking very nice indeed and will be a modular system.

There will be a base photoimagery layer to start with and various other layers including autogen, 3d buildings and more in future.

Manual Watermapping for Utah and California will commence shortly and will all be done by hand now which will take time but will be worth the results. Oahu is 60% complete right now and will have imagery finalized in the next few weeks.

Full Speed Ahead

2011-07-12T09:33:00.005+08:00

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.

Office Moved

2011-05-31T10:34:00.003+08:00

Thankfully all of the medical challenges have passed since moving back to the Philippines.

The new office is nicely set up and is up and running. Quite happy with the new setup. Now to get the old DVD burner back up and operational as well as the old P4 computer.

Today I'll be taking a few screenshots and then will start prep for getting some new data available in the store...

Oahu Beta Panoramas

2011-05-25T17:32:00.004+08:00

Some panoramics of Ultimate VFR Xtreme - Oahu including some shots showing it with Aerosoft's Dillingham X...

Battles

2011-05-10T11:31:00.003+08:00

For some reason, ever since the day I flew back to the Philippines I've been facing minor but irritating battles...

Firstly the day I flew back I came down sick with food poisoning. Took a week to get better.

Then I came down sick with a respiratory infection which knocked me out for 4 days.

Then I ended up with a severe sunburn while on a long awaited vacation.

Then I got burned on the wrist by some hot cooking oil while making lunch on Monday.

Then I got burned on the right hand middle finger while again preparing lunch the next day.

Followed by some sort of acne flare up in my nostrils and arms that have been extremely painful and are slowing me down today, and am considering seeing a doctor tomorrow.

I'd post photos but they'd not really be appropriate for this blog but I'd sure like these battles to end so I can be back up to full speed.

In the meantime Oahu only has one more DVD of source data to prep, and then final assembly.

Back in the Philippines

2011-05-04T18:15:00.002+08:00

It's been a busy 3 weeks of moving back over to the Philippines to prep for our eventual move to Australia once we get a fiancée visa for Melanie.

I spent the last month prepping for the April 9 flight to Manila, then came down sick with food poisoning from some bad pizza at Little Caesar's at K-Mart in Guam. The next few days were spent trying to find a driver up to Baguio City with the 32" monitor and the 2 suitcases. Several days and $200+ later we arrived back in Baguio City.

I spent the next few days gaining back my strength after the food poisoning incident and then suddenly had to travel down to Melanie's old family home in the province in the Philippines where I quickly came down with a respiratory infection that knocked me on my back for 3 days straight. Being that it's a remote town in the Philippines there was no internet there and I had no 3G access there.

Next we headed back to Baguio, on a grueling 9 hour bus ride during the last few days of Holy Week (i.e. Easter is huge in the Philippines), we had a very cramped ride back to Baguio and arrived late Sunday night. The next day we were scheduled to go on vacation (I've had maybe 3-4 vacations in the last 20 years), and headed back down to San Fernando, La Union on Tuesday last week.

After a refreshing 5 days down by the ocean, snorkeling, gaining back strength from the heavy travel itinerary and after a 2 hour ride standing up in a bus that had people standing in the aisle and going up a 7000' mountain road with twists and turns and several thousand food drop offs right next to the road, we made it home to Baguio City.

The last few days I've been catching up with getting the office set back up and have almost got the hard drives brought back online. I should hopefully have them all fully functional by tomorrow.

Oahu is about 3-4 weeks behind schedule due to the move, travel and vacation time, but all watermapping is complete except for one dvd, next up is the assembly process and then getting her all packaged up for download.

I'll start back with the video blogs as soon as I get my box of belongings that were shipped from Guam to the Philippines. More news tomorrow.

News News and More News

2011-03-25T08:14:00.003+08:00

Well I have some good news, some good news, some better news and some not so good news, oh and more good news...

I am now a fully fledged United States Citizen as of March 11, 2011. I had my Oath Taking Ceremony here in Guam and am proud to be an American.

Good news is that Oahu is in the final stages of completion and I've started a $14.95 pre-launch sale and expect to have Oahu released by end of April.

More news is that now I have my citizenship I can head back over to Manila and get back into operations full time due to the much lower cost of living. I'll be flying out on April 9 and now have a place for rent in Manila which will mean more reliable and much faster internet service.

The not so good news is that I'll be busy packing this week and the next in preparation for the company move again. This is also due to the Television Station I've been working at shutting down. The flip side of that is that I now have a very good network here on Guam and can travel to and fro easily. This all means DVD backup service will be put on hold for a few days.

The other good news is that Melanie and I are planning on getting married in the next few months and will have Melanie's help with the business operations. It also means that shortly I can hire staff in the Philippines to help run the business.

More news to follow, and pictures to be posted on the Oahu product page shortly.

March 2011 Update

2011-03-15T19:34:00.000+08:00

Alrighty, after a year here on Guam my time is almost up. I was sworn in as a U.S. Citizen last week and the TV station is also shutting up shop at the end of this month.

I'll be moving operations back to Manila (not Baguio) where there are fewer problems with electricity and internet connections.

We might be moving the wedding date up on our schedule as well.

The server was offline for about 20 hours due to maintenance at the data center our server is at but after a reboot everything has been restored.

Oahu is progressing well and is nearing finalization.

Ultimate VFR Xtreme Oahu - Watermapping Update Feb 13

2011-02-13T18:50:00.005+08:00

Keep an eye on our Livestream for keeping up with our work as it is being finalized and also to catch a glimpse of how she is looking and how close to release she is.

This weekend I've been able to complete more of the inland waterways for Oahu. Ken is still working on the coastline watermapping and is like a bulldozer.

The inland areas are a lot more hands on due to vegetation and deciphering what is dirt and what is water due to the rich minerals in the earth on Oahu.

This is one sample of one tile from today's work. Lots of inland water.

Below is an interesting location I found with a tunnel going into the mountain.

Ultimate VFR Xtreme Oahu - Watermapping Update

2011-02-12T01:05:00.002+08:00

We're up to having completed 5 of the 14 source DVD's of imagery for watermapping of Oahu. I'm aiming to get inland water mapping done (such as ponds etc), over the weekend.

Ken is now fully up to speed with the process and is like a bulldozer with this watermapping process. So glad he has come on board to help. The results are looking amazing.

Once we get the watermapping complete then it's just a quick matter of prepping the blendmasks (around the reefs) and getting version 1 out the door. Once the imagery is complete we're expecting to be able to add more and more 3D objects to the scenery layer on a frequent basis.

More pics to follow soon...

Ultimate VFR Xtreme Oahu - Watermapping

2011-02-07T22:58:00.004+08:00

Well it was worth the wait, we've done some leapfrogging recently and have been able to push towards version 1.0 release rather than the interim placeholder watermapping as we had planned.

Here's todays Beta 3 render of area around Dillingham X (from Aerosoft), with their ground photos turned off.

All that's left to do is the blend masks but we need to get sources 2-14 completed as well...

Ultimate VFR Xtreme Oahu

2011-02-02T20:39:00.003+08:00

DVD 1 of 14 has gone through the final water mapping process and just needs to be assembled and rendered.

