1st day of summer and 1st FSX-DX10 Progress report

[PhilTaylor 45]

Is available here,http://blogs.msdn.com/ptaylor/archive/2007...t-fsx-dx10.aspx

[Guest zinja]

"Early DX10 SDKs had no multimon sample code, so digging for information on how to do multimon in DX10 was hard and it is very good that part of the port is largely past us."I love your honest and non-PR-speak approach to our community. Keep it up!

[Bob_D 38]

Keep em coming Phil! No matter what some others think I always think its interesting to take a look inside the "sausage factory". :) Boy the wireframes of Chicago sure bring back some flight sim memories! heh

[Guest Mike707]

Great to hear of the progress and looking forward to FSX-DX10 in game screenshots.

[Guest Robin R.]

Phil,Good to see the progress report. One of your links isn't working on my IE7 box http://blogs.msdn.com/photos/phil_taylor/picture3447286.aspxDue to current performance issues with FSX (even SP1) and with so few people running multiple monitors (at least for gaming/sims), I'm curious as to why you started with MultiMon work? Not that I don't like Multiple monitor support (I do), but the nature of FSX doesn't fit well with the overhead (in terms of hardware) for rendering these view ports. In other words, I would have expected this to be a lower priority for DX10 version rather something you start with?Can you give some insight why you elected to start here?Were you able to secure more resources to hit that Fall 2007 ETA? That's a pretty agressive mark giving yourself til Dec 20th especially when your team is in DX10 learn mode -- actually you'd have to wrap up the code by at least Dec 1st. Looking forward to it, but I'll have to play a wait and see before I decide to install Vista to run FSX DX10 -- lets just say you'll really need to provide A LOT of WOW ;)I know many folks were a little angry over the Halo 2 release for Vista only when the game is still a DX9 title. It's good to see your dedicated to a true DX10 title.Zinja -- Phil's post is PR -- is that a bad thing? I don't think so.Robin.P.S. I know you didn't want to discuss features, but when you decide on features and have to prioritize please put 64bit build ahead of multi-mon support I really think this would benefit more of the majority.

[PhilTaylor 45]

That link works for me, and I did nothing special when I posted that image.Device bringup is, pretty obviously, the 1st thing you have to do. Multimon is essentially multi-device bringup, so its closely related to device bringup. This is all in the "plumbing and infrastructure" area and its always wise to get that taken care of before going off to more advanced work. You dont want to leave an unknown behind you unresolved, and you want the plumbing for the whole house done, not just downstairs, before you start hanging drywall. And the community would, I believe, reject a FS version without multimon so I disagree its a lower priority.Given we have had a resource working on DX10 in the background since last November, that is helping the team get up to speed fast. I mention that in the article, as its only 5 weeks since SP1 so this is good progress. I would hope we are out before Thanksgiving and dont use up the entire season, but that remains to be seen :-).I'd like to think my posts are more than PR, thank you very much. Certainly there is no PR reason to talk about FSX-DX10 right now, this is really to keep the community informed and not about PR. No Marketing rep cleared my post, no wire service is carrying it, it has no vestiges of PR so please dont try to paint what I do as "just PR".I have already stated, and will do so again here, that 64-bit work is not part of DX10. 64-bit is essentially porting the engine to another platform, the changes are that broad. A change that large will only happen as part of a new version, and no decision has been made there yet to move to another platform as part of the next version. Given the adoption of 64-bit to date, I have to disagree with how many would benefit from that work.

[scott967 62]

>Boy the wireframes of Chicago sure bring back some flight sim>memories! heh>>That was my thought exactly!!scott s..

[Guest Robin R.]

Ok on the PR, like I said, I don't consider PR a bad thing. You have zero obligation to provide this info to anyone, the fact that you do provide it is good PR. As to the content, that's a good read regardless and much appreciated and I never suggested it was for PR purpose only.I'd recommend you get porting the entire engine to another platform then -- cause no matter what you do with DX10, that 32bit wall will remain. I've done 32bit to 64bit ports on WinXP 32/64 and it wasn't what I would consider a "Big deal" -- pretty much a search and replace with recompile with some tuck and tidy work around allocations and a bunch of testing -- on the project I was working on (it was large) took about a month. But I don't pretend to know your code base so maybe you've got a lot more issues to deal with?Have you done market research on what is important to FS simmers -- beyond your Beta group and these forums? You might find some of your assumptions wrong -- if that matters to you.Robin.

[Ted Striker 338]

It is interesting to read about your progress Phil, and I do appreciate you providing progress reports to the community. However, I've got to agree with what Robin is saying. I can't use most of the features in FSX right now, so reading about new features doesn't get me that excited. Now if you wrote something like "with DX10 we are finding the textures loading much quicker and are getting crisp 1 meter textures 5 miles around the plane" I think this thread would really come alive.Just a little customer feedback, no disrespect meant at all. Keep up the good work.Ted.

[Manny 1,293]

"Mr. Robin",Whats your problem?

[ccaughie 0]

If they're going to port to another platform surely they should pick a platform with a higher adoption rate than Win64, say... Linux? :-lolSeriously, thanks for the early info Phil. Now I have a good few months to work on a way of persuading my wife that a new Vista DX10 machine is a good use of a thousand pounds...

[Guest nels]

Thanks so much for the update Phil.

[Guest zinja]

>Zinja -- Phil's post is PR -- is that a bad thing? I don't>think so.Of course it's PR, by definition, since he is an employee of the company who publishes the software and is communicating with the public. My point was that his tone and content are frank and lacking in the typically "PR language" which is usually dripping in promotion and lacking in relevant information.The information he's posting is similar to what I'd probably expect if Phil and I were about having a couple of beers. You don't get that much from game development companies.Thanks again, Phil.

[Guest PPSFA]

thanks for the update, I personally find it unfortunate that DX10 will not be XP compatible, since I have no plans to upgrade to Vista that leaves me, and I assume a lot of others, lacking.

[victorwest2 0]

>thanks for the update, I personally find it unfortunate that>DX10 will not be XP compatible, since I have no plans to>upgrade to Vista that leaves me, and I assume a lot of others,>lacking.But we've always known that DX10 needs Vista.