PhilTaylor

see https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/ptaylor/2007/10/03/acceleration-and-sp2/ and http://www.joyofsetup.com/2007/12/16/flight-simulator-x-service-pack-2-available-and-how-to-work-around-common-problems/ note SP2 requires SP1 to be installed.

That wasn't part of either SP1 or SP2, and I don't see it in the Dovetail SE list here: http://steamcommunity.com/app/314160/discussions/0/496881136926977562/ So no.

Bert, Thanks. We thought it was solid work when we released, it's nice to see it has truly "stood the test of time". And I was honored at the time to have the freedom to make the call on what was "in". Yes, alpha-fade autogen was on our list, props to the LM team for getting it done. Phil

Maybe exactly what SP1 did in terms of threading and peformance needs to be clarified: https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/microsoft-flight-simulator-x-soars-to-new-heights-with-multi-threading http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ptaylor/archive/2007/05/15/performance-work-in-sp1.aspx And SP2: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ptaylor/archive/2007/10/02/acceleration-and-sp2.aspx

no worries there, just want to be sure of accurate data. one of the reasons, after all this time, 6+ years, that FSX (and its step-child P3D ) are still "what we have", is there are sooooo many challenges to making a full-world sim. the "sim engine and rendering engine" are almost dwarfed by the business and technical challenges of generating the world-data-set, for instance. the interlocking data agreements alone are serious business. and that's just the mesh; without human footprint ( urbania, suburbania, farmland, etc ), or airports, or planes to fly, or cockpits, or 3 types of traffic, or sky ( atmosphere, sun, moon, stars ), or water, or appearance of land, or add-ons, or .... still, the Steam version breathed some life into the old beast, and it will be exciting to see the VR version of FSX.

uh, not true. unless something was broken after.

Steve, does DTG get your updated tool set for Flight? having that as part of the "head start" might make a difference. and if they open Flight to 3DPs, it might be interesting depending. obviously the jury is still out, but having someone make a try is at least movement over no one making a try. Phil

ok fair enough on camera-centered, but it still isnt a WGS coordinate system, so real-world object placement has to be implemented as a mapping on top of the base UE4 coordinate system. in some key cases, it looks like the range limits of UE4 and its coordinate system do not map to the required ranges. thats a hard problem to solve, since those sorts of range limits tend to be part of the authoring pipeline as well as the rendering pipeline. and nice to talk to you, virtually. :-)