DVD's 2-14 will follow very quickly, don't have time for screenshots right now or to give a proper update as my former home state of Queensland in Australia is about to be hit by a Category 5 super Cyclone as big if not bigger than Hurricane Katrina and is now likely to be the biggest Cyclone in Australia's history with winds reaching 180mph/290km/h

More details to follow, but version 1 for Oahu is very close to release.

Happy New Year

2011-01-24T09:32:00.002+08:00

Okay I'm back from vacation and just catching up on administrative tasks.

Coming back to Guam after Christmas and the New Year in the Philippines the situation here on Guam has changed. The TV station closed down the news operation which has freed me up to focus more solidly on FS Dreamscapes work, while also having part time work in the other TV operations.

I'm just finishing up administrative tasks then by tomorrow evening I should be able to release some new datasets for Ultimate VFR Calfornia and then upload some upgrades to Oahu followed by dedicated work on Oahu to get her complete.

Melanie and I have set a wedding date for mid April.

Ultimate VFR Utah & Merry Christmas

2010-12-18T10:10:00.003+08:00

Good news today with regards to Utah, we've had confirmation we'll be able to implement our new water datasets shortly and will have a complete new release for Utah early in 2011.

I plan to upload Ultimate VFR Xtreme Oahu's placeholder release to the server by end of this weekend.

Merry Christmas to everyone, I'll be on vacation for 3 weeks as of Monday but will be providing support to customers during that time.

Sunday Blog

2010-12-12T11:54:00.002+08:00

A little tour of our island...

Crazy Busy

2010-12-06T18:34:00.002+08:00

Been crazy busy these last few weeks and am working on setting up setting things up for California, building installers, uploading installers, prepping product pages, download links etc.

A coastal county is next on the finalize list and that's going to involve some work on ensuring our shoreline routines are nicely set up and are going to work well. Hence a slight pause in releases for Starship Members with mainstream release to follow.

I hoping by the end of this week California counties and Oahu (with placeholder water) will both be uploaded by the end of this week.

I'm a little under the weather at the moment as well and have been suffering from exhaustion with my current 16 hour per day schedule, but I'll have 3 weeks vacation over Christmas/New Years to recover.

Word is that our watermapping system for California and Florida is now going away for other states but hopefully we'll have another alternative as good if not better by the time we reach other states.

Ultimate VFR California

2010-11-22T00:06:00.003+08:00

A large section of California near Lake Tahoe is almost complete. Just need to add the water options and build the installers and write documentation.

Imperial County and El Dorado counties are almost complete as well with just the water option to be added.

Ultimate VFR California & Utah

2010-11-17T01:35:00.004+08:00

Work is at full speed ahead for Ultimate VFR California with Yuba, Sierra, El Dorado, Plumas, Placer, Butte and Alpine Counties all complete on rendering. Next is to build the installers for them and write documentation.

Here's is some comparison shots before and after:

Of note in the shot is the straight line ridge in the terrain both in the FSX default mesh and the NEXTMap ProMesh. This appears to be a flaw within FSX rather than within the mesh datasets.

We're still awaiting word on Ultimate VFR Utah water datasets, but we do have some significant changes for Utah coming up in the final release. Hopefully we can secure the water data shortly so she can finally be finished up.

Oahu is just awaiting some time to map out a vector polygon for the placeholder water, and I'm yet to test our autogen for the island but that is also close at hand. Once the placeholder water is done then high resolution water mapping will commence.

NEXTMap® ProMesh™ - Massive Price Reductions!

2010-11-14T12:10:00.000+08:00

Up to 50% off on most products.

Due to our imminent release of the Ultimate VFR Series we're pleased to announce a massive price reduction on all NEXTMap ProMesh products starting today Nov 14, 2010.

Ultimate VFR California - Rolling...

2010-11-11T20:44:00.003+08:00

Just a quick update for today. Ultimate VFR California is now locked down in rendering processes and so far Alpine, Nevada and Placer county are complete.

Butte county needs a complete re-render and Plumas county is just needing some quality control done on it.

Here's some random screenshots in HD over recent days during testing.

Nemeth Designs MD 500D in Magnum PI colors.

Flying over Nevada County.

Lionheart Creations Quest Kodiak.

Scenic Shot.

Scenic Shot.

Ultimate VFR California - Final Process

2010-11-10T19:17:00.002+08:00

Okay after testing some new technology, I've decided to do a quick reboot on current counties rendered in order to save server space down the track and allow for the new technology to be implemented.

Good news is I have a partial day off tomorrow from TV work so I can set up a few renders and get things moving full speed ahead, finally...

Ultimate VFR California - Water Excludes

2010-11-09T22:23:00.001+08:00

All of California's water excludes have been completed as of today. Was a challenging task but it's now complete which means we can start rolling out the remainder of California shortly.

Sunday Blog #5

2010-11-07T19:50:00.002+08:00

This week has been an exhausting week for me with election coverage, getting crucial paperwork from Las Vegas, applying for a visa for Melanie so we can start planning our wedding, business contracts prepped, investing in new aerospace technology software, finalizing contracts at the TV station and investing in a 1080p capable HDTV/Monitor for development work. Needless to say I've been wiped out and am still getting strength back to finalize Oahu version 1. Hopefully this coming week I'll have time to focus on it and also California.

In the meantime here's a follow up to "End of the Spear" story, it's called "Beyond the Gates of Splendor."

Elections Over...

2010-11-03T23:32:00.002+08:00

Now that the elections are somewhat over here on Guam, (the election was too close to call)... I'm now just gaining strength again (after a 20 hour day yesterday), and then will jump back into things.

Yesterday we invested in some technology that hopefully will lead to hyper accurate vegetation placement in future. Don't want to reveal too much right now.

Anyway just going to get some rest and then start making headway once my head is back in the game...

Ultimate VFR Xtreme - Oahu Placeholder Water

2010-11-01T20:47:00.003+08:00

I've decided rather than wait to finalize the excludes I'll release the placeholder water version of Oahu by this coming weekend in order to at least get a somewhat working version into everyone's hands.

It won't have everything perfect just yet but will at least provide water effects for the island temporarily.

I just have a very busy 36 hours ahead with wall to wall election coverage at the TV station from 6pm-4am and starting the day there 8 hours earlier than that. It's going to be a 16 hour day at least tomorrow, so please have mercy on me over the next 36 hours...

Sunday Blog #3

2010-10-31T10:13:00.000+08:00

Following on from last weeks' Sunday blog movie, here's the latest news from Steve Saint (one of the central characters in "End of the Spear")

Sorry my blog posts have been few and far between this last week, this week has been extremely busy in TV land with senatorial forums, political debates and preparations for the election coverage Nov 2. After this week I'll have lots more time to blog.

Sunday Blog

2010-10-24T10:08:00.004+08:00

It's been a while since my last Sunday blog post. Today's Sunday blog post is a movie about an MAF pilot named Nate Saint...

Apologies to all non-U.S. viewers as the movie is locked down to the USA only, but should be available on DVD in other countries.

Ultimate VFR California - Autogen

2010-10-20T20:01:00.005+08:00

Totally flabbergasted today, got work in from a fellow developer who's been working on Autogen and Airport alignment for us and I'm totally flabbergasted by his attention to detail and his work... Amazing, absolutely amazing... Still imagery does not do this justice...

