Ben Russell

Simon: I'd love to help you out here and enforce our policy of being a neutral party in things but even I know better than to mess with Iron Man... You're on your own here I'm afraid. Good luck!

We got hit by a thunderstorm during the main act of Circe de X-A... Your patience is appreciated. Two weeks max and the new installer will be done, shipped, ready, polished. There is simply too much data in this release to move forward with the old, admittedly rickety, installer. Thanks guys, we're all doing triple back flips at the moment, you'll understand in due time.

Sorry to disappoint but this is a beta tech demo that was intended for people that already have a working copy of Gizmo fully installed and working. The process of which is fully documented and proven. (Instructions with actual product$ may be more complete than free instructions on the wiki..)

Ask them. Guessing isn't good for anyone.

vh: Have you previously installed either the Falco or the Cessna 400 Corvalis? These packages contain full instructions on installing Gizmo correctly. This tech demo assumes that you had a working copy of Gizmo installed before you tried to follow any instructions here. If you do not you can find instructions for installation here: http://x-plugins.com/wiki/Gizmo

thank you, this news is relieving.

I would like some assistance from anyone willing to beta test. This is a replacement for the Gizmo.plugin package in your X-Plane/Resources/plugins folder. Please make a backup of your existing Gizmo.plugin package before installing this one. The update may not work on your machine. The 10.6 beta is here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/948813/Gizmo/10.6.tech_demo/mac/Gizmo.plugin.zip I have also prepared a small scripts package for the X-Plane 9 default Cirrus Jet. Unzip this file in the same folder as c4.acf http://dl.dropbox.com/u/948813/Gizmo/10.6.tech_demo/cirrus_jet_scripts.zip Hopefully if everything goes well you will get to play with this for 10 minutes: ( time intentionally short, panel placement intentionally annoying, this is a tech demo. )

I'll see if I can get a manifest together of the files that the OpenAL installer is putting on your machine. Thanks for your patience. -sighs- (Other plugins are shipping with OpenAL needs now, are they using a better/different method than Gizmo to get it setup on your machines???) Cheers, Ben. (thread stickied, ..... i'll copy the guts over to the bug tracker too.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXs2v3HejpM.

What you're looking at here is object placement in the browser, using Google Earth. OBJ files can be hosted on any approved HTTP host, they are auto translated for display in Google Earth. Position data and all object data is downloaded to the X-Plane client automatically. (single menu click for now, eventually time/distance based) The instant you see the object available in the browser it is available for all X-Plane clients. There are no DSF's to make. There is no scenery pack to share. You just fly and get objects. Austins XPFR2010 speech covered this, some of you may have this in mind. I have videos posted on YouTube from March 2009 demonstrating a prototype of this software. You saw it here first. This technology is plugin based, some things that DSF can do, this cannot. Some things that DSF can't do, we can.. Performance will be interesting to explore, I don't expect it to scale as well as Laminars scenery systems for some time, there is a price to be payed for such ease.

fixed the gui

This is the evolution of "flux"... it's a Gizmo based script, scenery data is stored on Googles Servers, load balanced, distributed, the works. If you head over to http://x-earth.appspot.com/ you can have a play with the browser half. (Total alpha, the Google Earth Plugin is giving me a hard time about adding objects when i click the create button, sorry the video is a bit blah...)

...that's just evil.

pet project, tech demo / test-bed. .... gotta have something fun to blast around in, ya know. ( this is programmer art, I don't claim to compete with our real artists in any way. ) Will NOT be payware. Will NOT be upto normal X-Aviation quality standards. (There are no landing gear doors or custom struts, for example.) May possibly appear as a free toy for you all to play with and see what Gizmo can really do in the near future at a forum near you. Is not meant to compete with Greg Hofers F-16 project in any other way than basic shape. If you want a reference F-16, buy Gregs work. This is a toy. (I literally started this the day before he announced on the Org..)

stickied! Where you guys been all this time? 'been waitin!!! No, really, great to see this site spring up! Get in Austins face about it.

