... and back to the ground

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.

Reaching for the sky ...

I do not know what happened. The Sportstar Simulator has been online for almost 2 years now, but it never exceeded the 500 hits a month. I checked my stats today and .. and last week ... on Tuesday ... over 3,000 people went to play my little simulator. My web hosting provider must be wondering where have gone all these 2 Gigs of data. I am glad that somebody found it fun enough to post a link somewhere on a major blog or news site.

Because my hosting is not really "state of the art", I do not have any referrer data so can not guess where all these visitors came from (a shame).

Also, because I am not really a clever business guy, I did not put any Google ads on the hotlinked page: so I missed a good deal of clicks and money (a shame again).

Anyway, the Sportstar simulator has never been designed to make me rich. That was just fun to do and I am glad some people around seem to find it fun too.

That makes me wonder if I should not take it more seriously and make it better. The technology behind (shockwave) is pretty old now and performances do not permit a lot. I have been waiting for MacromediAdobe to bring it a step further but they appear to get stuck with the old school 3D engine they built, back in the last millennium.

A shame, I tell you. And if you look close enough to this little peace of online software. If you realize that I built it up from nothing with no money in just a few month - they you can wonder why the Microsoft Flight Simulator 70 people highly skilled and greatly financed team can not do any better with collision detection or crash effects.

A shame!

Keynoise wins the Golden Polygon

It's official now. The Sportstar Simulator won in the Simulation category.

The Golden Polygon has been created to promote online 3D applications. Since web based 3D programs have been around for a while and never received the attention they might have, it is nice to see that there is some very good stuff done with several technologies.

The Sportstar Simulator is not the ground breaking software that you might expect to win a competition, but it is a proof of concept that forgotten technology (here Macromedia Shockwave) can still be rewarded.

I have made this simulator for fun. It can be better. The original plan included a dynamic loading of the terrain elevation and textures. Sadly, I have been short on time and obliged to crop down the project. I focused on the physic simulation itself and have been able to make it pretty realistic (for a project of that scale). I had the privilege to actually fly the Sportstar (Well, for a few minutes) and guaranty that the simulator climbs, cruises and banks like the original plane.

With the new trend for online based applications (Web 2.0 ? :) and this nice feedback, I should try to get back to work and release something more complete.

Keynoise

The New version I (and may be you) was waiting for, for 3 years (huh).

Take a look at the Sportstar Simulator, I'm quite proud of it ;)