Ultimate VFR Xtreme - Oahu Progress Report

2010-10-20T19:21:00.007+08:00

30cm placeholder watermaps are in place, and new Oahu water excludes are built to remove the water flattens from cutting into the terrain...

The island is looking spectacular with the temporary water maps and the terrain data being allowed to show in it's full glory, but it's led to discovering a quirk about polygon based excludes in FSX...

So it's again a case of two steps forward one step back... Next I'll need to trace around the island and develop a water polygon to then fix the missing water from the scene out in the ocean as it's turned to dry land... Now I was in Hawaii in 1994 when they were filming Waterworld and I think this dry land is just a little too much dry land...

So...

Oahu is looking good and the final blend masks will be able to be made for the version 1.0 release once I get this tempoary water situation sorted out.

Here's a couple of preview screenshots from the very low level test flight... See if you can spot the SS Minnow... :-)

[NOTE: Last two shots are approaching Aerosoft's Dillingham X, with their imagery removed and replaced by ours.]

More Progress Today...

2010-10-16T14:40:00.002+08:00

Good news is that today I've been able to finalize county wide exclude routines for all water flattens for all photoscenery areas.

No longer will water flattens be an issue when used with NEXTMap ProMesh...

Here's some comparison screenshots (all are running NEXTMap ProMesh):

1. Ultimate VFR California w/ Ultimate Terrain X USA before water excludes
2. Ultimate VFR California w/ Ultimate Terrain X USA after new water excludes
3. Ultimate VFR California
4. Ultimate Terrain X USA
5. FSX Default

Oahu - Temporary Water Maps Nearing Completion

2010-10-16T09:45:00.003+08:00

Today we should have the temporary water maps in place, they're not perfect by any means especially where they end in the ocean but they're good for testing out the fidelity of the version 1.0 water effect positioning before we work on the blend masks...

Next stage will be the blend masks and recompiling for the final version 1.0 release of Oahu...

Also, running a test today I believe I have come up with a possible solution for the airports in the NEXTMap ProMesh series which will need further testing.

Big Big Day

2010-10-13T21:25:00.002+08:00

It's been a big big day, first up routine stuff like laundry before work, then heading in to work at the TV station to continue work on copying 2TB of MPEG2 video data and prepping that to run through mpeg encoders to fix data breaks and timecode breaks...

Next working on several hundred music videos for broadcast on PSST our new TV channel here on Guam, which is quite the undertaking.

At the FS Dreamscapes office, work re-started on bumping up the resolution of the watermask data to 30cm as our build yesterday ended up with geotiff files that were too large for the SDK resample.exe program to handle. So tiling all that back out again.

Next during lunch it was time to take the car in to have the front tires/tyres replaced as they were close to blowing out. Upon reversing off the ramp, the reverse transmission finally started giving up the ghost, a costly $2000 repair job. Good thing the TV station work can cover that.

Finally after spending several hours behind at the TV station bumping 100's of GB of data onto a drive, I was finally able to head home and get Oahu back up to full speed again, which it's happily doing right now...

Next stage is the temporary water imagery, then the blend mask, then final resample. That will lead to temporary watermasks which will then allow me to build the final blendmask for version 1.0 of Oahu!!!

So yeah it's been a big day, this guy is tired but never ending in the quest to finalize and get mass production started on all photoscenery projects...

Ultimate VFR Xtreme - Oahu - 30cm Temp Water Maps

2010-10-12T22:20:00.004+08:00

Another days' worth of rendering and I'm glad to say that the temporary watermapping for Oahu is almost complete and should be done in about 6 hours.

The good news is that the stage is now set to get version 1 of the Oahu water maps complete within the next couple of weeks.

Yesterday's watermaps were 1m resolution, today I've been able to increase that resolution up to 30cm to improve users' experience when it comes to the version 1.0 release.

Here's a look at the difference from yesterday to today.

Oahu - Stop Gap Water

2010-10-11T21:39:00.004+08:00

Just a quick couple of shots to show the temporary stop gap water that will act as a stand in until I finalize the next render.

Note: There's no water blending and the masks cover up all the reef, but it does place water effects pretty close to where the water should be. I know it's a rough and dirty version, but I wanted to get something into everyone's hands until I do the final version of the watermasks in the next couple of weeks as time permits...

Aloha...

2010-10-11T00:35:00.002+08:00

Last blog post for today... Just a little video to hint at what is being worked on right now...

Water techniques finalized...

2010-10-10T23:24:00.004+08:00

First two counties are imagery complete, this is taking a few more steps than anticipated but I want to dot all the i's and cross all the t's to make sure when california is released it's the best possible.

Also... Now that the water techniques are finalized I can start rolling on the temporary water maps for Oahu... Initially they'll be missing the coral reefs but will at least get the island usable until I can rebuild the version 1 blendmask routines...

Finally Utah's temporary water maps are about ready to go into production. Just needing to finalize some routines on that as well then get the ball rolling...

A couple more things needing to be done include investigating if autogen is able to be pursued quickly, water flatten excludes built, documentation written, and a few other tasks...

In the meantime here's a couple of recent test flight images...

Ultimate VFR Utah - Placeholder Watermaps

2010-10-07T12:49:00.003+08:00

Based on our latest work we're implementing some temporary watermaps for Ultimate VFR Utah until we get our commercial data. Check out our livestream to watch the progress.

Should only be a matter of days before these watermaps become available. I'll work on a second version in the coming week with separated water elements for users to be able to configure the water as they find appropriate.

In the meantime Ultimate VFR California has seen both Butte and Alpine Counties completed rendering wise. Next step is documentation writing and approval.

Alpine County took a bit of hand editing due to the snowcaps... A couple more counties will also need that level of attention. The great news being that our watermaps are something we can upgrade as time goes by to make them even more accurate than what we already have...

More on Water...

2010-10-06T00:06:00.003+08:00

Just before heading to sleep I had another brainwave which I'm hoping will lead to 2 successful tests tomorrow...

If the first stage of the test works then I'll look at implementing a second stage of the test for the water and should be able to come up with a neat little routine to make the option 1 water look super nice...

This is starting to get fun...

Ultimate VFR Xtreme - Oahu

2010-10-05T21:30:00.002+08:00

Okay in light of the latest scenery developments, I've got good news also for Oahu... Water effects will be implemented within 7 days hopefully with image refinement to continue.

The water effects will be placeholder momentarily while we finish up the super super fine watermapping but we'll have something up very quickly. The imagery in the ocean won't be blended out just yet but that will happen once we get everything refined, but at least it will give us a good idea of what we should do in terms of blendmasking the ocean side...

Ultimate VFR California - Water Test Flights

2010-10-05T21:04:00.003+08:00

Doing some test flights at various times of day to see the effect of light on the water and am quite pleased with this initial version of the water. Looking at some comparison shots between real world imagery and some of the myriad of shots in sim I'd have to say it's about as close as it can get to real life in sim for color...

Ultimate VFR - Water Technology

2010-10-05T18:56:00.002+08:00

In the last week of finishing up our routines and tests I've had a few eureka moments when it comes to watermapping.

First of all, for Ultimate VFR Utah water will be finalized within weeks for version 1. There's already a Version 2 planned. Version 1 will have not so accurate data but version 2 will have hyper accurate data.