uh no. TS 2014 is "route-based" and not "world-based" like the FSX engine. That means TS 2014 could be "re-engined" to the UE-style engine relatively easily. A full-fledged world simulator like FSX, not so much. . FPS engines just are not a realistic option for a world simulator. The fact that Aerosoft investigated and discarded multiple FPS engines should serve as a proof-point, but I see people still get impressed by rendering technology and don’t think about either the world rendering requirement or the simulation aspect behind an FS-style engine that performs full-world simulation. So let’s get concrete for a second: Rendering limits, range: UE3: UE3 and the UDK had a 10kx10x10k limit to terrain, and I quote: Unreal Engine 3 supports a maximum world size of 512k x 512k (524288 x 524288) Unreal Units. This is equivalent to approximately 10 kilometers squared of area using the default engine unit conversion of 1 UU = 2 cm (10km x 10km). For those who don’t want to read documentation, UU=Unreal Unit. As we move to considering UE4 engine limitations, the use of UUs to describe size limitations will persist. Clearly, UE3 just won’t work for full world rendering without a source code license and a lot of custom streaming code. Hire a good dev. Rendering limits, range: UE4: World Browser does have some “streaming” capability, so it goes beyond the 10kmx10km extent limit of UE3. However, without implementing your tiling system, the default size is still small Forum posts state world size is on the order of half the total magnitude available, eg 5kx5k. Another thing to consider is the default UE tiling system is an infinite plane, so there is no curvature. So you still need source code access ( cheaper now so more possible ) and a dev to write some world streaming code that conforms to loading DEM at multiple resolutions, stitches this transparently at DEM boundaries and across a world geodetic sphere definition with curvature. Hmmm, I think I know an engine that already does that. Oh, wait. This ignores the fact that outside of low-resolution DEM data, the high-res data is a national asset and you need an interlocking set of data agreements to get "seamless" world coverage. Oh, and wait. "Seamless" from a business development perspective means getting all the data. At the best resolution at a price point that maps to studio profitability. Rendering-style "seamless" is different. The wizards in the Geo-team write tools that sweep the raw data, condition it where there are errors ( and if you think the published errors of spikes and holes are hysterical you should see what the data looks like before we condition it ) and export it at a data-density that respects commercially viable storage/download media/rates for most of us. Then the terrain programmer-wizard needs an oct-tree based engine that understands DEM resolution per tile, tile boundaries, level of detail, terrain texture generation, etc to stitch that all together visually in a way that from any altitude above 500 foot, the terrain looks good. Yeah, 500 ft of altitude. Thinking about that relative to UE4, the heightmap format has a severe limitation for our purposes, eg : Heightmap Format These values are divided by 128 internally, and then multiplied by the Landscape's Z scale (default 256). This means that by default, a value of 32769 (i.e. +1) is 2 units (cm) above the Actor location, and the maximum range of heights is -655.36m to +655.34m. 655 meters = ~400 feet. That is the height of the largest terrain feature. Dead Sea to Everest spans -1300 feet below MSL to 29,029 feet above MSL. That’s 30,329 feet of range, so you need the full 16 bits devoted to the range unmapped. And thats ignoring if you actually want to do accurate seafloors. Marianas Trench is how deep? That is not FS altitude, which will take you to 1,000,000 ft above the planet or approx 200 miles. Here is another one to consider: World Coordinates and Terrain Movement: UE4 offers “player-centered” movement where the world moves and the player stays at 0,0,0 That doesn't square with WGS84, GPS, etc. So from this, all should see that simple use of an “engine” like UE, Crytek, etc isn’t enough. Ignoring the issue of rendering range and if an engine could actually deliver a consistent 200milex200milex200mile rendering box, and seamlessly stream it at all altitudes – would it do it using the WGS84 coordinate system so that GPS navigation and other desirable features just work? Not today Zurg. And we haven’t gotten to a feature set like: · Gauge system designed to deliver gauge data at something approximating real world frequencies ( read 1s or sub second accuracy ) · Cockpit rendering, either 2D or 3D. · accurate 10,000 star starfield that enables shooting a sextant out of any plane and doing hand navigation, phases of the moon, tides, time of day, terrain shadows. · real world weather stations, · world airport database including ICAO, bush fields, etc · auto-gen airport provisioning and rendering for 24,000 airports located geographically precise on a WGS84 Earth globe. · ATC, taxi, tower experience, airport experience, etc · AI traffic for auto, 3 types of boats ( military, commercial, small craft ), and 3 types of air traffic ( military, commercial, private ) synced to real world data. · "work" systems like catapults, arresting gear, and hoists. · Wing, engine, and flight dynamics simulation for fixed wing ( prop, turboprob, jet) and rotary wing aircraft ( helicopters ) · 5 season autogeneration of terrain textures using a continental landclass system · water rendering, including ocean, river, lake using a water class system · auto-generation of city-scapes, forests, and other terrain features using real-world density data · Expandability for aircraft, terrain, textures, photo-scenery, etc as well as programmatic add-ons via the SimConnect interface. · And more I cannot remember since its been since October 2008. · Etc. As cool as UE4 is, and it’s pretty damned cool, it isn’t going to cut it for FS11.

