The peak in the Sportstar Simulator's stats did not stay for long. I still do not know what was the cause of this. Anyway, the game is still doing between 500 and 1000 hits a month and I am happy with that.
I, sometimes, receive an email from a visitor asking about the next version/improvement/bug fix and I try to do my best to make them happy. But I guess the simulator is now going to stay as it is.
The original idea was to implement a terrain engine to stream data (textures and elevation) from the server and offer a greater area to explore. That was really challenging and I gave up to be able to publish a version in time. Shockwave (Lingo) was not fast enough to build a proper ROAM algorithm and I had to come up with a homemade Level Of Detail system; just to discover that the texture swap was slow too, freezing the game for a few milliseconds every now and then. Using Havok for collisions was a nightmare when applied to a dynamic mesh and my shared hosting server was struggling to generate and deliver the textures.
I sometimes think it could be nice to use the Google map images as textures in such an application: they have the big machines and broad pipes. It's all nice and sliced up in little squared chunks, ready to be mapped on the mesh and fast delivered :)
Another time may be. For now the terrain is a single mesh object with a poor resolution but easier to integrate in the game. The focus, anyway, was on the plane and its flight characteristics.
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