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January 23 The Demise of Microsoft ACES StudiosThis is indeed a sad day for those in ACES Studio, and for the Flight and Train Sim communities that the ACES studios have provided so much to in the last 20+ years.
I had the privilege of knowing some of the ACES team & visiting their studios, and all were highly talented people dedicated to the products (Flight-sim, Train-sim and/or ESP) they worked on and the customers they served.
IMO, this was an incredibly short-sighted decision by the company. To try to recreate the talent, knowledge & experience of the current team, while not impossible, will be a difficult and multi-year task, even with access to the archived code of the current products. Microsoft could try to create a new simulation product from an entirely new codebase a year-or-two down the road, but the cost of doing so would likely be prohibitive, even assuming a significant improvement to the economy by 2010-2011.
So, despite the statement of Kelda Rericha in the MS press release listed above, I doubt that we will see anything in the forseeable future from Microsoft w.r.t. either Flight, Train or other types of simulators - the actions of the company in the last year or so, in closing down studio after studio, have shown that they no longer wish to create PC-based games. I had hoped that the commercially-focused ESP product might have survived, but apparently Microsoft has concluded that even that is not a commercially long-term viable proposition.
Microsoft may create new, simple, flying-type games for the X-box platform in future, but IMO they will neither be - or pretend to be - accurate simulations of flight,, but rather follow along the lines of the Crimson Skies product - fun games, but not based in reality.
To those of the ACES studio who might read this, I wish you all the best. Your skillset & talents are of the highest order in your field, so I do not think it will be hard to find new work outside of Microsoft (from all accounts, internal transfers will be hard to come by).
Good luck to all,
- regards, 75027 November 18 ESP DocumentationAs some of you might now, the ESP team from Aces Studio are holding a couple of conferences this month. If you can't attend, you can still see what was presented at the November 2008 ESP Dev Conference. You can also download some nifty ESP videos, as well as code samples. Two other useful ESP links are the blog by Todd Landstad, Technical Evangelist for ESP, and the MSDN ESP Developer Center.
Even though ESP 1.0 is flight-centric at this point, if you look at the last presentation deck at the conference (8. Conclusion.pdf), you'll see that ESP v2.0 will add land/air capabilities & v3.0 will add marine/indoor/avatar features. Pretty cool stuff!
Since ESP, TS2 & FSX are all built on the same core platform, if you are interested in developing for TS2, I think having a good understanding of ESP will help a lot when developing custom models (locomotives, rolling stock, etc.), scenery (stations, buildings, trackside objects, etc) and terrain when TS2 & its SDK become available.
- More later
- 75027
October 23 FSX Exporter for XSI - Update VIt's been a month since I last provided an update, so I just wanted to let everyone know that the FSX exporter is still alive, but all work was put on hold this last month. My regular job kept me pretty busy, plus I've been reviewing some really cool stuff for a new product that took up any free time that would otherwise have been spent working on the exporter. So, for those of you who were hoping to see progress & more screenshots, my apologies - but I will get the exporter done (eventually!) PS: Don't forget that if you don't like GMAX and want to use another modeling tool, Paul Gausden has created an exporter for 3D Canvas - you can read all about it on his blog here - more later September 23 FSX Exporter for XSI - Update IVA very quick update an a couple of screen shots to show that progress, though slow, is still being made! I've been working on the LOD & Animation tabs over the last couple of weeks. First, the LOD tab: LOD polymeshes are identified by the polygonreductionop operator associated with the mesh. Only those meshes with this operator are displayed in the LOD Name list. Choosing a LOD in the list displays its triangle count. The list is not dynamic, so if you add new LOD meshes to the model, or modify the triangle count of a mesh, you need to click on the Refresh the LOD List button to show the changes. You also have the option to rename all the LOD meshes by entering a name and clicking the Refresh all LODs button: You can rename the meshes as often as you like. Right now the numerical suffix at the end of each name is calculated from the boundingbox size of the mesh. I still need to determine the best approach here & experiment a bit. The animation tab is a work in progress: There is still a lot of coding work I need to do to get this to work - I'll be focusing on getting this done, hopefully by the end of the month. - more later September 07 Caligari release Beta3 of their SDK for TrueSpace 7.6With the release of trueSpace 7.6 as a free download, Caligari has become another option for modelers looking for free or low-cost modeling tools. Until recently, I had not paid any attention to this product as there was no way one could easily export models to Microsoft games such as FSX. Like XSI, TrueSpace provides very basic .x export functionality out-of-the-box, but with none of the enhancements that FSX (or Microsoft Train Simulator 2) require. In other words, it's in a similar position today as XSI was when I first looked at it last November as a potential modeling tool: it has potential, but will require a lot of work to get it to a usable state as a reliable and easy way to create game content for FSX or TS2. The release of their SDK (here) has changed the tool from being a non-starter to a possibility: It now might be possible to create a FSX/TS2 exporter using C++ (or perhaps Python) to call into the published APIs in the SDK. I've download both the tool & the SDK & have had a very brief look at both, but am not planning to spend any time investigating further as I want to get my XSI exporter finished. That does not mean you have to wait though - you could start creating an exporter yourself! J - 75027 |
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