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Interview With Charles Macelli aka Prospero246 Conducted by Dominic Smith Charles, when did you first start developing for flight simulators and what got you interested in it? I would say just under a year ago. Compared to the real pros in the business, I am just entering the toddler stage, shakily trying to find my balance. But I am getting steadier on my feet as time goes on. After several decades of rapture with Microsoft Flight Simulator, I finally made the change over to X-Plane. I discovered that unlike other flight simulators which are dominated largely by commercial companies, X-Plane had an astonishing wealth of payware-quality freeware, especially regarding sceneries. Finding out why this was so was simple: easily accessible and relatively uncomplicated, designing tools. Could you tell us about the nature of your sceneries and how they are created? I use WED (X-Plane's World Editor) to mainly fill the X-Plane shortage of smaller 3D airports, mainly in Canada. Most of the larger airports have by now been very adequately modeled by other scenery designers, both freeware and commercial. However, there remains a need for the smaller, run of the mill airports which are the backbone to any country, most especially one as large as Canada. Out of all the sceneries you have designed, which one do you consider your best or most popular work? Strangely enough, even though I have completed close to 60 airports, my personal best has been Malta International Airport, LMML, which due to its size and spread, was a real challenge that took many weeks to complete. There have been several commercial, and some freeware, renditions of this airport, mainly for FSX. The problem is, I was born only a bus ride away from this airport and having lived on the island of Malta until the end of my university years, I knew the island intimately. So, like any old curmudgeon, I have never been totally happy with any of the sceneries I came across. Some came close but even those were outdated by the "recent" major changes to the airport. This was a project that I just needed to do, mainly for my own satisfaction. However, if we go by the number of downloads, the most popular so far seems to have been Chilliwack Airport (CYCW), by around a hundred downloads. This is surprising to me because I did not take significantly longer to finish this scenery than I did most of the others. However, the natural beauty of this region of Canada cannot be denied and this may account for the scenery's popularity and need. Charles, when developing a scenery, what aspect of it do you find the most challenging? The fact that I only create sceneries that would be acceptable for inclusion in future releases of X-Plane makes any project very challenging. This is because making what are called "Lego" buildings, I am restricted to using a single library of art assets, that of Laminar Research. While the library has been steadily increasing with every new version of X-Plane, there are still a great deal of important structures and items that are missing. A recent addition to the library was the Terminal Kit which has proved invaluable in creating buildings that are as identical to the originals as possible: https://developer.x-plane.com/article/terminal-kit/ This kit has "redesigned" my own approach to airport design and allowed me to create better sceneries than when I started just a year ago. However great the addition of this kit has been though, the actual art assets for creating smaller airports has not increased significantly since I started creating sceneries. My suspicion is that the first time intrepid user of any flight sim is more likely than not, to jump into the cockpit of a Boeing 747 or an F-16 without ever taking a single lesson in a Cessna 170. The creators of X-Plane in their infinite wisdom must have come to the same conclusion because I suspect (and I may be wrong, of course) the library has been designed with the idea of mega or very large and modern airports in mind where these aircraft can function. Many smaller or medium size airfields in Canada for example, still contain Quonset huts and other WW2 hangars with curved roofs. There are also rickety shed like buildings with slanted roofs and a unique aura of slow dilapidation that is hard to model because of the conspicuously missing art assets at present. This makes it a challenge for the designer who then resorts to blending two or more different buildings to create a semblance of a single one. What have been your favorite projects to date? I am not sure if I have any favorites. To be honest, the more complicated and elaborate a project is, the more frustrated and grumpy I get as the weeks go by. However, the payoff is the greater satisfaction when the project is finally complete. What personal satisfaction do you get from this hobby? There is an undisputable thrill in the creation of something out of nothing, especially when it leads to the use and pleasure of this creation by others; even if your scenery in this case, may ultimately be hijacked by others and remodeled into something better or worse. There is also a great deal of satisfaction to be had, when a user leaves a message, thanking you for creating a scenery they have an attachment to i.e. learning to fly at the real airport, and that they can now relive those unforgettable moments. Then there are the rare pleasures when you know you have made someone's life a little happier by your work. A case in point: a few weeks ago, an octogenarian gentleman wrote to me and asked me if it were possible for me to model an airport where he used to live half a century earlier. I took a couple of days off my normal Canadian airports and did this. The result was my first US airport (09S Sullivan Lake, WA) and while not spectacular by any means, the scenery proved very satisfying for the gentleman, as you can see by his remarks here. When creating a scenery, what software packages and tools do you use? Much as I admire and love the third party libraries available for X-Plane, and am thankful for the many selfless people who developed these awesome collections, I can only