Just to show It CAN be done....

Ok, NOT trying to bash ACES here... While I do find it seriously disconserting that the team wasn't up on future trends in CPU tech (considering AMD made no bones about the fact since Athlon64 Day 1 that they were going multi-core) and as such chose not to seriously take advantage of multi-core processors, I understand, and to a degree, it makes sense for them not to do so (let's face it, there's still a TON of Single core users out there and writing multithreaded code that really requires multiple cores/CPUs to run effectively would lock out a lot of those users.)Anyhow, just to show that it CAN be done: http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu...e-multicore.arsValve is seriously embracing the multithreaded model and are having great success with it. It requires the game programmer to step back and rethink the way they've done things for years, but when done right, the advantages far outweigh the difficulties. It also sounds like they took the right approach - build yourself a suite of tools to make your job easier.I think the ACES team could learn a lot here... I know that the UT2007 team is also seriously pushing on multithreaded techniques.I also find it difficult to understand how it is that ACES doesn't have access to the MS resources to help them with this. I know for a fact that MS has been pushing developers to write for multiple threads for at LEAST the last 2 years (I sat through a MSDeveloper Network online tutorial on it back then and they were stressing that multi-threading was going to be essential in the future.)And yes, I DO write multi-threaded code (I'm a Java developer at a large Fortune 100 company) so I DO know how difficult it can be at times to develop and debug multithreaded code (I had 1 deadlock bug in my program several months ago that had me totally stumped for the better part of 2 weeks that would only reer it's ugly head when very specific conditions took place.) Multithreaded programming is like a religion that requires total dedication and total devotion and even then it CAN be very difficult. That's why I'm very impressed with the approach that Valve took and the apparent results they've gotten out of that approach.Hopefully some of the information of how they did what they did will filter out and be dispersed amongst the developer communities and teams such as ACES will be able to take advantage of the ideas to make their products better in the near future. Unfortunately, I don't think this will help FSX...But, that's ok, I'll be off flying FSX in the mean time :-)--2002cbr600f4i