Personally I find myself always wanting a better graphics card.... CPU's have got cores to burn for almost every task. Better GPU + a bit of additional ram, and solid state storage has some interesting performance trade offs as well. (You could swap some ram budget for SSD budget, the virtual memory performance is that good.)

The Operating System has a hibernate feature that is fantastic for this kind of thing. Sure, you have to get everything, but it saves us spending a month writing a save feature. Yes, a month. Literally. (hundreds of data items, the state of multiple interacting sub systems, making sure x-plane will let us put it all back in just right, ON THREE OS'S...... most of the time would be fighting with x-plane so everything resumes properly...)

Please post any further comments about "the downloader application and Linux" to the Linux thread in Rant, thanks.

...on that note, I showed a friend who had recently come back from Hawaii the game "Test Drive Unlimited" which is based in Hawaii. The maps in that game are about 80% realistic (concessions made for obscene arcade game speeding) and he was able to recognize several neighborhoods from both the building structures around and the general layout and feel of different parts of the island. Pretty amazing stuff really.

...I'm just putting the finishing touches on per-tile downloads and packaging so that you guys can buy the areas that matter most to you to get a feel for how much you like it. I think you're in for a pretty amazing experience after all the work that's gone into this release, you'll be getting night imagery of unprecedented detail that, as far as I know, doesn't exist in any other image database, anywhere, for any price. The reason is that it's been synthetically enhanced using a complicated and well evolved algorithm, one that only Real Scenery and X-Aviation have. I've been watching the imagery evolve, it's pretty awesome, I wish I had the machine to run it.

I stumbled upon this lovely piece of custom firmware for Canon PowerShot cameras. http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/CHDK The Wiki seems busy to read but ultimately it comes down to: - Is your camera model on the list? - Does your camera have the right firmware on it? If yes to both, download a zip and extract it onto your memory card, you can then "run" some new software on your camera that opens up a whole heap of things you never thought your PowerShot could do. The stand outs after 2 minutes of use: - RAW image support. - Custom bracketing. - Realtime Histograms - before shooting. - Lua scripting! (Gizmo uses Lua at its core...) - Motion Detection - 60ms latency. They say it's fast enough to catch lightning. The new firmware also lets you see engineering sensor data from the camera, things like Optics, CCD and battery temperatures. If you like it you can set up your memory card so the new firmware auto-boots. If you don't like it, or only want to try it, all you have to do is turn your camera off and on again to go back to factory firmware. The scripting feature opens up all sorts of possibilities. Time lapse photography couldn't be easier.

Cameron drives the car, Eric keeps it polished and looking fantastic, I tune some of the engines. Honestly no idea, sorry. Release schedules is not my area. ..glad you like the shots.

8) ...I love seeing the up close panel shots and movies you guys do.

...why do i feel like a deer in the headlights? :-[ Nice shot rush, love the angle. (you're welcome..)

Some beta screenshots of the new downloader. I hope it addresses any of the troubles some of you have had with our previous product. The login screen, supply your X-Aviation customer details and the download-key for your Real Scenery purchase and you're set. The transfer status screen, hopefully you see this screen as little as possible. (Failures are deliberate. For testing.) The core code has been entirely re-written. It is capable of completely saturating my meager ADSL connection. Due to the long time involved downloading hundreds of megabytes of data I have included a throttle slider feature. This allows you to keep your transfers active during "peak hours" when you want to use your internet for business or gaming, etc. You can reduce the bandwidth use of the downloader to practically nothing, cryo-stasis levels of consumption, then when you're ready you can slide more priority in. The downloader is now multi-transfer capable too. This will hopefully ensure that your transfer completes as soon as possible. By transferring two or more files at once any gaps in the network transmission of one file will hopefully be filled in by another. If there are any features you would like to see please speak up. I cannot guarantee we can put them in but I would like to hear them.