Yes, it’s real and it’s here. Go grab it! Congratulations to everyone, this is a big day for the simulation community. Now I can stop pretending that FLARE is being made for OF…

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Yes, it’s been a long time since I posted here. I’ve been very busy with my job (I’m working as Lead Creature TD on an upcoming feature animation) and I don’t have much free time for other things. When I’m not working I need to recharge my energies by spending time with my wife and my two kids. And in a few months someone else will join our family!

But let’s get to the point, I know what you really want to know. Is project F.L.A.R.E dead? Absolutely not! This is a long term commitment for me so I will complete it and release it. There will be ups and downs along the way but I won’t abandon it.

I‘m currently writing from my iPhone. Yesterday I left my computer on during the night to do some batch texture conversions. The fire alarm of my apartment woke me up this morning around 5AM and I saw my computer on fire! We managed to stop the fire from spreading to the surrounding rooms but my computer is gone.

The worst part is that FLARE is gone too. I kept all my files on the internal hard disk and it’s now fried, nothing can be recovered. I used to have an external backup hard disk but that one is fried too. I know many of you will be disappointed but there is nothing I can do, months of work are gone and I decided to give up.

I can’t help but feeling responsible for what happened, maybe if I didn’t overclock my computer too much… But I can’t go back in time so there is no point thinking about it. I’m deeply sorry but the most important thing is that we are all safe because the fire didn’t spread. It could have been worst.

(EDIT: Yes, this post was a joke for April Fools Day!)

New month, new screenshots. As you can see, I posted an image showing inland water tiles. In FLARE there are two different types of water tiles, the ones used for ocean water (coasts, open sea, etc) and the ones used for inland water (large rivers, lakes, etc). Inland water will have different colors and textures. Some people still believe that you can’t differentiate inland from ocean because in Falcon these tiles are shared. Well, this is now proven false by FLARE.

These folks made the error to underestimate what Microprose created many years ago. The water system always had a trick that allows differentiation. Yes, the original release used only one type (probably for lack of time) but this doesn’t mean that they didn’t code a way to allow both.

After so many years, I am still impressed by what they were able to achieve. In order to develop FLARE I had to spend a lot of time studying their tiling system and it was worth it. Inland water is a great discovery and it will be a unique feature of FLARE.