I was hesitant to send in my Tuxedo laptop for repair but finally decided to do it because I had a slower replacement laptop available. I thought it would be complicated but Tuxedo Computers sent me a DHL return label with a paperless trade barcode (C-PLT-...). I.e. the customs declaration was done digitally and sending it back to me was without problem as well. Altogether it took more than 3 weeks for shipping, repair, and shipping back. The repair was done well and I hope the laptop will serve me for some more time :-) Thanks!

Currently I am working on deferred shading. This requires me to separate rendering into two passes:

• Geometry pass: render data to a point buffer, normal buffer, and a color buffer, etc.
• Lighting pass: use the geometry buffers to compute lighting including shadows and volumetric clouds.

The change is quite a bit of work, because I have to split up the graphics code and the shaders for rendering the space craft, the planet, and the atmosphere.

However this will facilitate rendering of runway textures which are at the same height as the rest of the scene but have a higher texture resolution. Simply adding textured polygons to render a runway does not work, because extra geometry placed at the same elevation as the ground causes z-fighting. Z-fighting is a rendering artifact where two surfaces are so close together that the depth buffer can’t reliably tell which one is in front.

Another nice feature of deferred shading is that it allows for multiple localized lights to be rendered at once. You can render the backfaces of a small cube around the light source and use the geometry buffers to light the scene additively, factoring in both the incident angle and the distance from the light source.

I.e., deferred shading enables detailed nighttime runway rendering with dense, spatially localized illumination, while keeping performance manageable compared to forward rendering with many dynamic lights.

Don’t forget to wishlist sfsim!

Also you can catch me on the sfsim Discord.

So many space sim game news these days :) Here is my small contribution: the new version of sfsim now has a navball display showing the orientation of the spacecraft relative to the orbit and the ground.

I wanted to share this conversation as a warning to other indie developers (especially first-timers) about scammers posing as professional marketing or PR agents on Discord.

The Setup

A user named "Brian" cold-messaged me on Discord, praising my unreleased space sim game. He called my organic wishlist count encouraging and posted quite long messages which probably were AI generated.

After I told him the game is going to be free and I have limited budget, he asked me what "modest amount" I could spend.

The Red Flags

Empty Discord profile: The Discord account was maybe one year old, but it had a running number appended to the profile name. The profile was empty.

No Public Presence: When asked for a website or public contact info, he claimed he didn't have one.

Stolen/Fake Identity: I managed to convince the AI to send me an Upwork profile link as "proof" of his legitimacy. However, the name on the Upwork profile did not match his Discord name. When called out on it, he gave a classic evasive answer: "That's part of my name."

The Takeaway

Edit: As pointed out by a commenter below, it is safer to just not engage with any inbound messages.

Legitimate publishers and PR agencies do not cold-message random Discord accounts using mismatched, unverified freelance profiles. If someone tries to sell you marketing services and they don't have a company website it is safer to ignore them. Even if they give you a link to a public website/profile, that website should mention the discord user name and the website/profile itself should have some independent reputation attached to it (Upworks earnings, Google reviews, ...).

sfsim now has an orbit display to make launching into an orbit easier. The orbit display shows a visualisation of the planet Earth and the orbit as well as several orbital parameters.

Currently I am working on launch trajectory optimization for the sfsim space flight simulator. It is not optimal yet as the rocket should first go up to leave the atmosphere more quickly. I am using proximal policy optimization (PPO) which is a reinforcement learning method which has become popular.

Machine learning explained using the parabola example

If you are trying out the Citation-X with X-Plane 12, I can really recommend the XChecklist plugin and the checklist file for the Citation-X. To help you with finding all the different controls, I created this interactive page.