Adam Szofran

I can't imagine the world without Tom. He's been such a presence in this hobby I've enjoyed for almost 25 years now. I know there are many others who feel the same way about him. Farewell friend.

Cheat sheet: http://www.microsoft.com/Products/Games/FSInsider/news/Pages/Avsim2006.aspx Smile Tom! :-)

Has anyone been able to get the original Flight Unlimited for Windows 95 running on Windows 7? I can't seem to get past the splash screen. It plays the engine start sound and then just quits back to the desktop. I set all the compatibility options and they didn't seem to help:Run this program in compatibility mode for: Windows 95Run in 256 colorsRun in 640 x 480 screen resolutionDisable visual themesDisable desktop compositionDisable display scaling on high DPI settingsRun this program as an administrator

The machine running the weather server is getting a little long in the tooth and it has had a few hiccups lately. As far as I know there are no plans to pull the plug on the server and I have seen no black helicopters circling the Redmond campus. :(

Ok, I'd like to clarify a few things. > we run our mesh triangulation algorithms in software True. At least for FSX anyway. We are currently experimenting with terrain mesh rendering techniques that rely much more heavily on vertex shaders. Hopefully that will allow us to implement neat things like LOD morphing to prevent "popping" and real-time mesh deformation for explosions or water waves. I don't know if any of this will ever see the light of day, but at least we're experimenting with it. > Due to the complexity of the [texture] synthesis algorithm, we execute it in software rather than using video hardware. > No fewer than three times Adam has stated that the rendering is done by the CPU in a memory buffer. This applies to the synthesis of terrain textures only. Once the texture for a particular patch of terrain is done being synthesized, it is attached to the corresponding patch of terrain mesh and rendered by the GPU. > What ACES managed to accomplish in FSX SP1 & SP2 was to move some of the final rendering passes to the GPU... Sort of. The main thing we did for terrain in SP1 was to parallelize the terrain texture synthesis routines by allowing them to run on multiple CPU cores simultaneously. Thanks for reading my paper, by the way. -Adam

>This will always happen until airports in FSX are no longer>"flat".Not necessarily true. Sure, non-flat airports will be great, but mesh vendors can eliminate the plateaus around flat airports if they massage their data appropriately. The default mesh in many places uses 38 meter data and it would certainly show plateaus around airports if we had not smoothed the mesh by interpolating between the airport elevation and the mesh elevation within a kilometer of the airport. It's fairly simple to do with a good GIS software package.-Adam

That's correct. Follow this reference for the details:12. NIMA Technical Report TR8350.2, Department of Defense World Geodetic System 1984, Its Definition and Relationships With Local Geodetic Systems, Third Edition, 4 July 1997. http://earth-info.nga.mil/GandG/publicatio...2/tr8350_2.html-Adam

The modified land class textures have different coloration than the default ones that were used to create the very low resolution imagery of the globe. The low res globe imagery is used to texture the most distant terrain that is visible from high altitude. The only way to "fix" the problem would be to rebuild the globe imagery using the new land class textures, but that's not easy.-Adam

Christian,Why don't you apply? There are open positions on the ACES team right now. For example:http://members.microsoft.com/careers/searc...tCol=DatePosted-Adam

Thanks Chris. I'll have to investigate further once I get my copy of the Horizon scenery.-Adam

Paul,It affects the terrain textures in sceneryworldtexture. It also affects textures loaded by 3D objects like aircraft and autogen. It does not affect photoscenery created for FSX, but it does affect FS9-style photo scenery.-Adam

I stand corrected. The FSX texture file loader is not operating as intended. We are, in fact, reading the entire file contents even when we only want a small portion of the file. We're investigating to see what went wrong and hopefully we can fix it. The fix may not gain as much performance as you might think, however, due to the operating system's file cache, but it certainly won't hurt.-Adam

Jaap,I'm not certain you are the same person, but a document roughly matching the description of your concept was shown to me and a few other FS team members about a month ago. My expectation is that duplicating the files in multiple locations to prevent multi-step searches doesn't really buy that much in terms of performance. The writer of the document I saw even doubted if there was any tangible benefit noting that there was little, if any, measurable performance improvement. Therefore, busy with other things we know will improve performance, we didn't give the document any further thought. I still think that was the right call, notwithstanding the unsubstantiated performance improvements claimed by others in this thread.The reason I take the performance claims made here with a bit of skepticism is because all of our file I/O is performed on a secondary thread. Therefore, it shouldn't cause stutters or frame rate fluctuations unless you are running on a single-core machine, have a horribly fragmented hard drive, or have a disk controller running in PIO mode (CPU intensive). Since the file system caches directory information, the multi-step searches shouldn't be very expensive after the first attempt. One could argue that we shouldn't be doing multi-step file searches at all, and I might be persuaded to agree with them, but that's part of the cost of allowing customizable third-party content.Someone else raised the issue of the file access patterns of photo scenery in this thread. That's something that's being discussed in a different thread. Look here: http://forums.avsim.net/dcboard.php?az=sho...3&page=1#377412-Adam

