beatle

Not sure where you are getting the 3 years value from, it hasn't even been 3 years since ACES closed yet. LM has only had the code for about 16 months, and has put out 3 releases in that timeframe. The two primary features have been a license that allows use in a commercial setting, and the fact that development on the engine is continuing. To be fair, that had nothing to do with old code, new code, hybrid code, etc - nobody has wanted to own the Weather system since at least FS5 (when I first started working on the code) - it's the subsystem itself that no one wants to own, nothing to do with the state of the code (I would hazzard a guess that about 90% of the devs interviewed to work in ACES wanted to work on the DirectX pipeline code - that's what they consider to be "game programming", as opposed to me who works on almost everything else except the DirectX pipeline code - that aversion is related to the years I spent doing direct graphics hardware programming :-> ).

A more accurate statement would be that PFC supports FSX (FSX doesn't do anything specficially to support PFC) and nobody is able to say whether PFC will support Flight (or be allowed to support Flight).

Hey All, Just wondering if anyone else is planning on attending the AVSim social this Saturday, or is it just going to be me and the AVSim folks getting drunk at the Hilton :->

Well, I don't think you would use P3D to make "something like FSX" :-> The $499 would be paid by two general types of buyers: Solution Providers - these are people who provide a complete solution, including hardware, software, custom content, etc for a single price to their clients Direct End Users - these are people who are setting up one or more machines for a commercial use (training, education, visualization, etc) who then combine the software with their own hardware and any custom content they might want to purchase or create (in the case of High Schools/Colleges/etc, we should have an Educational license available soon, so they won't have to pay the full $499 per seat) Then there are the Occasional Other buyers, which is anybody else who buys a P3D license (or developer network subscription) for whatever reason :->

Generally, smaller ISV's would probably do things like create a package with custom local sceneries, specific target aircraft, training missions, etc and sell it to say a local flight training school, flying club, FBO, etc. What you would have to pay Lockheed Martin for would be the $499 per seat license fee for each machine you provided as part of your solution. What you charged your customer for the whole package would be up to you. Larger ISV's might also include custom hardware, like the Redbird Simulations folks do with their motion platform and multi-LCD wrap around view (or LM's own MFTA based systems). Or target larger/regional/national flight schools (or maybe type familiarization for an aircraft manufacturer). Another option would be to put together a "timed experience rig" (ie you know, like those motion platforms with the roller coaster sims you see at county fairs), but using Prepar3d to allow a "Fly for x minutes for y bucks" sort of rig you could take to county fairs. In all the above, the only payment to Lockheed Martin would be the $499 for a seat license for each machine in the solution that has Prepar3d installed on it. The SDK is a free download, and the developer network subscription is optional.

Just to clear up some misconceptions, the limitations on Prepar3d are all related to pricing and marketing - ie we can't sell a product at an "entertainment price level" and we can't market it as an entertainment product. But ANYBODY who wants to buy a copy (either a full seat license or a developer subscription) is free to do so (there's no limitation on how you use it, just how we sell it :-> ).

Well, MS also kills off projects all the time for reasons that have nothing to do with money (ie office politics - like how ACES got shutdown in the first place :-< ).

Couple of ways to reset the config file without knowing where it is. You can hold down the CAPS_LOCK and CONTROL keys while the app is launching, you can add a -RESETINI switch to the FSX command line, or you can add a -CFG switch with no path\filename to the FSX command line (normally, it would be -CFG:d:\SomePath\SomeFile.cfg - this form lets you use different .CFG files for different setups). Tim

Not sure for FS9. When FSX is the foreground app (ie has input focus) it will attempt to disable screen saver/screen blanking modes, but isn't always successful (particularly if you have a domain-joined machine and the domain requires Screen Locking after x minutes, that happens regardless of what the app tries to do). The main problem is that WIndows doesn't consider joystick input as input (like it does with keyboard and mouse input). If you look around, you might be able to find software that installs as a "virtual keyboard or mouse" that you can set to send some innocuous command (like press and release the shift key, or minimal mouse movement) at some rate slightly faster than the screen saver setting (ie if the screen saver is set for 15 minutes, then send a random "input" event every 12 minutes) - don't know of any software like this off the top of my head, but since the problem exists for any joystick based software, there's probably something like that out there :-> Tim

Some of those items left behind could be "common" files shared across several products (ie a common gauge package that several addon aircraft use, etc) - in this case, uninstalling the "common" files could break other installed addons. This is fairly common in regular software as well - if you install Visual Studio on a machine that didn't have any .Net runtime installed, then uninstall Visual Studio, you will find the machine still has the .Net runtime instlaled (granted, in this case, the .Net runtime does show up in the installed programs list as a seperate item) Tim

Well, in the general sense, you can use a generic rigid body physics engine for quite a few things in a flight simulator: Collision Detection General rigid body stuff for aircraft ground handling and regular cars/trucks/etc If it includes a cloth/wave simulation, you can also use it for water surface animation, flapping flags and wind socks, etc Some also provide support for moving some calculations to the GPU, although you could also go directly through DirectX APIs for that :-> Granted, once you leave the ground, most general rigid body physics engines don't provide support for that. Tim

Prepar3 to be happy (sorry, couldn't resist :-> ).Yep, the 3DS Max Tools in the Prepar3d SDK do currently output FSX-SP2/XPack SDK compatible MDL files (well, .X and .XANIM files). And yes, the Asm2Air tool, headers, and docs are included in the Prepar3d SDK. The in-sim tools (Object Placement Tool, Traffic Toolbox, VisualFX Editor, etc) will not work with any version of FSX (those files only work when the SDK version matches the sim version).Tim

The flying races thing was part of the Acceleration Addon Pack, not part of the base FSX product, so no time was spent on it until after the base sim and the first service pack were done.Tim

Core wasn't really ever an ACES product, it was just the group within ACES that worked on the parts of the sim that were common between FS, TS, and ESP (graphics engine, terrain engine, etc).Tim

Guys,This version of FS (yeah, they may call it Flight, but its still just FS to me :-> ) will be just like every other version of FS: There will be some new features/modules/subsystems Some existing subsystems will be rewritten/greatly enhanced/etc Some existing subsystems will have code tweaks (speedups, bug fixes) and minor enhancements Some existing subsystems will be almost exactly the same (think Weather system, the system nobody wants to touch because they will then own it :-> ) You guys seem to thing there's some single "FS Engine" inside the codebase (ie that would be the entire program :-> ). There are whole bunches of subsystem engines (graphics pipeline, terrain system, autogen system, weather system, Aero modeling system, etc), they don't necessarliy all need to be rewritten for every release in order for there to be performance gains, enhanced graphics, etc in each new release :->Tim