The great news is that you won't have to download GB's of data again for the whole state. You'll only need to download minimal datasets for the upgrades, probably less than a couple of GB.

I'm reworking what has been mapped so for for Ultimate VFR California and that will align the project with our new approach.

We now will be offering water in a variety of flavors, starting off with 1 or 2 options to begin with. The rest will follow at a later date once we refine processes further for future options. We think this will give users the best range of choice and will make photoscenery *highly configurable*...

Along with that, we also have some ideas on how to implement future technology which could really revolutionize photoscenery for FS in a way not yet done...

Anyhow, I'm off to finish up the water for Butte county and take a test fly through it. If that looks positive then expect a version 1 release shortly.

Ultimate VFR California - Beta Test Flight

2010-10-05T07:14:00.004+08:00

Better viewed in Facebook, just a little too long for YouTube...

More Ultimate VFR California - Nevada County & New IRIS A-10 Warthog

2010-10-03T19:17:00.002+08:00

Another couple of test flight and a test flight with the new IRIS A-10 Warthog...

Ultimate VFR California - Yuba/Butte Test Flight

2010-09-30T07:57:00.001+08:00

Here's a couple more screenshots from the Yuba/Butte test flight...

Ultimate VFR California - Water Tests

2010-09-30T00:06:00.001+08:00

Been running some R&D tests tonight and I think we've got the best options for people in terms of watermapping...

Here's a sneak peek...

Ultimate VFR California - Butte & Alpine

2010-09-29T12:06:00.002+08:00

Photoscenery aspect has been completed in rendering. Will do a test flight tonight.

We just need to start building the water flatten excludes in case users don't have Ultimate Terrain X.

Will post pics later tonight once I'm done in TV land.

California & Oahu

2010-09-28T22:13:00.002+08:00

Finalized our code for the new versions of the software we recently upgraded to and everything is back fully automated again.

Butte and Alpine Counties are rendering for California as well as all the watermap / blendmask cutouts for all the counties in the state...

Just waiting for some quick color correction work to be finalized on Alphine before freeing up compute cycles to do more photoshop work on Oahu...

Here's a sample of the county water and blendmasks that are in progress...

Ultimate VFR California & Ultimate VFR Xtreme Oahu

2010-09-27T21:24:00.002+08:00

Yuba is complete, just need to tweak our installers and then get her ready to upload...

Many more counties are in process right now and work is also continuing on UVFRX Oahu...

Stay tuned...

Ultimate VFR California - Yuba

2010-09-25T01:23:00.004+08:00

The final render for Ultimate VFR California - Yuba (County) is now complete, still have some re-coding to do with our software tool, but that's another story.

Took a test fly through the scenery and discovered one of the biggest issues with massive scale water mapping is the time the imagery was acquired vs the position of the moon, the tide, the recent rainfall, waterflow etc etc etc.

So watermapping on this scale is good but not perfect. As Remote Sensing technology gets better this of course will improve but for now you will notice some anomalies that unfortunately can't be avoided with such a massive scale project. The only way to have perfect water is to hand watermap and that would take years for California alone, by the time an effort like that would be completed another year's imagery would be available and the cycle would continue of never catching up.

So while not perfect in every regard, it's pretty close and definitely a lot more accurate than the USGS data that has been the source of watermapping in the past.

I know there will likely be complaints from perfectionists so I want to set expectations now. We do have plans for much more accurate watermapping in the years ahead but at the same time the datasets we're needing to rely on for that level of fidelity are still several years away.

So without any further ado, here's a warts and all slideshow of the initial rendering of Ultimate VFR California - Yuba County...

Click to see higher resolution version in Flickr.

California Here We Come...

2010-09-22T23:01:00.004+08:00

Just putting the finishing touches on the initial test render for Yuba County. Photoshop CS5 has changed a few things in the scripting language that we'll have to code in at some point but for now we can run the scripts after a manual tweak. I want to add one more thing into the scenery creation process that no one else has done with photoscenery but that will take a quick couple of tests...

In the meantime here's a sneak peek at our nice colorful water bodies we're ready to add effects to...

Florida Water Masks Complete 99.9%

2010-09-22T09:29:00.003+08:00

Work has been completed on the Florida Statewide Water Masks as of midnight last night. Just two tiny blocks need work tonight once I'm back from the TV station.

Work will start on the first finalized county for California tonight and once the initial render is done then I can build the scripts for the final masters.

At the same time work will roll again on watermasking by hand for Oahu which should not take long with the new software we have.

Florida Has a Lot of Water

2010-09-21T17:49:00.002+08:00

Boy oh boy does Florida have a lot of water...

Just been rendering the watermaps the last couple of days and there's so much water over the whole state it's stunning...

In fact there's so much water it's tempting to go to turbosquid, buy an alligator from there and drop some into the scenery... Just kidding...

It's been a very successful couple of days, I'm expecting to get going again on the watermaps for Oahu once Photoshop has finished up the watermapping for Florida...

Live Stream - Online Again

2010-09-21T09:53:00.001+08:00

Ultimate VFR USA - Production Rolling

2010-09-19T23:42:00.004+08:00

After several days bringing the 5 drives we brought over from the render farm in the Philippines to Guam, we're up and running.

Ultimate VFR California is about to start final rendering with the watermapping having been completed already and Ultimate VFR Florida is being prepped with watermaps at the same time.

Ultimate VFR Xtreme Oahu is also in process for watermapping and the first datasets should start rolling out very shortly as well.

Here's some shots of the Florida Keys' watermapping.

Dreams...

2010-09-17T20:00:00.002+08:00

Tonight as I've been re-assembling the production suite and gearing up for scenery rendering and distribution I was reminded about how far this journey has taken me.

It's been 4 years in the making as of this month and is not a road I'd anticipated becoming so big, but the hour is very close at hand where our first complete photoscenery rollout is about to begin.

Work is also close to completion on the initial release of Oahu and I'll be working full steam ahead over the weekend to start bringing that to life. In order to get what we have out the door I'm electing to drop some features in version 1.0 that will appear in version 2.0, simply because we want to get things wound up and into everyone's hands.

So in light of that we dedicate this video to all who have dared to dream along with us... It is almost time for the sun to start rising over the land...

Paradigm Shift???

2010-09-17T01:47:00.002+08:00

Doing some deep cyberspace exploration... "It's cyberlife Jim, but not as we know it..."

...and no I'm definitely not a Star Trek fan but in this case the references fit what I'm exploring right now...

...if the technology and delivery systems we're looking at make sense from a feasibility standpoint we may just see the biggest revolution in Flight Simulator Photoscenery delivery, distribution and pricing...

...standby...

Oahu Update

2010-09-16T10:23:00.000+08:00

Watermapping tiles are being uploaded to our server for finalization work. Version 1 should be out shortly.

Ultimate VFR California Prepping

2010-09-16T10:09:00.002+08:00

Ultimate VFR California is in the beginning stages of final production. We're expecting the first county to come online next week. I have a busy weekend this weekend shooting at the TV studio but the first elements for California are prepped.

Next step is ensuring the water mapping details are aligned. Then the blend masks, which we plan to do something special with. Then it's off to processing.

