I would love to see a complete overhaul of the fs engine, scenery etc, but the one reason why I think MS don't is the fact it remains very open ended the way it is. MS encourage 3rd parties to further enhance the sim with scenery etc, so an overhaul may turn away far to many fans :-)

Perhaps I am missing something but what does the complete "overhaul" have to do with "open-endness" ? Michael J.

You can't use an FPS sort of engine like DOom3 or Far Cry for a simulator such as FS.Those engines only have to render a relatively limited area.FS has to render thousands of square miles.

Agreed. However those "thousands" of square miles share same textured data. Things like clouds or autogen - rely on repeatable patterns too. Also currently the power of graphics card is significantly underutilized in the FS. Nobody is talking about using DOOM3 engine in FS but just bringing it to current standards would be enough.Michael J.

FS is not displaying/calculating thousands of square miles of area at once - it only displays the areas around the plane up to your visibility range and it loads in the new areas dynamically as you approach them. An FPS engine is no different - there's all sorts of optimizations done to make sure that only what is visible to the player at any given time is actually being rendered etc. Far Cry's engine does claim to allow for maps that ARE several thousand square miles in area - play around with the Sandbox editor that comes with it - it's great fun, really intuitive! I know too there are several areas in the actual game where you can see other islands that are miles away from you.The BGL based FS engine started with what, FS98? It's really time for them to move on to something that's more efficient and takes advantage of current hardware and 3D rendering techniques. In fact, I'd be willing to have them take more time to get the next version of the sim out if they indeed were to do a near ground up rewrite with an all new graphics engine, aerodynamics/physics engine etc.In fact, how cool woudl it be if the engine became something of a "world simulator" where you actually are a person in the game - you could start off at the FBO or whatnot in first person mode - walk out to your plane, and climb into the VC just like you'd jump into a tank in Battlefield 1942 or something to that effect. I think that'd be incredible if they could make an engine that could scale like that. You could make almost any type of game you wanted with it.

I think there is a lot more going on in FS9 than the latest game engines have to deal with. Not only does it have to render the appearance of the environment and your aircraft (inside and out), it also has to has to replicate complex aerodynamics, control surface functions, drag, gravity, inertia, engine and prop functions, instruments, GPS and now weather radar, weather and all it's complexities, lift and stall effects, and lots more. It just doesn't leave enough hardware resources for anything like the graphics of the latest games, or even a lot of older ones. Maybe the FS9 engine is inefficient and outdated, I just don't have the knowledge about that. However I am amazed at what it can do.David

>In fact, I'd be willing to have them take more>time to get the next version of the sim out if they indeed>were to do a near ground up rewrite with an all new graphics>engine, aerodynamics/physics engine etc.I thought of the same. They could for example skip FS2006 altogether and go straight to FS2007 or FS2008. This would give them more time for major architectural changes and allow 3-rd party vendors to prepare for the transition (if required) to new standards, SDK, etc. Michael J.

I agree too! in fact, the BGL way to display sceneries is outdated in that it is a bottleneck to the modern 3D card hardware rendering pipeline.Doom3 engines and Unreal II engines are thought from the ground up to respect, and optimize the use of the underlying 3D video card rendering pipeline. There is no difference to render 60nmx60nm than 20ftx20ft for a video card. The perseption of distance and real world proportions is only a matter to transform a floating point 3D coordinate to a 1024x768 pixel screen. Be it a 3D point 20ft away or 20nm away, it is still a 3D point on a polygon which is rendered with a texture (the texture will be the most important factor to your perception of distances).With the power of today's cards, I'd bet FS could run at 100fps at 1024x768 with a ATI9600 like video card on a P4 2.4, as long as the rendering engine is feeding the video card properly...Same goes with Hyper Threading. FS9 is marketed as HT aware, yet many report better FPS with HT disabled... and if you take a look at Intel's HT developper forums, you'll know why it is better having it off UNLESS the software is specificaly designed to take HT in account (and it is not a matter of running two thread one along the other, it is more a matter than when you have 2 virtual CPUs - remember they are 2 CPU core in the HT cpu, but they share the same cache and memory - which are running a thread each, and if each thread is trying to access different and large area of memory simultaneously, then your CPU will spend more time dealing with cache miss than effectively running the code, because the HT CPU share the cache and memory for both virtual CPUs...with HT disabled, you no longer have the problem and this could explain why with HT disabled, FS runs better for many users, especially with a memory hungry application such as FS9....Hope this helps!

