Keeping up with an ever changing world...

Every weekend when I drive down to Portland, there's a special landmark that tells me I'm 45 minutes away from my destination.  It's Trojan Nuclear Power Plant in Rainier, Oregon.  It was operational for about 16 years before leaking radioactive steam forced it to be shut down and decomissioned in 1992.  Ever since then it has been a giant concrete landmark that warns you of your imminent arrival in P-Town (where the "P" stand for Peter Brady).

Well, on May 21st, the Springfield... er Trojan Nuclear Power Plant is scheduled for demolition.  Which brings me to a difficult part of Flightsim:  keeping up with an ever changing world.  Now we've got to remove Trojan from our database.  It's hard enough keeping up with all of the pesky stadium upgrades (I think we're still about 10 years behind in what stadiums we represent).  How on earth are we supposed to know that Bank of America Park was torn down and replaced with Depends Adult Undergarment Field.  And on top of that, every year some Alan B. Wilkins Stadium gets renamed to Wells Fargo Stadium, because nobody really remembers who Alan B. Wilkins is and besides Wells Fargo had more money to offer.  Did they rename the stadium?  Or did they tear it down and replace it?  Or did they just build a new one next to it?

In Seattle alone, we've had a stadium implosion and two new stadiums built in the last 6 or 7 years.  And now the Sonics are whining about the Key Arena and want the public to build them a new one.  If they stay here, at least we'll know when  it gets torn down and replaced.

At this rate, Flightsim is going to become a historical guide to stadiums.  Anthropologists from far in the future are going to unearth copies of Flightsim, load them up and use the various releases over the years to get a picture of what was around when.  I just hope for their sake that they have fast computers in the future.  Heaven forbid they get the "blurries" while trying to do their historical research.

Comments

• Anonymous
  May 18, 2006
  Hahaha - now that's some real FS-humor.  Yeah, I guess what you guys put into default scenery is a moment frozen in time - whatever time that is during the development cycle.  I guess that's why you shouldn't worry too much about all of that stadium stuff - I'm sure some scenery designer out there has the gumption to make his/her favorite stadium appear as it does in real life, as current as real life is.  
  
  Sorry that you are going to be losing your landmark...
  
  Owen
• Anonymous
  May 19, 2006
  Hey - I'm bummed I won't get to see the implosion. I'll be driving right by there on the 28th on the way home from Memorial Day weekend.  (Let me know if you want to carpool).  :)
  
  -SusanAsh
• Anonymous
  May 23, 2006
  You see that is exactly why I love building scenery in FS.  It can be a snapshot of time at a certain moment in history.
   Right now for FS I am working on the island of Oahu as it was on the morning of Dec. 7th. Before the attack of course...it is FS after all.... and fly amongst the mountains, military bases and the fleet anchorage.  
  
  (CFS2 people will be able to defend the skies)
  
   Yep FS is a great historical guide! ;^)
• Anonymous
  May 24, 2006
  The comment has been removed
• Anonymous
  May 25, 2006
  The comment has been removed