Hi Everyone, Here's a "sligthly" longer -and slightly more serious- report from last weekend's FSWeekend event in Lelystad. In general I believe we were a lot better prepared this time than last year. If anything, we probably had too much equipment on not quite sufficient booth space, but that was just a minor nit. Last week, I'd been working quite frantically to get a full fledged windows binary, addressing a few last minute bugs, which I managed to do just in time before the show. As a consequence, the windows machine wasn't configured quite optimally, and early in the afternoon on saturday I decided to disconnect it from the video projector, in favor of my linux laptop. Most of the performance problems appeared to originate from the fact that we pulled the scenery off a network drive, so I copied the whole scenery tree over to the machine's local harddrive. Running as a background process, it took the entire day to transfer just a small portion of the scenery over. Fortunately, that portion did contain the areas we used most frequently (San Francisco, Lelystad / Amsterdam, and Switzerland), so on Sunday the windows machine was back onto the projector.
In total, we had 7 computers operating the booth, all connected on a local network, with my linux desktop running as fileserver / multiplayer server. The server part worked exemplary and the multiplayer feature was actually a big crowd pleaser, even when it was just operating locally. We've been trying to setup demos on each machine in such a way that we showed as many different aspects of FlightGear as possible. Due to the tight space at the booth, this didn't always work out as well, but in general, I do have the impression that we did get to show some of the various possibilities of FlightGear. Martin was mainly operating the machine he had brought, which was equipped with two dual head video boards. This setup allowed for one operator console and three cockpit-view screens. I didn't spend much time behind this computer, except for a short aerotowing demo, but I remember from LinuxTag, earlier this year, that this setup is quite magnificent (and yet another reason why OSG should be the preferred development route). Martin also brought a mini mac, which ran an early beta version of 0.9.11-pre1. The mac wasn't quite powerful enough, so we let it just idle on the terminal (in multiplayer mode, so this machine's position was transmitted to all other computers). Torsten brought his laptop and demonstrated a good variety of aircraft on it, in addition to running the Jeppensen moving map application (which is a windows application, run from a virtual windows 2000 (?) copy on VMWare, if I'm not mistaken). Torsten also built a variety of hangar buildings for EHLE, in addition to creating a submodels based "FlightGear" towing banner that can be picked-up in flight and dropped on command, using the property system. I forgot for which aircraft this was, but I'm sure this feature will be committed to CVS soon. My (t)rust(worth)y old linux desktop took care of network traffic and in addition to that, I ran a copy of FlightGear on it, which ran the UFO slowly rotating over EHAM tower (in particular on Sunday), giving a good overview of the early alpha version of the EHAM terminal buildings and the AI traffic. As a demo version that actually worked quite well. As mentioned, my new laptop and windows desktop shared duties as demo machines. On Saturday I had hooked the laptop to the beamer, with the windows machine running a static version of FlighGear. On sunday these roles were exchanged. Due to a last minute mess-up on my side, I couldn't use my old (Pentium 3) laptop on Saturday at all. I had forgotten to bring a second small-size power extension cable, so I had to sacrifice the only one I had with me for the network switch. I did bring the cable on Sunday, so I could use the laptop that day to show taxidraw (Just leaving it open with a copy of the Lelystad airport layout). This actually did get quite a few looks, so I'm glad I did bring it. It became quite obvious that it didn't make much sense to run our demos at the announced times (we had three demos scheduled), so instead we just ran them continuously. Since I had put in the aircraft carrier operations demo, I'd also decided to get the hang of landing on them. Last week at home, I got from a full 0% successrate up to nearly 100% success in just a few days. At the show, running these on a big screen, in the public eye, sitting in a chair not entirely well adjusted, and not having pedals, I did miss quite a few landings during the show. In the end I guess I got up to about 70% succes rate again. Anyway, I did find doing these demos a lot of fun, and doing them on such a big screen with many people watching quite a challenge. The most successful demo was probably the aerotowing one. I particularly rembember the sunday session where I was running the Cessna (on the big screen) towing Torsten's glider. Quite a few people stopped to watch the mountain scenery on the projector and my sometimes desperate attempts to stay clear the steep mountain ranges (Torsten's comment: Can you at least /attempt/ to fly straight) :-). Slowly, some people began to notice that the scene on Torsten's computer was very similar to mine, and began to realize what was going on. I got the impression that people were actually quite amazed to find out that the two aircraft were connected by a virtual wire running through a multiplayer server. On Saturday, we tried running the demo using the piper cup, which is also a lot of fun, because the glider is actually faster than the cup, so if you want to stay behind it you need to do quite a bit of maneuvering. This, in turn, has the consequence that the tail of the piper cup is tossed in to every direction you don't want it to go, in particular, not in a swiss mountain range. Although I didn't talk to as many people as I'd wished for (too busy with demoing and keeping things running), I was generally pleased with the overall positive response we got. Although we did get a few negative comments, regarding the sparseness of the scenery and the sometimes "blocky" graphics, there were also many people expressing a sign of relief in seeing that there are still alternatives to Microsoft Flightsimulator. I didn't write down the exact comments, but here are some interesting ones. - It might be that FlightGear is the only hope for the future of PC based simulation, because the microsoft gaming division will probably only continue to develop for the xbox. - So you (the flightgear team) wrote this entire product from scratch? WOW. - How do you guys manage to compete with these big companies like Microsoft? (My answer: We don't, because we don't need to, since the entire development team is volunteer based). - This is an older version right?(Clearly not seeing that this was not a microsoft progam at all). We also got a considerable interest from NL2000. NL 2000 is a project that (if memory serves me well) has been around for almost as long as FlightGear. They are working on extremely high resolution scenery for the Netherlands and are about ready to ship their latest release, which will be a 5 DvD download (and that for a country that has a maximum diameter of under 500 kilometers). Both Martin and I talked to a few of their project members and they expressed a clear interest in expanding their range of supported platforms. At this stage it is just an idea, but is seems an interesting prospect to keep in mind. I will contact project AI later, and see how common a base we could create for a possible collaboration. I'd like to finish this mail by reiterating my statement that the last two days were an incredible amount of fun. Of course, this wouldn't have been possible without all the great contributions that everybody has made to the project over the last eleven years. In addition, I would like to thank Martin and Torsten for making the trip to Lelystad, Gijs de Rooy for his beautiful buildings livening up the Amsterdam scenery, and for giving his permission to use them in this early stage of development. Gijs, it was great you did make it to Lelystad! Georg Vollnhals for doing a lot of additional work in getting these models incorporated into the scenery, Maik justus for creating the incredible aerotowing feature, and of course everybody who has worked on the aircraft carrier scenario (Vivian?, anybody else?). Finally, I'd like to thank everybody who made the trip to Lelystad and bothered to stop by and have a look at our little project. It's been a great two days, and fortunately enough there is still room for improvement for next year. Some impressions of the event can be found here: http://durktalsma.xs4all.nl/FSWeekend2007/web/index.html Cheers, Durk ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Still grepping through log files to find problems? Stop. Now Search log events and configuration files using AJAX and a browser. Download your FREE copy of Splunk now >> http://get.splunk.com/ _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