>it also has to has to replicate complex aerodynamics, control >surface functions, drag, gravity, inertia, engine and prop >functions, instruments, GPS and now weather radar, weather and all >it's complexities, lift and stall effects, and lots moreJust like X-Plane has to do then? I don't have X-Plane but it apparently has far superior flight dynamics - and is very fps friendly. While it is true that the eye-candy may not be up to the standard of fs2004, the job of flight dynamics is one that can be done by the CPU leaving eye candy to be processed by the graphics card.Anthony Dyer

Yes, yes, yes...It's just what I have been thinking for a while now.My current PC gives me enough capacity for the current version of MSFS to suspend belief and provide a pleasurable Flight Sim experience. With all of the add-on's out there (both scenery and aircraft) the current version is good for a few years yet.I believe that MS should leave the current architecture as is and concentrate on a new version that utilises all of the excellent functionality out there without being hamstrung with backwards compatibility that IMHO is keeping us from getting the best out of our hardware.MS if it goes down this path, should announce it's intentions as early as possible so that all the 3rd party developers can prepare for the transiton and with some assistance can hit the ground running in a couple of years with awesome new products.Thanks all for your excellent contributions and hopefully MS will have a read of this thread.Cheers,Chris Porter:-outtaPerthWestern AustraliaMy "Around the World 4" flight pagehttp://members.iinet.net.au/~portercbp/fly...e%20World_5.htmIntel Pentium IV 3.0GHz (800FSB) Socket 478 pins CPU w/Hyper-Thread Technology MSI 875P NEO FIS2R, AGP 8X, i875P ICH5R Chipset with Gigiabit LanKingmax 512MB PC3200 Double Data Rate (DDR) RAM CAS-2.5- 400MHz Rated x 2BUILT By ATI (Original) Radeon 9800PRO w/TV Out & DVI 128Meg DDRTEAC DV-W50E, 4x DVD-R/ 2x RW, 16xCD-R, 8xCD-RW, 16xDVD, 32x CD-ROM Internal Drive Only Western Digital Raptor 36.0GB HDD IDE, 8MB Cache, 5.2ms, 10,000rpm , S-ATA, w/DataLifeguard WD 40Gig HD for dataATX 470W Pentium IV Power Supply CESkyhawk Jupiter Aluminum CaseHyundai -ImageQuest P910 , 19" Multi-Scan Digital MonitorHercules Game Theater XP, 6.1 speakers Dolby

I disagree. It's not the flight model calculations it's the rendering engine. The flight model calculations only require a small portion of the available processing power to calculate. If you don't believe that then turn off all your weather, ATC, AI, run all the rendering sliders to minimum, set visibility as low as it will go, set a forward view with no panel and unlock the frame rate. When I do that on my system the average frame rate goes from 40 to 150. Keeping in mind that the sim still has a graphics load even in this state it's easy to see that the flight modeling calculations are not the bottleneck in terms of performance. You can see the same thing in X Plane; dump the rendering and the frame rate skyrockets.Tonydigital-flight.com

And even if the game-engine is completely overhauled, the new version could of course still use gmax-made models, so even if the 2004-aircrafts don't work straight off, it wouldn't be too difficult to export your old 2004 gmax models into the new simulator for the 3rd party designers. And of course the gauges could still be coded in c or xml. So even though a great deal of 3rd party addons need to be updated, many of the old models can still be used. Well, that's what i THINK anyway! :-) rgrds fredrik granfors