All you ever wanted to know about alpilotx ...

[alpilotx 505]

Then you might read this new interview at flightsim.com B)

http://www.flightsim.com/vbfs/content.php?13946-Interview-With-Andras-Fabian

 

[jcomm 5,882]

Great reading!  Thx for the link, and my respect and gratitude for your dedication to the cause!!!

[scotchegg 4,158]

Very interesting article! Recently I'm becoming more and more interested in the role of meshes in creating a plausible environment to fly in.

 

As a linguist I'm fascinated in the role of word choices in creating a precise representation of complex thoughts, and so I kind of get the fascination with all those little polygons that allow you to represent something as complex as mountainous terrain with mathematical precision.

 

You say in the article that you're happy with offering your work as donation-ware, and God bless you for that, but have you considered partnering with your texture artist Albert and putting some real time in to doing custom scenery for smaller parts of the world as a commercial concern? XPX seems to be gaining some real momentum recently and you'll be aware of the success Orbx has had with FSX scenery. Given the work you've done with NZ, and the quality you've already achieved with XPX on a global scale, I have a feeling you could knock everybody's socks off if you could focus on bringing a very high fidelity package for a smaller area.

[jcomm 5,882]

As a linguist I'm fascinated in the role of word choices in creating a precise representation of complex thoughts

Heck! That's what I did before coming yo the met office - under the scope of AI. A bit of NLT too.

 

In the beginning of scenery design for MSFS, when Enrico made available the first scenery for fs5 - his Kenya scenery - I even cooperated with Manfred Moldenhauer in the compiler testing of SCASM!

 

Nowadays it's all GUI-based, and that's great the way it is. WED for instance is a hell of a powerful tool, just as Plane-Maker...

 

Maybe we get even better airport & scenery design tools to complement it in the future...

 

"Long lives Chomsky!..."

[alpilotx 505]

Hi scotcheg ...

 

Well, then I think you have missed a point of my ... uhm ... way of working. To be honest, I am not the one who enjoys to do hours over hours (weeks over weeks, months over months) of manual object modeling, manual texture creation (even if I did a little bit of both already - and at small scale it might be ok), manual object placement, manual everything. Thats not me .... I am an IT guy, someone, who likes to work with algorithms, scout available data (which comes from different projects, different sources, different motivations), work with the big data piles, structure them, transform them, combine them to create new data, and mostly let computers do the work .... Or simply put, if I can decide, if I would invest a specific amount of time to do something manually, or invest the same amount of time to let algorithms do the job for me, then I would always go for the latter (as its much more satisfying type of work for my brain   ...

 

So, don't expect me to go in the local scenery business .... neither do I think that Albert would consider that, as he has already enough visions, ides etc. to fill his coming years with improving the X-Plane base artwork.

 

I am quite happy where I am ... (and I think, there is still enough I can give the community this way) ... B)

[LAdamson 240]

I read it all. A good interview.

[dskviator 4]

Very good interview, thanks for sharing your thoughts, info, and all the freeware scenery!!

 

Cheers!!