Updated:Issues that may affect 3rd party content for FSX and that will not be fixed in SP1
I forgot the name of the #define for handing the VS2005 SP1 redist dependency and accidentally deleted the post
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A couple of issues have come up that we think are going to affect 3rd party content, and that SP1 will not fix.
VS 2005 SP1 and VS 2005 SP1 redist bits
The first one is, the release of VS 2005 SP1 comes with a new redist. Any 3rd party who builds code intended for FSX with the VS 2005 SP1 bits installed will take a dependency on the new DLLs in the redist unless they take special care and compile with a special #define ( #DEFINE _USE_RTM_VERSION ). This code will fail to load in FSX RTM. It is the 3rd party developers' responsibility for shipping all the bits their package is dependent on. Because we cannot fix FSX RTM, we are not going to include installing the VS 2005 SP1 redist bits in the SP1 installer. FSX SP1 itself does not have this dependency. We will place a link to the VS 2005 SP1 redist bits on our site with a note to this effect.
FSX RTM and the "round earth correction" issue
The second issue is the "round earth correction" issue for 3rd party content like long runways. If we don’t "round earth correct", the ends of long runways end up floating and planes appear to go thru the runway. If we do "round earth correct" and the 3rd party content has very long polygons to model the runway, we get z-fighting with the terrain mesh since the tesselations don’t match. We believe the right thing to do is add the round earth correction to SP1 which will work for short polygons (the threshold is somewhat dependent on the current mesh tessellation but we think <100m is likely to be safe) and not cause z-fighting. That leaves long polygons. We could go further and re-tesselate the polygons for 3rd parties "on the fly" at load time but we are not going to be able to get that work into SP1. The real answer is for the 3rd party to update the content for FSX using the FSX SDK. For content that hasnt done that, and has polygons with a long extent, we are not going to be able to fix this in SP1.
I hope these issues and the explanations are clear, useful, and help the FSX community.
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