Hobbies - Other Interests

[06YarisRS]

I was doing some housekeeping on my computer and came across some pics. Figured I post some in case there are any flight sim enthusiasts on the site. Before I got more into cars, I did a lot of flightsimming. After virtually flying the global skies, I decided to try my hand at developing some scenery. Microsoft Flight Simulator was open-sourced enough to allow for considerable third-party development. Some of the add-on aircraft I bought were amazingly compex and came with actual operations manuals - virtually every system modeled. My mainstay for flying was a Boeing 767.

I worked with a couple other guys, one of which was my coding guy and he did most of the effects and coding needed to make seasonal ground polygons work among a bunch of other really complicated stuff. Although most of the sceneries he and I created were freeware, we did do one project that was payware. The scenery was the culmination of about 18 months work and 1000s of pics sent to me by a Westjet captain out of Calgary International. He was basically my project advisor. Everything you see on the airfield proper was created with a 3-D modeling program and all textures for the buildings and ground polygons were either actual doctored digital photos or made from stratch in Photoshop. The aircraft in the photos are low resolution AI air traffic.

Some of scenery development groups out there make this stuff look cartoonish in comparison. It's really amazing what can be done.

I hope to get back into simming some day again and my son has started to develop an interest.












Here are a couple from another scenery, Calgary Springbank.