I don't know who might buy and what it might mean. But the economics of FS were not bad, just not "Microsoft scale" which is a billion dollar business. FSX sold on the order of 2 million units. Deluxe was $60, Standard was, I think, 40. With discounts, let's take $30 as the average. That's a 60 million dollar business. With a staff of 50, at an average salary of 100k and a billed cost to the corporation of 2x or 200k, that's 10m salary. If it takes you 3 years to build the product, net profit is 30 million over 3 years, or 10 million per year. Many people would see that as a viable economic model, but it is not "Microsoft scale". Then the studio was behind on its own schedule, the division the product was in (XBox) was increasingly moving away from PC gaming ( evidenced by canceling Age of Empires at the same time ), and the terrible economic times of 2008-2010...and a newly minted VP who desired to look VP-ish...all of that contributed. So yes you could have a nice profitable fun business that provided entertainment and enjoyment, and still get chopped off at the knees. It isn't easy operating at these levels of the industry and there are often "strange forces" at work....

I know nothing about this specifically; there have been several "rumors" over the years about a sale before and nothing ever happened. If someone was serious about developing the tech, it would be great. There is still a lot of potential, if the codebase and geo/art assets were shown the right love. Would I go back to work on it? Maybe, if the offer was right.

stranger things have actually happened...I caused an "international incident" by editing 1 airport out of FSX-SP1...true story. some governments are very sensitive and get upset if "a game" or anything doesn't represent the world as they see it.

http://stevesfsxanalysis.wordpress.com/2013/06/21/dx10-scenery-fixer/ this tool looks very promising for FSX in D3D10 mode. D3D10 does offer efficiencies under heavy load so it will be interesting to see if this fixes enough anomalies to make flying at the "heavy load" airports both worthwhile from a lack of bugs and more fun due to a better frame rate.

this is technically incorrect. scenery and autogen uses texture-based lighting, yes. and does have a tendency to look a bit "flat" models are rendered with dynamic lighting calculations though. what do you think specular highlights, bloom, and shadows are? some effects like nav lights might be texture maps, but not all of model rendering is. water does some interesting things to get its effects. as does the skybox to get the atmospheric effects. in an apples-apples comparison of other "full world rendering" simulation engines, FSX still stands pretty good considering it was originally released in 2006 and the last patch was 2007. comparing it to Crysis or Battlefield or some other shooter that isn't under the same constraints and thus has solved the problem differently, that is apples-oranges. with that said, if you are unhappy with it - then don't fly it. but to come to just provide a negative comment - there are better things to do with life. go do them.

Stonelance, you rock! May the force be with you.

Ok, so I have something to say in this thread. It has been a while since I posted in a thermally challenged thread, I can only hope you all listen. :-) it seems way premature to say FSX is done The future of FSX is, like the force, with you all. Activations aren't the issue. As some have noticed, if the activation servers go down, as long as the Microsoft phone numbers work, you can still activate by phone.That is one essential "lifeline" measurement. Once new activations cannot occur, then the community size is stagnant. But until then, while activations can still occur - the community can grow. So because the community can still grow, technically nothing is done. :-) Now, even if activations get cut off, I will argue there is still a very vibrant community so even then FSX isn't "done". So it seems again way premature to actively worry about end-game scenarios. I would actually argue that even if Microsoft fails as a company ( unlikely in the short-term, although now a longer-term risk than one might have thought when I left MS back in 2008 ) there is still a strong future for FSX. Why do I say that? Even with the issues FSX has ( which are true of any software product ); the technological underpinings of FSX are world class. It solves a lot of problems of scale at a "world rendering" level. These are non-trivial problems. Another factor, the interlocking data agreements to get a world-wide WGS 84 terrain database and implement a process to massage that into a consistent representation that is downloadable; combine that with the same data sourcing issues for airports, traffic, land-class, etc - and then pull that into a coherent produt that can be loaded and rendered real-time on a PC - that is harder than it looks. I always considered the interlocking data agreements and the heuristics used to take the 100G of data and reduce it to 10G was at least as important as the engine. Data is king, Big Data is a bigger King! :-). FSX was big data before it was hip. As some have started to notice ( I have seen threads where people notice fan usage on the GPU increases in D3D10 preview versus D3D9 ), the D3D10 implementation, even though labelled "preview"; did indeed move more rendering to the GPU. So as issues are fixed there, and as 3rd party add-ons support D3D10, this path does add improved rendering scalability. That helps with platform lifetime. And over time, the community has figured out and fixed an amazing amount of things. Steve's D3D10 Fixer tool is just the latest in a long line of honorable work. This has actually improved the base rendering in D3D10 and I will argue extended the platform lifetime. It will take significant commitment and funding to replicate all of that. It could happen, but until it does - what is wrong with the mantra to "love the one you are with"? So at least the base is relatively solid. And the add-on community has also continued to layer on top with lots of new content. As long as this continues, the platform is vibrant. That is my story and I am sticking to it :-). So the future really is in all of your collective hands. Keep the activations going. Keep buying 3rd party add-ons. Keep participating in forums. Keep being flight simulation fans. It is an honor to be a part of such an august community. Of a piece of software that was actively developed for 25 years and brought so many people together and brought such joy. And continues to live on. And keeps on giving. Is there any better gift? Isn't that why we are all here? And keep coming back? If we can all remember that first, perhaps we can all get along better. I say that while acknowledging particular warts do rub some people the wrong way. That is life, things are imperfect. There were always bugs I wanted to fix, and bugs I really felt afterwards I should have fixed. Honest postmortems are tough, and the tougher you are on your own decision-making, the better off you are in the long run. I do want to say, though, that I wish the angst the warts give people wouldn't cause them to lack perspective when they engage. I admit I am a naive idealist in some ways. Personal example, once object oriented programming and class libraries where explained to me, years ago, I replied "there should only be one"; which presaged "Highlander" by years. :-). So I understand idealism. Realism and experience have value too. Collaborate more, argue less. Love Flight Sim, Love fellow Simmers. Fly more, argue less. Enjoy every sunset and sunrise, real or virtual. We only get about 25,000 of those, unless we go beyond 80 years old. The future is so bright, you need to wear shades. :-) Thanks for listening, Peace Out Phil

