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!

Macro Photography With a Web Cam

I made a great discovery today. I own a Philips ToUCam basic web cam. What is great about it is that you can fully unscrew the focus lens. It gives a very short focus distance and, if you hands don't shake, you can do some nice close-up photos. The resolution is not that great (640x480) and the depth of field a little short, but results are quite interesting.

This is a ballpoint pen ... with one of my hairs stuck to it.

Here is Europe ... on a 10 Euro cent coin.

The edge of the same coin.

My left thumb finger print.

Salt crystals on a CD.

A cigarette filter.

The tip of a key

A flower.

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 ;)

Google aims for the moon

Last interesting step in the restless fight between Google and Yahoo.

To celebrated the anniversary of the first manned mission to the Moon, Google Maps provides a view of the area where Apollo missions have landed.

100% zoom gives a good idea of the technical power of google.

http://moon.google.com/