Phil added another interesting post to his library of many others. He is keeping us informed about the organization aspect of the Team. I guess there is a major effort to keep on top of things this time around. ACES has almost double in size since FSX. Good job ACES! And thank you very much Phil for keeping informed :-) Can't wait to hear more - expecially when we get alot further down the road!http://blogs.msdn.com/ptaylor/archive/2008...-and-today.aspx

It's always interesting when gaming studios enlarge their staff. The biggest studio I ever worked for was maybe 20 people. I did work for an organization that had a couple of thousand, but there were maybe 100 full time employees and the rest were contract labour of one kind or another, and I was only in contact with no more than 30-40 people at a time.People think that managing 100 people is much like managing a dozen, but I don't think so at all. What I really am in awe of are the animation studios in the Far East, epecially Japan, Korea, and China. There, it's not uncommon to have a 1,000-worker studio, and there have been projects where there have been up to a dozen of those studios involved on a single project. That's over 10,000 artists! The logisitics of supplying all of those people, getting their work organized and standardized, and then making any money at all from the project, well I have no idea how all of that must work, except that slave labour could be involved. Not at all a happy thing to think about when you are enjoying your Simpsons or your Macross DVD. Jeff ShylukAssistant Manging EditorSenior Staff ReviwerAVSIM

I was actually quite surprised at the number of people working there. Phil says they had 60 when working on FSX and now have 100. With those numbers and knowing it took 3 years from FS9 to FSX you can guess the cost in making the title. 100K x 60 x 3 (obviously very rough guess and I am trying to include all costs in the 100K which is probably light)... $18 million. Not sure if other titles came out during that time but I dont think so.Comments,Mark.

Doubling the size of the team has to be good. I'm sure from an organizational standpoint there might be a few more challenges but assuming those hurdles can be overcome, the overall effect will surely have to be positive.My impression of ACES for the last 1.5 years was that they were "harried", but doing the best job humanly possible with the resources and time they had. With more cooks stirring the soup, maybe they will be less frazzled and ESP platform will be great.RhettAMD 3700+ (@2585 mhz), eVGA 7800GT 256 (Guru3D 93.71), ASUS A8N-E, PC Power 510 SLI, 2gb Corsair XMS 3-3-3-8 (1T), WD 150 gig 10000rpm Raptor, WD 250gig 7200rpm SATA2, Seagate 120gb 5400 rpm external HD, CoolerMaster Praetorian

Yes for about 100 people we can take average $100K salary (including insurance, 401K etc) then total salary bill=$10 million annual. A good ball park figure for other overheads is 100% of salary bill, so thats another $10 million. If FSXI comes out in 2 years from now then total cost $40 million. If Aces gives out the software for $40 to distributors then with 1 million copy they'll break even and if they sell a few million copies....wow!!!Similarly in another perspective, every million pirated copies mean a 100 people company like ACES can go hungry for 2 years and people enjoy their hardwork of 2 years for free!!

I would have to think that with a team of that size, significant resources would have to be given to CM and SQA, which appear as overhead. They might also need a bit of staff just to support the SE development environment.scott s..

How many of those people work on just Flightsim and Trainsim. Or does ACES studio also develop for XBox?

>How many of those people work on just Flightsim and Trainsim.>Or does ACES studio also develop for XBox?Hi Matthew,From Phil's post ... ACES team members are a part of one of 4 groups: Core, FS, TS, and ESP. ACES does not develop for the XBox platform. As the technology basis is the same, certainly there could be some overlap of people on each of these groups.Regards,Owen

Not all of the 100+ people work on the Flight product, so you cannot simply take the total number of people and multiply.You cannot even sum Core+Flight and do the math that way, since Core supports all 3 products.Even more broadly, that was't the point of the posts.

Phil:Is there any hint that MS's eScience initiative will be resurrected, maybe in connection with ESP development? I know it was canceled at some point, so I'm just wondering if MS will need good R&D people in a future, maybe to supervise the physical aspects of simulation. Regards,=S.V.=eMachines T5026/P4/3.07GHz/1Gb RAM/160Gb S-ATA HDD/Windows XP Home SP2/ATI RADEON 9250 PCI 256Mb/ViewSonic VX910 19' 1280x1024/Microsoft SideWinder Force Feedback 2

We always need good people :-).ESP is much more targeted than the eScience initiative was. ESP is about using the existing Sim-Platform as a solution for the scenarios it can already simulate and not about generic linkage between data. Even TerraServer is more about a generic service for others to use in any way imaginable and less about solving specific problems in specific domains.

I should have read Phil's blog first :)In anycase 100 people (Devs, QA, Admin etc) working on Core/FS/TS/ESP is a lot.The future of the FS (and TS) franchise is looking good! :-beerchug

I see, Thanks, and good luck with all that managing and new hires! Four years ago I wouldn't hesitate to apply but now I guess I'm too much into a scientific simulation as opposed to software engineering... However, I do hope, at some point, simulation games and scientific models will collide, because I like to work and play at the same time :)Cheers,=S.V.=