Bell 412

I know, a little boxy here and there.  Just saving polys.  After all, everyone wants high frames per second, right?

King Air B200

I am finding it hard to not include every detail, so this has a little bit more of that than the RV-7.  I have to watch out for the polygon count, having the simulator's performance in mind, but I figure it is always easier to take a high detail model and scale it down than the opposite.

So far so good regarding the project plan.

RV-7

So tonight is the second night of work on the first task in the project, creating a 3D model of an RV-7. I have one more night, according to the plan, to finish this up. I plan on creating some basic textures (one of my weaknesses right now) to have some color on it. Can't wait to see what that looks like... For now, here's what the model looks like. I tried keeping the polygon count to a minimum, while adding enough detail. Click on each image for a full-resolution version.

Project Plan

The Project plan is done. If I am incredibly prescient, and have actually predicted every single activity right, it will take 219.5 days until I have a decently completed version of Tower Simulator. That sounds like a lot (and if that number is anywhere near accurate, I'd be very surprised. It could be a lot less or a lot more, who knows?), but it involves a lot. Here's what I have planned (in bold are the main sections):

Tower Simulator Project Plan

• Physics
• Collisions
• Motion
• Taxiing
• Parking
• Takeoff
• Climb
• Cruise
• Descent
• Approach
• Landing
• Driving
• Audio
• Aircraft
• Jet Engine
• Startup
• Running
• Shutdown
• Turboprop Engine
• Startup
• Running
• Shutdown
• Piston Engine
• Startup
• Running
• Shutdown
• Ground Vehicles
• Trucks
• Cars
• Tractors
• Voice Recognition
• Models
• Airports
• KCMH
• Runways
• Taxiways
• Apron
• Buildings
• LOWI
• Runways
• Taxiways
• Apron
• Buildings
• Aircraft
• Airliners
• Embraer 170
• Embraer 190
• ERJ-135
• ERJ-140
• ERJ-145
• Airbus 319
• Airbus 320
• Airbus 321
• Dash 8-Q400
• Boeing 737-300
• Boeing 737-700
• CRJ-200
• CRJ-700
• CRJ-900
• General Aviation
• Lancair Legacy
• King Air B200
• Bell 412
• Falcon 900
• Gulfstream V
• Cessna 172
• Cirrus SR-20
• Graphic Interface
• Splash Screen
• Main Menu
• Sub Menus
• Graphics Engine
• Load Models
• Terrain
• Skybox
• Clouds
• Shadows
• Rain
• Snow
• Input
• Keyboard
• Mouse
• Custom Shortcuts
• Installation Package

Let's see what happens.

Project Plan

I make no fuss about the fact that sometimes I find it hard to police myself in regards to following schedules, so I have hired a project manager: my wife. Maybe it sounds crazy to you, but this will keep me much more on track regarding the project plan for Tower Simulator, as she has been very serious about it. I'll be posting a Gantt chart of what the project looks like right now.

Terrain test

Today I found some time to test loading a heightmap, which I generated from a 10m DEM file, into XNA just to see how easily I could do it, and how good it would look.
The result was pretty good. Some information before you watch it:

• The colors are simply based on the height of each vertex, just to have some color. They are not related to anything else from the real world.
• The app runs at 60 fps without even sweating, but the video below is running at 30 fps due to compression
• The depressions that look like wholes on the opposite side of the mountains are either DEM noise or lakes, I have not investigated it yet
  

Can you tell where on earth this is? :)



Here's the original heightmap:

WILCO's TowerSim

I had the opportunity of trying out TowerSim, and have to say I was pretty disappointed. I had a longer list of things I didn't like, but here's the major stuff:

• Graphics are sub par - For today's standards, the graphics are really not very good. Some interesting things, such as shadows that fade into transparency as they get away from the object casting them, and point lights for runways and taxiway lights that do get very small at a distance (unlike the light "gobs" that MSFS has) are good ideas, but the texture resolution, aircraft models, terrain resolution, weather conditions (rain and snow) are not very good.
• No tower cab - the view from the controller's perspective is simply a point in space, without control panels, monitors, glass or anything else to represent the inside of a tower. It is as if you were floating in space.
• Aircraft motion - This is a soar point for me. I think part of a realistic and fun Tower Simulator is aircraft moving as they do in the real world. The aircraft I watched tended to fly a precise approach path, without a single foot of variation, hit the runway exactly at the same point, perform no flare whatsoever, and have unrealistic angles of pitch.
• Controller's interface - The radar scope is very similar to the one I am designing, but the text window that allows the user to control aircraft is cumbersome and slow. It could also have been a bit smarter, such as recognizing "cleared for takeoff runway 9" instead of forcing you to type "cleared for takeoff runway 09".
• No voice recognition - Controllers don't control via text, they do it via voice. ATCsimulator does a good job at that, so there's no reason these guys couldn't get it right.
• Robot-like pilot voices - They used about 8 people to record different pilot voices and accents, but the stitching together of words sounds pretty mechanical and unnatural. I have not cracked the nut on this yet, although I have found a couple of expensive text-to-voice engines that can do a great job. I just have to discover how to do it cheaply.
• Performance issues - I left Chicago O'Hare run without controlling aircraft, and the performance quickly dipped below single-digit frame rates. More and more aircraft showed up, and the simulator had no way of deleting older aircraft, or any other means of stopping it from affecting performance.

All in all, it is not a bad effort, but I expected more. I guess this is good news in the sense that the field is still very much wide open for a good Tower Sim, but I could have been a bit more encouraged by stiffer competition ;).