Hi, I havent posted on AVSIM in ages, but I came across the DX10 fixer in another thread and wanted to post kudos to Steve for this tool. I want to echo the thanks of the community for this set of fixes and packaging them up in an easy to access tool. This certainly takes the DX10 implementation much further and much closer to what we intended before the schedule got cut on us. So thanks Steve! Phil PS, Its hard to realize that in January we get the 5 year anniversary of Microsofts' decision to close the studio and cancel the game. Got to thank Phil Spencer for that one again.

I believe due to the requirement to run on Windows XP, Flight uses D3D9 but havent fully verified that.The fact that those components are reporting as disabled is at least part of the problem.Note, the version reported by DXDiag is just the highest "installed" version, not what is either the highest "runnable" on your hw or what the game actually uses.

if you run DXDiag on your system, what does it say about your graphics state?Does DX9 Shader Model 3 support show up?Do the DXDiag tests run?

I am stating, factually, the number doesnt mean what you state it does. And have presented the analysis to back it up.Continuing to quote the single number will prove you are not being "thoughtful" as contextually it does not mean what you are trying to say it does.

as I saId, a single number is meaningless. when taken in context, it has meaning.you can keep trying the single number bit, but any one who is thoughtful will now see it for what it is. randomness.

Unfortunately the XP-haters thread is locked, because I wanted to present some statistical analysis on "facts" about FSX and crashes presented by GoranM in that thread, in the interest of fair play.It was quoted in that thread that there are 30 pages of topics in the FSX CTD forum, as if that is somehow an indictment of FSX.It is true, that is the count of pages. That is all that is true about that number, however.As usual with statistics, a truthful comparison lies buried and needs analysis. Which I will deliver.If we are to use number of crash posts as a proxy for stability ( which was the original intent even though it is flawed ), one must look at relative numbers to weight the occurrences, to gauge a sense of how prevalent crashes are in one program versus the other, and once one has done that one must normalize by time duration so that we are comparing to a similar amount of time.And once that relative weighting calculation and a normalization is performed, an entirely different point of view comes forth.Specifically: The FSX forums start in Oct 2006. The XP forums start in Dec 2007/Jan 2008. So a time duration normalization must be used, otherwise we are comparing apples to oranges.And the frequency of CTD forum topics must be compared to the overall frequency of FSX forum topics, to gauge a percentage. And the XP forum must be examined to determine total number of crash threads as a percentage of total threads. That gives us a relative weight in both cases, so again we are comparing apples to oranges and not just using a single value in isolation to determine fact.Note, my analysis assumes the forum moderators are diligent about moving posts on crashes from the FSX forum to the FSX-CTD forum, but I feel that is a safe assumption.FSX------There are 30 pages of CTD posts, and 3609 pages of FSX posts. 