Ultimate VFR USA - Eventual Coverage

2010-09-15T19:30:00.003+08:00

This is a preview shot of our eventual cover for Photoscenery for FSX for the United States.

Some of the areas in Nevada are not available due to sensitive military installations, and some areas on this overall shot don't have current imagery showing. This does give a taste though of our eventual coverage that we'll start rolling out in the coming weeks.

Up and Running

2010-09-15T07:58:00.003+08:00

Alrighty the new server is up and running, our outbound email is now also working again after a brief delay due to some security measures we had in place that needed to be tweaked.

We've adjusted some server settings to help prevent the downloads of 500mb-2GB files from timing out and are testing that now. We've also built a test downloading tool and are testing that right now which will give more robust, more stable and much faster download access.

In about a week we should have the extra layers of technology implemented and should be able to start bringing the photoscenery online in the next few weeks.

It's been a long hard road for development, many challenges that starting out 4 years ago were never envisioned but it's definitely been worth the journey and I know the wait has been long. Flying through the test area of California yesterday I realized we do have something very special here and it's time to start making things go live and get the ball rolling once and for all.

On a personal level I apologize for getting so bogged down in detail that I lost sight of the bigger picture and just how special what we have is.

New Server Propogation

2010-09-13T18:16:00.002+08:00

Alright our new server is almost online, a little hickup over the last 24 hours but everything is now lined up ready to go. We just have to wait for the Domain Name Servers worldwide to catch up.

If anyone wants to know they can set their DNS to Google's DNS servers with a Primary IP of 8.8.8.8 and Secondary IP of 8.8.4.4 and they should see the site a lot faster.

Now it's just a matter of sitting, waiting and then she'll be live.

If anyone, particularly from Europe has had problems downloading then once the site is back up live you should no longer have any issues with broken downloads or download timeouts...

Wrapping Up Server Port

2010-09-12T22:56:00.004+08:00

Got 95% of the server now ported, just finalizing one minor thing before everything is fully back up 100%...

Here's a preview of our design work for our eventual new website...

Server Port...

2010-09-11T16:54:00.002+08:00

Been busy the last 24 hours prepping the new dedicated server and getting ready to flip the switch hopefully on Monday Guam time.

Everything is going very very well so far, still have about 80GB of data to port over and then move the databases over as well.

The new server will free up data transfer speeds and connections for all customers outside of the continental United States and is our first step towards expansion of our operations.

It's been a very long hard road to this point and we have more technology we want to roll into the loop to give everyone the best experience possible for Flight Simulation.

I'm looking at investing in a few more pieces of technology in the coming month that should make the massive downloads a breeze and make life much more enjoyable for the community.

More news soon.

California...

2010-09-10T19:38:00.002+08:00

Just a couple of shots, we're almost ready, it's been a long process... We'll have something special to announce soon...

New Server Built

2010-09-10T11:55:00.003+08:00

Our new server is built and we'll spend the next few days configuring her and then porting our site over in the coming week.

If all goes well we should only have the site down momentarily next week as we flip the switch...

Changes

2010-09-09T22:07:00.003+08:00

We're working right this minute on changing over to a new hosting solution and delivery solutions and the next step is porting our site over to the new server which should happen this coming week.

We're about to upgrade equipment here in Guam to handle the new influx of rendering and data and that process will be happening over the next month or so.

So things are moving along, we're finally in a position to be able to break loose and let the flood out of the floodgates.

Quick Update

2010-09-08T14:24:00.002+08:00

Working on upgrading our systems here on Guam after moving all our drives over from the Philippines.

Should have 5TB of drives up online in the next week or so. Then work can start on California.

Also working on new delivery systems due to our current hosting solution timing out way too frequently on http downloads.

In the next month we expect to have new infrastructure in place for delivery so we can start pushing a lot more data out to customers.

Busy Month

2010-08-17T07:27:00.003+08:00

Hi Simmers,

It's been an extremely busy month for me, sorry about not keeping up to date here. A lot has been happening at the TV station I've been freelancing at and I've started Directing/Technical Directing the news, have had a big change in management and are launching new t.v. channels. This has kept me very busy the last 4 weeks. So here's the latest news...

ProMesh California is almost ready for packaging up and uploading to the server. Just have to put the finishing touches on her.

Ultimate VFRX Oahu is almost complete, am still bogged down with cloud removal but I've now hired someone to do our watermapping to help speed the other part of the process along. We'll be doing a lot more outsourcing in coming months as we expand and grow.

We're also forging some new ties with some key people in the industry to bring you better scenery than we can do solo. This is a work in progress but expect news soon.

We're looking at new delivery systems as well that will revolutionize the way scenery for Flight Simulator is sold.

I'll provide a new update hopefully in a few days...

Dean.

NEXTMap ProMesh California Version 2.0 Almost Complete

2010-07-21T19:51:00.003+08:00

After a mammoth render process of almost 2 weeks NEXTMap ProMesh California Version 2.0 is almost ready to upload. There's just one more tile to re-render to fix mountain peak clipping issues but then she'll be ready to upload.

Then on to NEXTMap ProMesh France, Italy & Germany Version 2.0.

Oahu is still in process. What a bear to get the watermapping complete, thankfully the freelance tv work is shifting into a new role which has freed up a lot more time to be able to get back to the nitty gritty.

NEXTMap ProMesh California Version 2.0

2010-06-23T18:04:00.002+08:00

NEXTMap ProMesh California Version 2.0 is currently rendering with France, Germany, Italy version 2.0 to come.

Work is also continuing on the Oahu scenery package with watermaps and blendmasks also being re-generated while manual processing for version 2.0 is in the works.

Heavy Editing - Oahu

2010-06-17T19:42:00.002+08:00

Heavy edit work today on a massive amount of waves...

Standby...

2010-06-08T22:05:00.003+08:00

Been a busy couple of weeks, still editing Oahu imagery, as well as doing some freelance work at a local TV station.

California Photoscenery will be going into production within the next week at our render farm, while other NEXTMap ProMesh products get brought up to version 2.0 standard. California is on hold due to one or two corrupted files.

The last couple of weeks have been quite busy as I've been biking to the TV station and the last few days have been able to re-invest the income earned there in a car which will allow me much more time to edit rather than cycling up long long hills. The process of purchasing a car has been taking up a lot of my time outside of the freelance work.

I'll be building the watermask scripts in the next few days (likely on Saturday) and should be in full scale production for California on Monday.

NEXTMap® ProMesh™ California Version 2.0

2010-05-26T20:56:00.001+08:00

NEXTMap^® ProMesh^™ California Version 2.0 data is being loaded into the main system now and will start rendering shortly. This will be taking place while we have a few free compute cycles and have a little spare RAM while I'm out making television.

Ultimate VFR Xtreme Oahu - Ongoing

2010-05-26T20:45:00.004+08:00

I've been a little busy the last week with freelance television work here on Guam but work is still continuing on Oahu with some really massive edits on a couple of tiles in the DVD2 source data.

This source DVD is likely to take a few more days to complete and then it'll be on to 3 of 14.

As can be seen in the following image, the number of waves in this scene is substantial and these need to be removed to fit in better with our blend masks once we're at that stage...

Already a significant number of waves have been removed from the above image but this tile has the most whitewater surf of all of the images.

