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 ;).

Have you seen this?

I have known for a long time that there is a community out there just dying to have a good tower simulator. This means that this community is actually pretty sizable, and is great news for everyone! Raising awareness about tower simulations is only one of the good things this software will do.

I like the following features, besides the basic stuff that needs to be in a tower simulator:

- Career mode
- Real-world airline schedules
- Service vehicles

The visuals look quite good, but I am more interested in how realistic it will be. Maybe a demo will be out soon? Here's to hoping.

New airport being considered

As you have probably noticed from the poll on this site, there were some major airports I was considering including in Tower Simulator. After watching a very well-done documentary on Van Nuys, this airport became a very strong candidate, perhaps even number one!

This airport has everything to make a tower simulation interesting. Beautiful scenery with some pretty high terrain close by, varied traffic (small pistons, flight training, business jets, news helicopters). OK, there are no airlines, but we can fix that by having another airport in this release. Not to mention it is the world's third busiest general aviation airport, as well as the 25th busiest among all world airports, with 1,200 operations per day. That should keep everyone pretty busy :).

Another interesting point is its proximity to LAX and Burbank, which means lots of coordinating between the three facilities. This would allow me to develop the intra-airport communication system that I have been thinking about including. This, of course, exists in real life, and I think adds a lot to a controller's responsibilities and overall perception of realism.

It's tower is pretty interesting looking too, and should be fun to model.

If you have some words on this idea, leave me a comment.

We have arrived!

Uhuuuuuuu, after a lot of planning and effort, we have arrived in Columbus, OH!!! The good news, as it relates to Tower Simulator, is that I will now be able to resume development, as the dust settles down. Stay tuned.

Eco-house

So we have decided to build a new house in Columbus, and while this is totally off topic, since it is affecting my work on Tower Simulator, I thought it fair game.

In going over all the deatils you need to pick and choose when buying a house I am finding out a lot about being environmentally sensitive while at it. Here are some really cool solutions:

- Solar water heater
- SunTunnel skylight
- Green roofs
- Geothermal power
- Great reference for all parts of the house: Energy Star

There are so many inexpensive ways to make a house considerably greener, and it will only cost an overall addition of 2 to 3% compared to a "normal" home. Pretty cool, huh?