My Vision for MSFS

[Guest guyjr]

What I would like to see out of FS2004 is a complete breakup of the simulator engine, so that it is possible to run various components of the system on separate processors or machines, broken down as follows: - Flight dynamics engine that models the flight envelope of the aircraft ala X-Plane. (Goodbye tables, hello aeronautics 101) - Scenery rendering engine that renders the world relative to the viewpoint of the aircraft, and also renders the aircraft model based on its orientation. Plus, allow full control over the camera, instead of the locked views we get near the plane at all times. - A panel and VC rendering engine as well. The VC and panels need to be much more interactive, and the API for interacting with flight systems needs to be extended to allow as much control over the aircraft as a real pilot would. Engines and cabin environmental controls in particular would be a great start. Ice up those windows if an automated system goes haywire, and scramble for that oxygen mask! - Weather generation engine that feeds into the flight dynamics, scenery and panel rendering engines, for true modeling of 3D clouds, mist, rain, fog, snow, thunder, lightning, wind, turbulence, hail, sleet, icing of aircraft surfaces, etc.One advantage to breaking out the scenery and panel engines would be to allow a system to be built that allows a user to fly the simulator, while a 3rd party watches the action from the outside of the plane, panning, positioning their viewpoint wherever they like. For instance, the "pilot" takes off from her local airport, and flies toward a friend's house. The friend is watching the action on a separate machine that is getting fed the data from the simulator, and can set their viewpoint to where their house is, so they can see their pilot fly over. Or in a more commercial setting, an army attack helicopter flies toward a forward observation post which observes the copter coming in, and can designate a target on their screen which is relayed to the HUD in the helicopter panel.I honestly think this is doable given the right team. This would launch FS into a whole 'nother realm, as each engine could run on a dedicated processor tied to the same memory, or perhaps 4 separate machines all running on a 100Mbit network. It would probably be only a matter of a year or two for enterprising folks to then take this base engine and extend it to a full motion-based platform, submit it to the FAA for approval, and finally get an FAA certificate for flight training with MSFS.Of course, GMax modeling would make the aircraft visual models much more true to life, and I imagine the same techniques could be applied to the virtual cockpit as well. There are a lot of talented people in the freeware market... perhaps MS should try to organize them under an open source agreement (now I'm _really_ tempting fate!) to package some truly exceptional add-ons in with the game at the time of release as well.Ah well, one can dream. . . :-halo

[Chris Willis 8]

Hi, Some of the problem in weather is the Frame Rate almost all forget about this issue, you can see in any sim, clouds are repetitive, not true volumetric, clouds at far distance almost none, missing things and bugs. To recreate such as real life weather, this will take years and years and waiting for the CPU technologie capability . You will see improvement like cfs3 but far near the reality, you will always find some things wrongs or missing..this is why there is many version of Msfs.Some positif thing for fs2004, since the cpu will be near at 4ghz, so they should have more room for frame rate, but even thats, there is all other thing to render, new scenery etc..Some exemple already in fs2002 and it was the same in fs2000: My frame rate drop alot when there is many layers or the clouds is high in height.I am using fsw clouds and my frame rate drop (since my clouds are like the default performance one)why there is only 2 clouds layers of "3d cumulus" in MsFs and the others one appears flat like cirrus. (only because performance issue).Same in cfs3, I have only saw two layers of "3d cumulus" all others are high level clouds.(only because performance issue).Adding to clouds layers with, rain, snow, and all others things, fps will decrease again.The weather in fs2004 should be much much better than fs2k2 but with some sacrifice for frame rate.ThanksChris Willis[link:fsw.simflight.com/FSWMenuFsSim.html]Clouds And Addons For MsFshttp://fsw.simflight.com/fsw.jpg

[Guest guyjr]