Behind the Scenes

2010-05-19T18:06:00.001+08:00

Ploughing through Oahu

2010-05-18T01:01:00.002+08:00

Spent another day of heavy editing for Oahu, the section I've been working on has the most clouds of the entire island so the going is pretty slow but once through this one DVD dataset (i.e. 2 of 14) the rest will be a lot faster.

I know I'm now spending more time and energy on than anticipated, but I really want the quality to be there on this one...

In the meantime I'll quickly set up some scripts to start preparing for the render farm in the Philippines to start pumping out California.

Time for some sleep though.

Guam Vector Freeware Test Flight

2010-05-17T11:01:00.002+08:00

After a small amount of work on Jim and my part Guam freeware is almost ready for release. Just need to fix the airport plateau and add one small island to the dataset.

Note: to see High Definition version click on the title rather than the play button ;)...

Ultimate VFR Xtreme Oahu - Watermasks Mk2

2010-05-15T08:35:00.003+08:00

Yet again, we're raising the bar on quality and refinement of Ultimate VFR Xtreme Oahu's water maps.

While the initial version was going to be acceptable, the new version is exceeding even our own expectations.

The screenshots below show where the water effects will be shown:

Upgrading Store - Maintenance

2010-05-14T20:21:00.004+08:00

Today I was working on upgrading our store to the latest version and ran into a glitch which means the store is offline for about 24 hours. If anyone needs any products feel free to visit any of the regular online flight sim stores.

I'll have the updated store back up in a jiffy but need to do some heavy handed behind the scenes work to make it all behave.

I did have the update for Gross Glockner available before the glitch and it's standing by, but gotta do a little work to get her running smoothly.

So I'll be back soon.

In the meantime, Ultimate VFR USA preparations are coming along very well.

Ultimate VFR USA Preparations

2010-05-13T21:05:00.002+08:00

The last few days, aside from working on Ultimate VFR Xtreme Oahu, have been spent preparing the master project elements for Ultimate VFR Utah, California, Florida and West Virginia...

I'm happy to say that we are almost go for launch for Utah and California processing and Florida should be followed shortly after...

I'm itching to find out if we can advance the Utah project faster and get that one wound up once and for all...

Today I headed out to town and mailed out the last batch of DVD backup orders and I'm currently investigating a new DVD backup delivery system that will be much more efficient...

So much catch up work to do now that I'm operating out of Guam. So many projects about to start, many screenshots to take, new delivery systems to get up and running, new ordering processes needing to update, new datasets arriving soon, et al...

Sigh, someone once told me, to eat an elephant, you eat it one bite at a time...

So tonight sleep, tomorrow, more work...

Adventures on Guam - May 13, 2010

2010-05-13T00:00:00.002+08:00

Well tonight I experienced the first brown tree snake power outages that Guam is well known for. Tonight the power started to fade then suddenly shut down.

A few minutes later I walked out to the gas station around from me as I could hear the generator there and knew both it and the attached McDonald's would have electricity, plus with no fan it was just too hot to stay inside the apartment... Just moments after heading outside I saw a bright blue flash, followed by a loud explosion moments later... Something definitely blew up, and I'm suspecting the usual snakes...

I'm not exactly sure how frequent these occurrences are, but it's been just on 3.5 weeks and it seems it's true, snakes really do take out the power here frequently, but they seem to get it back up and restored very quickly, unlike the day long power outages in the Philippines...

Anyway it seems I'm no longer worried about snakes, although I've only seen dead ones for now, I kind of view them now the same was as I view cockroaches, just another pest that if you don't create anything that'd be an attractant to them then you're all good...

So this guy is off to sleep, and will be doing more work tomorrow... There'll be new changes to our store shortly including being able to manually process credit cards over the phone, being able to take phone, fax and mail orders, new DVD backup systems will come online and in the not too distant future, we'll be offering hard drive shipping... If there's anything else I forgot I'll post it in the next newsletter.

The Massive Cloud...

2010-05-12T19:28:00.003+08:00

Image Pass #1 at cloud removal...

Massive Cloud:

Massive Cloud Removed:

While I'm ready to move on to correct more image tiles, this has been my biggest edit for the entire island and will be the biggest single image edit for this scenery. While the ridges don't fully follow their original real world lines, this will hardly be noticible in sim... ***However***, I do have the technique and tools to be able to push everything back into place, I just need the stamina and inspiration to get to that part of the imagery processing in order to finish it up... I'm quite happy with today's results so far and should be able to refine this further once DVD 2's data has had a it's first pass cleanup done...

For now I'm fried after that edit, and it's literally the hardest one for the entire island, so I'm taking a break for until tomorrow...

Ultimate VFR Xtreme Oahu & Ultimate VFR California

2010-05-12T00:41:00.004+08:00

I'm currently still editing the imagery for Ultimate VFR Xtreme - Oahu and the process is moving along rapidly. Yesterday I worked 16-18 hours straight and in half a work day I got one DVD's worth of uncompressed source imagery 98% complete ready for masking.

Work will continue on Ultimate VFR Xtreme Oahu and will be viewable on our livestream channel during working hours.

Today I was also able to generate final project master data for Ultimate VFR California and shortly the render farm in the Philippines will be fired up for rendering.

Today I also was able to get Fiber Internet speed increased at the new office and that means both improved upload and download speeds.

I'm also gearing up for a new delivery system for all our products to help get our customers around the world our data in a much more efficient manner.

There's a lot of work ahead including building new shipping systems, new content delivery etc etc etc into our overall operational plans and this is now a high priority for us as soon as Oahu is completed.

New datasets for other states will be arriving in the next few weeks as well.

Half a Day, Hafa Adai and The Water Issue Just Got Blown Out of the Water!!!

2010-05-11T01:02:00.003+08:00

Hokey schmokes... Yep, that's what I'm sayin' and I'm not taking it back because my world has been seriously rocked over the last few days of development...

Ultimate VFR Xtreme - Oahu just got MegaXtreme in a way that I'm not even going to reveal until release...

First of all though what previously took a week to do via hand editing when I started Oahu has taken me just 1/2 a day to accomplish with way better results... In fact the results have been so good and so fast to implement I decided to take the quality level up a notch...

Here's a comparison screenshot of the source imagery vs the new color correction and image editing to clean up anomalies...

As you may notice, I've done something new, I'm removing the static waves breaking over the coral heads/reef... This will allow for the FSX water effects to look correct without silly image anomalies. I'll post more screenshots soon of the other areas including cloud and cloud shadow removal...

So what the heck is Hafa Adai (pronounced like half a day)? It's kind of like the Guam (Guahan), official greeting, kind of like Aloha in Hawaii, Mabuhay in the Philippines or G'day in Australia... Why Hafa Adai? Well my world was just rocked seriously in a way that I had always dreamed and hoped for but never imagined would arrive... Well today it has and unfortunately for everyone I think I'll keep it a secret till it blows everyone elses worlds too...

On the discussion of water the other day, that issue has also been blown out of the water (yes pun intended) and what I can say is the discussion I tried to open up while short lived, and very helpful is now no longer in any need for discussion... Because there is something new on the horizon and I can't sleep because of it... It's now 3:20am here in Guam...

So standby everyone, 'viper's coming down...' to borrow a cheesy line from a cheesy yet well watched movie...