30/3609 is .0083, to 4 decimal places.When I normalize that to CTD posts that start Dec 2007/Jan 2008, I get 22 pages of posts in the CTD forum, 22/3609 is .0061.that is 8/10ths of 1 percent un-normalized, and 6/10ths of 1 percent normalized.in both cases that is less than 1%, as a ratio of crash posts to "usage" posts.XP---there is no separate forum, so it is necessary to scan the XP forum and determine crash posts. and then compare that to "usage" posts.my scan of the forum showed 10 crash posts out of 22 pages, with a distribution as follows ( an x means no crash post on that page ):page crash posts1 crash on exit (1)2 x3 x4 crash on exit (2), crash on calibration (3)5 x6 x7 x8 x9 crash on startup (4), settings crash (5)10 crash (6)11 x12 x13 x14 x15 graphic card crash(7)16 x17 x18 x19 crash at startup (8), crash (9), driver crash (10)20 x21 x22 xwith 20 posts per page, 10 is one half of a page. so that is .5/22, and the ratio is .0227, which is 2.3%.Comparitive Ratios---------------------------using the un-normalized values, I get .0227/.0083 = 2.73x, or XP forums show 2.73 times the crash posts of the FSX ratio. Thats 273% more likely to crash.using the normalized values, I get .0227/.0061=3.72x, or the XP forums show 3.72 times the crash posts of the FSX ratio. Thats 372% more likely to crash.Even dismissing 20% of the XP threads ( 2 out of 10 ) we get .4/22= .0182, which is still 2.18 or 218% more likely, as compared against the un-normalized value and 2.98 or 298% more likely than the normalized value.Moral of the Story-------------------------Be careful of quick use of numbers without statistical analysis, it might lead to an unexpected result. I won't use this statistical analysis to bash XP, I don't see that as a fruitful goal. I instead use it to point out the uselessness of quoting numbers like that.I would add a hope that the XP advocates would stop coming to MS forums and bashing Flight or Flight Sim. Or, at a minimum, do it with actual thought and analysis instead.Finally, I find both of these numbers to be in an 'acceptable' range for consumer entertainment software and neither number in and of itself 'proves' anything about either program, much less that one is 'better' than the other. Consumer preference, fickle as it is, to me is the only meaningful determination of 'better' since that is the measure by which we can see who spent their hard earned shekels and where.

pray tell us your story of the "magic screenie"?as one who was there, and actually designed and delivered the D3D10 update for FSX, I can count myself as an authority who can weigh in on the veracity of what you state.and let me again state that when discussing the "magic screenies" it is unseemly to "forget" the studio issued an apology for releasing them when we released information on the D3D10 update. acting like we just put those concept shots out there and never talked to it after that is flat out false.

Not only was the magic screenie aspirational, we openly admitted it should not have been distributed and apologized for not reaching that level of rendering when we posted details on what the DX10 features in SP2 were. The community seems to conveniently forget that detail, that the studio was up-front about this exact specific detail when DX10 was finally released. The discussion feels like what transpired was for E3 2006, we released this picture and then when the product came out we said nothing. Here is a link to exactly what I said. And I posted on this to every site I participated in at the time, and engaged in detailed discussions. I do stand behind the fact that on my watch the studio acted 100% responsibly here. And any discussion of the magic screenies without acknowledging that we did discuss this and were not silent is not 100% accurate.

yawn.the better questions are:1) is it fun?2) does it perform decently out of the box?3) are there enough new features and extensibility to make it fun for 3+ years?if those are true, who cares if the Oompah Loompahs illuminate the pixels by hand.