Scott and Carl just got back from presenting at the Internation FlightSim Conference (IFC2005) in Blackpool, England. This is a really well done and well attended show. The only dark spot this year was that it came just days after the tragic bombings in London. I'm not going to get into political debate here but what a fruitless act that was. Very sad.

 

Anyhow, Carl presented a session on the development process used for Flight Simulator. It was a variation of one we've done before and was pretty high-level. One cool new aspect were some screenshots and a short video showing some new tech we've been working on. Since shipping the last version in April of '03 the graphics team has been investing heaviliy in developing new shaders using HLSL 2.0. For graphics cards that support them they make it possible to do some cool things, like bloom (basically light amplification when an object gets between the eye and light source) and bumpmapping (using height fields expressed in a texture to simulate geometry). The latter lets us do things like create rivets and other small details that shade as if they were real geometry without having to model them as true traingles.

 

There is a very active online community of enthusiasts, many of whom attended the show, who were looking forward to the presentation, hoping we'd make some sort of official anouncement about the next version of the product. They have been disappointed that we didn't but still liked what they saw and heard:

It's always super fun to read posts that follow some sort of presentation like this to see what people think about what's really going on behind the scenes. Online forums are filled with long threads about what the game does or doesn't do and/or what it should do in the future. I chuckle at some of the assertions like FS not taking advantage of the GPU. Think about it. If all the processing was still done on the CPU, why would installing a kick-butt graphics card increase the frame rate?  Anyway...we did an interview with Channel 9 a few months ago where we tried to dispell some myths but I'm sure there will always be those on the outside who know about how the game works that we do!!