PTaylor's WebLog : Flight Simulator

DevCon Topics

Phil Taylor — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 01:03:00 GMT

DevCon is fast approaching us. And yes, I am speaking as well as attending.

So if you want 1-1 time, come on down. The two topics I will be responsible for are:

1)Day 2 ( Thursday ) Customer Engagement:Striking the Right Balance

2)Day 3 ( Friday ) Panel Roundtable on Improving our Beta Testing Process

Here is the "request an invite" info from the AVSim Home page:

Are you a developer? Want to spend the whole week with Microsoft and AVSIM? Then check this out; "If interested, please send a one-paragraph description of who you are, what your interests are in the Flight Simulator or Train Simulator Development Communities, and what you hope to get out of the conference, to the Conference Manager (mailto:mattj@avsim.com, please mark the subject “DevCon Request").

And I will be available afterwards for follow-ons. And of course beer is always greatfully accepted. :-). I hope to see you there.

Vista OOM fix:Must have update from the mother-ship

Phil Taylor — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 00:14:00 GMT

Aug 28th a fix became available for Vista from the Windows team.

The bits will be made generally available from the link here and relatively detailed KB is attached.

The issue is that Vista was creating an extra copy of graphics memory ( noted by AnandTech here ) and that was causing a pre-mature exhaustion of each process's address space and then the dreaded OOM error. AnandTech reviews this issue further and tests the hotfix here.

Run, don't walk to this download.

FSX SP1:Beta3 posted

Phil Taylor — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 08:52:00 GMT

We just posted SP1 Beta3 to the beta testers.

We had a couple extra 3rd party bugs that needed to be fixed ( animated parts, mouse rects on the panels, lighting ) that we needed to fix and in fixing the stutters with the first round of threading code we lost some perf and had another bad bug lurking in there. And we identified an issue with 3 AI aircraft, 1 of which is fixed in Beta3 - if that aircraft passes muster in Beta3 we will fix the other 2.

We hope Beta3 shows these all as fixed. That does mean we have lost April for SP1. So we are into May now.

As far as how long it’s taken us, it has been longer than we thought and would have liked. Back in January, we clearly thought we had time in front of us. Just not as much as it has taken. We did hope the multi-core work would be done a good 6 weeks before it was. And the beta tests, while valuable, have added their fair share of the "extra" time. We have found and fixed a couple extra 3rd party bugs that we think are going to be of good benefit to the community because of that time investment.

So that was time well spent. As was the performance and thread bake time.

It is what it is; we are trying to get it right. That does take time. And we believe the result will show that care and attention to detail.

New job, new role - in Aces Studio

Phil Taylor — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 00:35:00 GMT

Hi, it’s been a while since I updated this blog, let me catch everyone up.

In July I moved over to Aces Studio on the Flight Sim team, to take up the role of Senior PM for Graphics and Terrain in Aces Studio. I joined Aces during the end-game of FSX and am now involved in all the studio projects moving forward.

First I want to give some background on myself, what I have worked on and why I love my new role in Aces. I have a long history, and have been in and around computer graphics since the beginning of my career. I hope I don’t bore you.

My first exposure to computer graphics was in 1982 at Florida Atlantic University, as an undergrad I talked my way into a grad-level math course on computer graphics given by a new Ph.d. with funding that got him a new computer lab outfitted with Apple IIs. Here I learned about vertices and matrices for the first time, and I still remember the code to enter the Apple II system monitor ( 3D0G ). I transferred to University of Maryland in 1983 and received my degree in 1984. My senior project was a robot arm simulation written on a 256k 2-floppy IBM PC using overlays, and I worked at Goddard Space Flight writing graphics applications for the scientists at GSFC while in school. It was there I learned the pleasures of the VAX architecture and OS.

My first job after graduating was at Intran working on Perq workstations where I learned the joy of bitmapped graphics and BitBlt. After that company went Chapter-11 (something I became intimately familiar with over the years) I went to a larger company, SAIC, and worked on a C³ system for a friendly foreign navy. After that product shipped, I joined TRW and worked on the main graphics app for an executive information system for Air Force Systems Command. In October of 1986, as I held my crisp new copy of that month’s PC Magazine in my hand and viewed the Compaq 386 on the cover I had a revelation that I had to start working on PCs or else, once they had a great 32-bit operating system working on these new 32-bit chips, I would be missing out.

So in 1987 (within 6 months of reading the PC magazine article) I left TRW and the warmth and comfort of DoD work for another small company to learn Windows. Little did I know I would be doing 16-bit programming for the next 9 years and come to love and hate the joys of segmented mode programming. While at this little geo-demographic marketing company I picked up the hard lessons of Windows programming. I was the reviewer of Petzold’s original Windows 2.0 programming book for Byte magazine, and my quote ( “broad in reach and omitting little” or some such ) still graces the covers of Petzold. When that company fell on hard times I left to do contract Windows programming on what became the largest collection of Windows programmers outside of MS at that time, on the ATT/BCS/CSC Federal Telephone System 2000 upgrade (which was the largest non DoD contract let by the government at that time) and learned more about Windows systems programming during my 2 years there. I then contracted to IBM Gaithersburg on a medical imaging system using OS/2 and performed a variety of other contracting jobs over the next year or 2 (including Chase Manhattan, ATT Bell Labs, MS Federal Systems, and more as my clients).

In 1990 I was offered a lead position in California on what was then known as MacInTax and what was to become TurboTax for Windows. After the hard work of updating the application for protected mode, we shipped a great product for the 1991 tax season. The company became involved in a takeover, and unfortunately the takeover by Chipsoft was a bad business deal for all but 3 individuals. I left and joined Borland before BC++ 3.0 shipped and worked on multimedia extensions to OWL. I was part of the “old Borland” before the disastrous Ashton-Tate merger and enjoyed my time there immensely.

As Borland fell apart I took 9 months off and finished my book, “3D Graphics Programming in Windows, Addison-Wesley, 1994. When the book was in copy-edit I took a job as Staff Engineer at Kaleida, the joint startup venture of the IBM-Apple collaboration. While there I developed ScriptX3D, the 3D extensions to the ScriptX scripting language and runtime system. We used Rendermorphics Renderlib, which was bought by MS and became the basis for Direct3D.

As Apple’s problems got larger it was clear Kaleida was headed for funding issues and a fall. I left to join Dynamix in 1995 and work on DirectX games. I shipped 3 games in my year at Dynamix ( A-10 II, Earthsiege II, Mission Cyberstorm ) and learned a lot about how and how not to develop games. Alex St. John hired me in 1996 to be the 1^st engineer on the DirectX evangelism team and I took over D3D evangelism. While it was a hard go for a while, eventually D3D turned into the leading graphics API it is today. Once the hard work of D3D evangelism was done, I joined the product team as DirectX SDK PM in 2000, and shipped the DX8, DX8.1, and DX9 SDKs. I then left MS to join ATI in 2002 and learn the hardware side of the business. After 2 years at ATI, I returned to MS in 2005 and joined the VS Core team working on VS extensibility. My time there was extremely valuable; I learned Scrum and became an Agile convert.

And now I am in Flight Sim and I am loving it. What a hard working, dedicated bunch this crew is. I can only hope to live up to the high standards and add value!