use the Laminar Research library, through WED because I submit my sceneries to "The Gateway" for future inclusions of X-Plane. Occasionally I use Overlay Editor but I find its manipulation awkward, so I don't use this program often, but it has helped on occasions. I also use Wedomaker for bringing the Bing orthophoto overlays into WED and of course Google Earth Pro and Google Street View; both of which have proved tremendously useful in practically every scenery I have made. Charles, who would you consider to be your mentors or inspiration in the development world, if you have any? I do not have any mentors as such. However, whenever I have any technical problems, Jan Vogel, a commercial pilot and designer of several hundred sceneries including many major International airports, always seems to come through on the ORG Scenery Development forum. I would say that his YouTube scenery design videos were inspirational in my own interest in this hobby. Do you develop payware/freeware or both and why? Even if I had the confidence or skill to develop payware sceneries, I wouldn't want to. I am a retired high school teacher who has spent over 30 years subjected to pressure and deadlines of all sorts. Whatever I do now has to be stress free, totally enjoyable and with the glorious option of choice. I only develop freeware which can be enjoyed by all, regardless of their economic situation. Charles, was it a conscious decision to only create "Lego-Brick" sceneries? As I mentioned earlier in this interview, I greatly admire and drool over the many freeware sceneries available for X-Plane; not only those created by the gurus of the industry like Mister X, TDG and others, but also from lesser known artists who use third party libraries with stunning effect and realism. The disadvantage here is that, along with the consideration you have to place on your ever shrinking hard drive (worse if you have a limited SSD), you really need to decide which sceneries you should (rather than want to) keep, and which ones you reluctantly need to trash or forgo from downloading. The world is a big place and there are a lot of airports! If you are like me, you want them all! Apart from the space consideration, there are some rudimentary skills involved in installing and updating third party libraries which many users may lack, depending on their enthusiasm for the sim. By designing airports using only the default LR library (and grudgingly accepting its limitations) I can insure extremely small file sizes (under 30 kb) because all the art assets are already installed on the user's computer. Moreover I can be assured that not only will these work without any error messages but that they would be automatically updated in future X-Plane versions. Also, once they have been approved and included in X-Plane, these sceneries can then be safely removed from the Custom Scenery Folder. I believe many of us are familiar with this message: Do you have any experience in real aviation? Unfortunately, virtually none. I took a total of eight flying lessons at a time when I had two small kids, plus one on the way and my wife was questioning my sanity in spending $80 an hour on these lessons. Since I already had a job, I had to give up this luxury. I know, that's peanuts today but almost 40 years ago that was a luxury. Charles, what started your interest in aviation? I believe it was Bruce Artwick and my first ever Flight Simulator on the Commodore 64 which took around ten minutes to load from a connected tape deck. I was hooked then. How do you go about choosing your next new design or project? At the moment I am moving eastwards across Canada, finding small or medium sized airports that are still in an embryonic, 2D state in X-Plane. I've reached Ontario where it seems there are several interesting sceneries to be made. I tend to skip over very small airfields where there is literally nothing to be modeled (or so little) because it would not be a challenge at all. The exception to this lately has been Sullivan Lake in Washington which I mentioned earlier in this interview and where uncharacteristically, I added some artistic license to make the actual airfield interesting. I only did this at an unusual request. Occasionally however I do come across some rather large Canadian airports that have either changed radically since they had been created by other designers or they have been done rather hurriedly and/or unrealistically. With these, I "erase" everything and start from scratch. I never "update" an existing, good 3D airport and would never replace a version that has obviously taken its creator, many arduous hours to complete. In what ways do you see X-Plane development changing in the future? I think there will be better tools available for airport design and probably a better integration of third party libraries with those of Laminar Research. I believe that the creators of X-Plane are very savvy in getting dozens of software designers, maybe hundreds of aircraft and scenery artists to work (for free) for the improvement of this product. This formula works only if the tools are enhanced, easier and fun to work with. Consider myself - totally addicted and much as I love armchair flying, I haven't been on a serious virtual flight in ages. What can sites like FlightSim.Com do to support you and the hobby better? Exposure of ones work on these sites alone can encourage designers not only to continue their work but also to improve on it based on constructive feedback by the site's users. Forums, moderated by good people who give much of their own time, where people like myself can find much needed answers, are essential to a good flight site. An up-to-date file library with a decent search engine also goes a long way towards supporting freeware, as does finding tools developers can use. Ultimately however, it is the users of these sites and their feedback to your product that may have the greatest impact on your work. Where can we find your work? Here on FlightSim.Com of course, as well as at X-Plane.org, under Prospero246 as well as on The X-Plane Gateway. Thank you for your interview. Charles Macelli Download Charles Macelli files