Chris,The FSX photo scenery file format contains tiles at a range of LODs. This was supposed to improve load times because the lower LOD tiles are prebuilt instead of having to be constructed at load time like is required for FS9 photo scenery. It's possible that the VFR scenery contains tiles at some of the very lowest LODs. If so, then the low LOD data from the VFR files would be loaded when assembling the textures that cover large parts of the globe. That shouldn't be a big deal because the amount of data read from each file should be fairly small. However, this could be a problem if there are a large number of spatially overlapping files with data at the very lowest LODs. How many files come with the VFR scenery? I haven't gotten my hands on the VFR scenery yet.You can see for yourself which LODs are included with the VFR scenery by opening one of the VFR files in the TMFViewer tool that comes with the FSX SDK. Select "Level of Detail" from the View menu and note the range of LODs that are present in the file. Menu items for LODs that are present will be enabled; missing LODs are greyed.-Adam

Scott,I expect that splitting files along QMID 15 (1 km) or even QMID 13 (4 km) boundaries won't make things better. You'll end up with billions of tiny little files that will only increase load time.-Adam

Very nice. If you're concerned about legal issues, then why not switch from Google to Virtual Earth imagery? (See http://dev.live.com/virtualearth/) I can't imagine Microsoft giving you trouble over using their imagery in their simulator. :-) Then again, I'm not a lawyer...-Adam

Nope. FSX reads only the desired mip level from each file; it does not read the whole file at once because that would be wasteful. If it later needs a different mip, it goes back and reads just that portion of the file that it needs. That's why you may see the same file accessed more than once, but FSX is reading different parts of the file each time. There's no doubt that FS9-style photo scenery is very poorly structured for performance due to all the billions of separate texture files. It takes even longer to load FS9-style photo scenery in FSX because FSX has a much larger visible scenery radius than FS9. That's why we adopted a new photo scenery file format for FSX that eliminates the need for separate texture files and needs very few file I/O operations to load. I would strongly discourage anyone from making new scenery for FSX that uses the old FS9 data format. It's simply not going to perform very well compared to the newer stuff.-Adam

Chris,Well, if there are corrupt scenery files on your disk, then all bets are off. That's the only other idea I've got, other than the three possibilities I listed in my previous post. Sounds like none of them apply to you, though.-Adam

I agree with player1. It sounds like Chris' hard drive needs a good defragging. In our experience, photoscenery designed for FSX, such as England VFR, loads much more quickly than photoscenery designed for FS9. That leads us to another possibility, however. Chris, have you installed any FS9-style photoscenery in FSX? If so, that could be causing lots of disk access because of all the separate .BMP files required by FS9-style photoscenery.One final possibility is that your hard drive is operating in PIO mode, which is very slow and CPU intensive. To check, open Device Manager, expand the "IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers" tree, and locate the primary and secondary IDE channel items. Right click on each of those and select the Advanced Settings tab. Then look at the current transfer mode. If any of them show "PIO Mode" then you're not getting the best performance from your hard drives and you might have a cabling problem or settings that need to be tweaked on the motherboard. To get the best performance, you want to use the faster DMA mode. Good luck,Adam

Holger is correct. FSX tries to preload the default flight to reduce load time once you click "Fly Now". If you change settings or start location, the preloading process starts over again. To disable it, add the following to the [Main] section of FSX.CFG:DisablePreload=1-Adam

With the FS9 Resample tool, the water mask punched a hole in your image to reveal default water beneath.With the FSX Resample tool, we wanted to allow more flexibility, so we changed how the water mask works and we also added a blend mask. Now the water mask triggers reflective and specular water effects, but it doesn't punch a hole in your image. The benefit of this is that you can now paint the water any color you want. For example, if your source imagery contains murky brown swamp water, you can now get the muck to show up in FSX with reflections and specular effects. If you'd rather just see the default water colors, you have to use a blend mask to punch a hole in your image to reveal the default textures below. Note, however, that the default textures revealed by the blend mask might not be water; they could very well be land textures! Therefore, if you want to guarantee that the blend mask will expose default water textures, you need to create a water polygon (a big square one will do) that covers the area where you want water to appear. For information about creating water polygons, look for the documentation of the shp2vec tool in the FSX SDK.Good luck,Adam

We're not just sitting on our hands counting our money! :-) As a matter of fact, we are looking to see if there is anything we can do to positively impact performance. If we find anything worth sharing, I'm sure we will. No time frame is set because we haven't found any magic bullets yet, but we are looking.Cheers,Adam

Allcott,The patch Hal just announced only affects photo scenery designed for FSX. FS9 photo scenery is not affected. You should be able to use FS9 photo scenery with FSX regardless of whether or not you install the patch. The reason FSX doesn't include any of the FS9 default photo scenery is because it is of such low resolution (5 meters per pixel) that it doesn't really look that good anymore. The three photo scenery areas included in FSX (St. Maarten, Las Vegas, Giza) are all brand new and were authored at 1 meter per pixel.-Adam

We (Microsoft) are not planning to wait until FS Eleven to improve the multi-core utilization of the Flight Sim engine. As soon as we have some cool multi-core improvements available, we'll share them with you. It may take a few months, but don't lose all hope.Cheers,Adam

It actually takes more CPU/GPU resources to rotate a polygon to face the camera every frame than it does to just draw two of them without rotation.-Adam