I have been a Microsoft Flight Simmer since the 5.1 release. I don't know a whole lot about MS flight sims prior to 5.1, but I assummed it was the last of a series beginning at some earlier time. As most of you remember, FS98 was a vastly improved version of FS95. That's when they implimented many of the video cards 3D features and you could actually get a sizable frame-rate increase and better IQ from changing out your video card to a more advanced version. Prior to that time, changing video cards did very little to improve performance. As I see it, FS2004 is a third generation improvement of FS2000. I liken FS2000 a lot to FS95. The difference between the best to worse of the then currenly available videocards did little to improve framerates and IQ in FS2000. FS2002 added a few new features and FS2004 added a few more which seem to progressively improved by the specific video card being used. Each iteration since FS2000 seems to rely more on videocard features. If this is true, is there a lot of room for improvement for the upcoming FS2006 in terms of avaiable videocard features, assuming (like I do) that FS2006 will be but yet another improvement of FS2000? FS2004 is way too reliant on the CPU, because I guess it has to be with all of the geometry going on, but I wonder at which point they can hold the CPU reliance constant while focusing on videocard features like most other video games or sims do.RH

FS2004 is not at all "just" an improved FS2000, and neither is FS2002.In fact, FS2000 was an evolutionary step up from FS98 while FS2002 included major new features and improvements (just as FS98 did compared to FS95).FS2004 is a smaller step up but still significant in many areas as it sets the basis for things that could come in the future.FS has always relied heavily on the CPU because there's a LOT going on that the videocard knows nothing about.The physics engine of FS is one of the largest (if not the largest) in the entertainment industry for example.The weather engine too is extremely complex. It doesn't just tell the videocard to put up a bitmap of a cloud somewhere, it calculates wind, precipitation (not yet all effects but who knows what the future holds), etc.. The videocard can't do all that, it knows nothing except how to show things on a screen (and it's pretty good at that). Telling it what to show is the thing that the CPU is so busy with.Simpler games like Doom 3 can rely almost completely on the videocard for everything, the only thing the CPU need to do is calculate if your bullets hit something which is pretty simple (given the highly simplified physics used in such games).

>The weather engine too is extremely complex. It doesn't just tell the videocard to put up a bitmap of a cloud somewhere, it calculates wind, precipitation (not yet all effects but who knows what the future holds), etc..

I didn't say the weather engine could not use some improvements, only that it cannot be run by the video hardware and therefore places load on the CPU (this in contrast of simpler programs that only use static clouds if that much).

>Simpler games like Doom 3 can rely almost completely on the>videocard for everything, the only thing the CPU need to do is>calculate if your bullets hit something which is pretty simple>(given the highly simplified physics used in such games).Go play through Half-Life 2 and tell us again about simplified physics in FPS games. ;) :DI think there's TONS of room for improvment of framerates and overall visual quality in the next version of FS. I'd totally support them actually not releasing an FS2006 and waiting another year or so if it afforded them the time to write a new rendering engine capable of taking advantage of all the shader stuff that makes the current cutting edge games possible. In 2004 for example, it's not the calculations for weather that slow the sim down when you have a lot of clouds on screen - it's the way the video card is drawing them - it saturates the card's fillrate, and bam, there goes your FPS. If the next version used a new technique for doing it using shaders or instancing, we'd probably have no FPS hit from huge cloudscapes and I think everyone would love that kind of improvment.

How about aircraft and ground shadows? What a waste of resourses! There has to be some way a shadow can be implimented by the videocard. Right now, shadows are treated as if they are geometric objects in the environment. They show up as black objects and are always present regardless of the weather during the day. They could be toned down and perhaps implimented from the videocard. What do you think?RH

I guess what I meant to say was that FS2000 is the base off of which FS2002 and FS2004 were built and most probably FS2006 will be built. So, in that sense, they are improvements. FS98 was build upon the FS95 base and was an improvement. RH

go back deep enough and they're all built on FS1...

It's not simple, but a lot simpleR compared to FS.Yes, the physics in HL2 are simplified too. Maybe not to the extent they used to be a few years ago, but that's one reason HL2 requires a heavier CPU than did older games (the increased video load being another factor, something has to pump all those bitmaps to the videocard...).

I think that if you go back far enough, all computer programs are related to others and are dervied from a common idea.RH

If they changed the way clouds are rendered like some of the old sims like Fly, then the current videocards could eat right though them. I often wondered the difference was between the Fly and MS clouds. I think the former were OpenGL and the latter obviously DirectX. What are your thoughts on this?RH

Again, the clouds could be rendered more efficiently. We could go though the clouds on FU3 and Fly with a 300Mhz computers more efficiently than we can with FS2004's clouds with a 3Ghz computer, and the clouds with FU3 and Fly were superior. The flight dynamics in FU3 and Fly were superior as well. RH