You are quite right when you say that weather is a frame-rate killer. From my understanding of how FS works today, all of the simulation is happening simultaneously on one processor: flight dynamics, scenery rendering, panel rendering, AI (I forgot about this one above, whoops! :-eek ). My idea is that if you split these rather CPU intensive tasks out to separate processors and/or machines, then each one would be able to dedicate itself to that one function and nothing else. Each module would be able to communicate with the other.Imagine FS right now doing these tasks: if you assume that each one takes 25% of the CPU's time to accomplish, then you can theoretically (in an ideal world) get a 4x speed improvement right away just by breaking out the modules. Now you have to reduce that very optimistic number, because you now have some overhead in communicating between the modules via either shared memory or network traffic that you didn't before, plus the overhead of synchronizing access to the shared memory if you go that route. However, if done correctly, I would imagine you should still be able to gain at least a 2x improvement in speed, which would let you do things like volumetric clouds and other nifty graphic effects.And don't forget, the machine that's dedicated to the scenery should have a very fast graphics card as well! So all the FS scenery engine would really need to do is define the weather, and let the graphics card take care of actually painting it to the screen.Of course, all of this is "in theory". :-halo

[Guest TerryT]

I have not had the privlage to fly the multi-million dollar airline simulators but FS2002 does a real good job (visual) compared to our mid 60s technology on the F-4 and F-111 Air Force sims. When we added visual systems to both they were on the scale of maybe FS4 or FS5 (remember back then?). We thought we were in hog heaven as we could now see where we were going.Yes I believe these and other improvements are very doable. The power in the average desktop computer is more powerful than both of our sims total computers put together and yet we were able to trained our pilots very well. I only got to fly the real jet (F-4) once, and just as I heard a zillion times in the sim, hey chief, why doesn't the sim fly like the jet? We were close but no cigar. Maybe they made the sims harder to fly so that the students would not get into trouble while in the jet.I for one cannot wait for Fs2004, 2006 20 etc to come out as they can only get better (we hope).Terry

[Chris Willis 8]

Hi, I like every version of Msfs with bugs or no, I just enjoy whats we have and waiting for the technologie capability. ThanksChris Willis[link:fsw.simflight.com/FSWMenuFsSim.html]Clouds And Addons For MsFshttp://fsw.simflight.com/fsw.jpg

[Francois_Dumas 10]

Salut Chris ! :-)Also to add to your earlier post.... with any new processor generation and MSFS generation comes a higher performance capability. But this higher performance is used TOO, by enhancing the capabilities of the sim. More scenery, more textures, more moving parts.... so it's a race one can never win :-)Although the sim does get better with every release, there will also be new wishes with every release! I am pretty sure that those of us that played and remember Bruce's PC Flight Simulator (Version 1.0) will be more than ahppy and content with MS FS2002...... and would not wish for anything more if it were still 1981 today :-) :-) :-outta Francois :-wave[table border=0 cellpadding=10 cellspacing=0][tr][td valign=bottom" align="center]"At home in the wild"[/td][td valign=bottom" align="center][link:avsim.com/alaska/alaska_051.htm|Don's Alaskan Bush Charters]"Beavers Lead the Way"[/td][td valign=bottom" align="center][link:www.avsim.com/vfr_center/mainpages/vfr_flights_main_page.htm]VFR Flight Center]"Looking Good Outside"[/td][/tr][tr][td valign=top" align="center]http://avsim.com/hangar/air/bfu/logo70.gif[/td][td valign="top" align="left" colspan=2]http://www.fssupport.com/images/moose2.gif[/td][tr][/table]________________________Francois A. "Navman" DumasAssociate Editor &Forums AdministratorAVSIM Online![/bemail: fdumas@avsim.com________________________

[PeterR 9]

Great ideas.Some of what you describe can be done--at least in terms of splitting up the engine and the graphics. Using WidevieW (http://wideview.00server.com/main.html), you can have the 3D display on another system. I've heard of someone combining one of the hard-core heavyjet simulators with the MSFS visuals (don't remember if they used WidevieW or something else; maybe WideFS). The US military and Boeing apparently have also mated MSFS as a graphics engine to some of their simulation engines.As for spliting out AI and weather generation, that should be doable using the available SDKs. Having better looking weather is up to MS, though.Division of labor is a good way to make use of extra PCs.