LiveStream Up Again

2010-05-10T14:20:00.003+08:00

Finally back in the developed world with fast internet, so we're now able to get our livestream back up of the main office computer... This is the most interesting feed anyway as the others in the Philippines are just rendering...

Watch live streaming video from fsdreamscapes at livestream.com

An Open Discussion About Water

2010-05-09T21:58:00.007+08:00

In developing wide area photoscenery for FSX we are coming up against a problem that really wasn't a concern in the days of FS2004/2.

The issue at hand is water mapping data. Years ago FS used to just use a solid 0,0,0 RGB value in an image to define where water was located. No problem, paste in black water and the default FS2004/2 water shows through.

In FSX it's a different story because FSX uses alpha channels in the source imagery where black = the water movement effects and white = land. Thereby overlaying water effects but allowing imagery underneath to show through, which would be great if all water variables in the real world stayed constant.

In other words, imagery that was taken of the ground in 2007 will see very big differences in water levels at dams, streams and rivers etc than water mapping data that may have been obtained in say 2009. With tidal bulge, evaporation, droughts, floods etc these water variables create problems for water mapping on a massive scale.

So I wanted to bring this dilemma to the table with the FSX community and solicit feedback on the most effective solution to this particular water mapping problem issue for massive scale rendering. Below is a screenshot of our alpha stage work and the arrows point to some of the types of anomalies likely to be experienced with just the water effect placed over the imagery...

Now, here's the thing. We have a few choices:

We can publish with these anomalies and risk the ire of the FS perfectionists who expect more than what is technologically possible today
We can paint the terrain a uniform deep blue color which will lose the subtle variances contained within the aerial image based water but will still give an effect similar to the water in X-Plane and will make the water more of a unique feature
We can do both 1 & 2 above and allow users to choose which they prefer
Long Term we may be able to punch out the water from the terrain and allow FSX default water class polygons to show through that we'd develop specifically to match our photoscenery, but this option would take an extraordinarily long time to implement, yet would be the final option we could give users in future

My personal thoughts are that Option 1 is great for the start and get the imagery rolling and out the door. Option 2 can follow shortly after. Option 3 would likely be available to start rolling out 1 year from now.

We do have plans to eventually run image analysis tools over these datasets in future but they are very expensive right now and require massive amounts of computer power which would only really be available through cloud computing.

So what do you guys think? I'd love to post a poll but I'd rather get real feedback through our forums in this thread... http://www.fsdreamscapes.com/forums/index.php?topic=610.0

The Alternative #2 would look more like X-Plane photoscenery water:

Accomplished This Week

2010-05-09T18:12:00.002+08:00

It's felt like a huge uphill battle this last week, but as I reflect on this last week gone by I realize it was a week full of successes and breakthroughs..

Software Upgrade:

Led to 2x the rendering speed of image processing
Led to 10x faster image editing
End Result - much faster processing of data and quicker turn around time for rendering, with less electrical usage (i.e. better for the environment)

Vector Scenery First Steps:

This week has seen our first new steps (well second steps if you count our initial testing of vector scenery back in the early days of FSX) towards developing our vector based datasets for use in conjunction with both NEXTMap ProMesh product lines as well as Ultimate VFR product lines.
These first steps have also led the discovery of new datasets we can employ to add value to both NEXTMap ProMesh elevation and Ultimate VFR photoscenery products
Roads, River & Coastline data improvements are all on the books for each of our products and will be a free enhancement once the datasets are developed
Default FSX water bodies are now able to be quickly removed for use with the Ultimate VFR scenery products which will remove the water plateaus often seen unless the slope values in the terrain.cfg are turned to "slope" or "off", adjusting these values will no longer be necessary

Ultimate VFR Xtreme - Oahu:

Is now in full scale production of version 1.0 and is just weeks away from release
Added in will be freeway road traffic vehicles, some enhanced scenery elements, basic autogen vegetation and all being well a new nightlighting system
Also on the cards is also a version of Oahu for FS2004

Ultimate VFR - Utah:

Water Datasets are not far off and are expected by mid 2010
New color and quality to the imagery, finally Monument Valley should look realistic
County scenery areas will be faded into the surrounding areas providing a nice blend rather than a hard edge line

Water Masking:

Water masking approach finalized - there will be options based on user preference
Water masking will be a modular approach i.e. initial release, then option 2 will come along later and then finally a 3rd option will become available

Office Operations:

New company vehicle - Schwinn Riverside Cruiser Bicycle obtained due to having to hike several miles every other day which was eating into work time
New P.O. Box established
Office 95% set up
CPU fan and heatsink cleaned and resettled
Quadcore Overclocked to faster speed
Cable Internet Installed

Guam Mini Project:

A mini 60 min project working with a few others in the freeware circuit has been in development very quickly (while awaiting rendering of Oahu)

I'm sure there's more I've done this last week, and I've been playing catch up over the weekend instead of taking a break as I should but these new developments have been far too exciting and encouraging to lose momentum :-)

For now I must sign off for the night and get ready to finish up Oahu this week (and a bit)...

Ultimate VFR - Utah Update

2010-05-09T13:21:00.002+08:00

Great news is that Utah's datasets for the water masks are not far away so we'll be able to get that project finally completed by mid 2010, I just need to confirm the datasets are on their way.

With all the things I've learned over this last week I can happily say that we're going to be adding new features to enhance the product very very soon (once we finalize Oahu).

Here's the short list:

Enhanced Imagery with Enhanced Colors
Statewide Freeway Traffic (i.e. moving vehicles) on major roads
Vector Based Water Polygon & Stream Excludes (i.e. plateaued water bodies removed)
New 3D Streetlighting System (may take some dev work for performance issues)
Basic Autogen Vegetation (yet to be developed)
Road Flatten Switch (turn road flattens on/off)
Future Water Configurator (still in R&D)
Support for Flight 1's Ultimate Objects Buildings

There will likely be further enhancements to all product lines as time goes by but this is our new baseline goal.

Oahu Version 1.0 Color Correction

2010-05-09T09:30:00.005+08:00

Great news is that the color correction for Ultimate VFR Xtreme Oahu color correction is now complete, and was much faster to render under the new software.

Original Color:

Color Corrected:

Another couple of comparison shots, the left image is before the right image is after color correction:

While I still want to get the downtown area tweaked color wise I'll leave that for the future update to Version 2.0.

In other news I'll be adding several extra levels of detail into the scenery including freeway traffic for all major highways and we'll also be doing other vector data based work.

This last week has been a big week of learning about vector based data and now I'm happy to say that it's a lot easier than I originally thought and this will have a major effect on the NEXTMap ProMesh and other Ultimate VFR product lines as well, particularly with water flatten removal for use with photoscenery...

Pending some further experiments as well I may be able to implement some other technologies I've been thinking about for a while, but those are dependent upon some tests...

Adventures on Guam - May 8, 2010

2010-05-08T18:45:00.007+08:00

Well I'm starting a new series in the blog covering some of the non-fs specific part of my new life in Guam...

Since moving here it's been wonderful to meet such friendly people and to always see the sun shining (so far, we'll see what happens in typhoon season starting next month), and all in all perfect temperatures...

As I have no car on Guam yet and not even a bicycle, my main mode of transport is on foot, which is great for really getting to know a new place. The weather has been perfect lately so today I headed off to get the long awaited Adobe Photoshop CS5 Upgrade I'd had so much trouble ordering, thankfully all is forgiven now that it's arrived and I'd rather have bad ordering experiences and get something exceptional than have great ordering experiences and poor user experiences, but I digress...

So I headed off and first up I wanted to check the status of the snake I had run into the night before... I'll let the photojournal do the rest of the talking... Note: Click on the title link to see a full screen slideshow presentation complete with track/photo markers...

Hike to Post Office (Part 1)

Map your trip with EveryTrail

Hike to Post Office (Part 2)

Map your trip with EveryTrail

I'll be making more posts like this as time goes along as I get to experience more and more of this wonderful island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean...

Blown Away!!!

2010-05-08T16:31:00.002+08:00

After the debacle with Adobe's ordering system I'm happy to say that today I received the Adobe Photoshop CS5 upgrade and am extremely impressed. I'd been using the demo and was very happy with the new content aware fill but after installing the registered software and finally setting it to work on image correction I'm blown away...

Speed has increased from hours to minutes... I'll run a side by side test and do some benchmarking but I think Adobe has really removed some of the rendering bottlenecks...

So we're getting ever closer to version 1.0 release for Oahu and I'll be working on the tiling fixes for the water maps in this next week. Then it's time to finalize the watermasks for version 1.0 and the piece her all together...

It looks like I may need to move to a 64 bit system though to make use of >4GB of RAM as now we'll be going beyond our current capabilities hardware wise if we want to speed things up even further...

Also Version 2.0 of NEXTMap ProMesh Great Britain (aka formerly NEXTMap ProMesh United Kingdom) has been released to the store and is available in the order history page for previous customers, we'll seed the data to the other stores shortly...

Something New...

2010-05-07T02:48:00.004+08:00

Well here's something new we're about to add value for our customers...

In the last few days as I've been prepping Oahu for the final version 1.0 render I've had a few compute cycles free and have been learning about the world of Vector Scenery Creation... Now I know it's not quite as exciting as photoscenery but here on Guam there's basically no public domain imagery available and having moved on island and wanting to see Guam properly represented in FSX and also seeing a post at the same time at AVSIM asking for someone to do Guam, I was able to quickly render a NED based 10m elevation mesh within 24 hours.

Following that Jim Dhaenens jumped on board and helped me get vector data converted for use to build new shorelines, water bodies and roads for Guam, a marked improvement over what FSX has to offer by default...

FSX Guam - Before

FSX Guam - After

Flying around the island now is a truly incredible experience, you can actually recognize Guam now...

Anyway long story short, this little project will be released as a freeware addition to our offerings under a creative commons license. In future we're looking forward to creating more areas like these for countries outside of North America and Europe to help enhance FSX in a way that has not been done before.

For all NEXTMap ProMesh customers these datasets will be available as free downloads via your store accounts once we start rolling out the data...

Basically these vector datasets are very simple to make and do enhance the base sim significantly. They don't take away compute cycles from the photoscenery or elevation mesh rendering and creation processes, they're just mini projects I can do while I wait for the main CPU's to do their stuff.

Also our airport plateau fixes will really start rolling out after Mid 2010 once the NEXTMap ProMesh series is completed.

Ultimate VFR Xtreme - Oahu Color Correction

2010-05-04T19:51:00.003+08:00

Ultimate VFR Xtreme - Oahu is now back into early stages of finalization and it looks like Adobe may have come through with our order and should be here by next week, in the meantime we'll do the image cleaning on the demo version of CS5 to tide us over while we anticipate our upgrade to arrive...

So right now the source files are copying across again and we'll re-run the color correction process over them which should take a few days, then we'll go ahead and build out the water as needed to allow for our blend masks to work...

What I'm really excited about is the ability to quickly clean up the imagery and remove dust marks off the imagery and lines that are on the source data, not that you really see any in sim but for anything significant it is going to make a huge difference...

Ultimate VFR Xtreme - Oahu & A Few Other Things

2010-05-04T01:15:00.005+08:00

Ultimate VFR Oahu is set for finalization now that Photoshop CS5 is running in our office and allows us to automate the finalization of our water extension maps.

It's been a battle with Adobe trying to order through them directly and that is still an ongoing process but in the meantime we've got a version up and running and the clock it ticking till the end of the month to complete the mapping at the latest, unless of course Adobe actually does finalize our order which we hope to do, but regardless we're aiming for Oahu to be completed by the end of May at the very very latest.

While I head off for the night I've started the final rendering of NEXTMap ProMesh Great Britain Version 2.0 and it should be ready by morning, then all it will need is packaging up and uploading to the server, which may mean a trip to an internet cafe for a few hours.

Also while we twiddle our thumbs waiting for various CPU cycles to complete we've rendered a 10m Mesh for Guam and have passed along road vector data to our friend Jim for our first in a new series of freeware products derived from Public Domain Datasets to complement the commercially obtained imagery and elevation data for areas where no such high quality commercial data exists...

Hopefully we'll be able to spare a few compute cycles as well and in a spare 10 minutes here or there be able to render Palau, Yap, Rota, CNMI, American Samoa and some of the other pacific islands...

National Elevation Dataset 10m Data vs. NEXTMap® ProMesh™ 5m Data

2010-05-03T00:46:00.010+08:00

I was just preparing for some advance side work for this coming week and wanted to post a quick comparison to showcase how vastly superior the NEXTMap^® ProMesh^™ data is compared to the USGS National Elevation Dataset data.

The National Elevation Dataset 10m Data can be seen to have quite a few anomalies, such as mole runs etc.

As you can see, where there should be streams there's a huge mess of random bumps and holes.

Compare this to the NEXTMap^® ProMesh^™ 5m Data and you can clearly see every gully and ditch clearly defined and in much higher resolution and quality.

The next two photos are 1:1 pixel @ 5m per pixel resolution:

USGS NED 10m

NEXTMap^® ProMesh^™

When compared in a slideshow it becomes very obvious which dataset is both more accurate and appealing. This is expecially important when this data is used in conjunction with photoscenery.

I'll continue to do comparison shots between the different datasets in coming weeks.

Oahu Ready to Rumble!!!

2010-05-02T23:24:00.002+08:00

Alrighty, after running a few tests tonight with Oahu and the new upgraded software I'm very very happy to say that this upgrade will do the trick and will make the final stage of Oahu version 1.0 be completed in a matter of days rather than weeks... I'm very very happy with the preliminary results and the next phase is finalizing the water masks and finishing her up...

Cooling System Sorted

2010-04-30T19:29:00.001+08:00

Cooling system has been fixed and temp dropped down back to a respectable 36-40 degrees celius t-core at idle...

Still awaiting the release of CS5 for download...

Getting excited to see how fast we can finish up Oahu once we've done the upgrade.

Tick Tock, Tick Tock, Tick Tock...

2010-04-29T21:39:00.001+08:00

Alabama, Arkansas, Connecticut, Iowa, Maryland, Massachussetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Utah, Vermont, Washington, Wisconsin, Wyoming...

:-)

California, Utah, Florida, Oahu...

Tick Tock, Tick Tock, Tick Tock...