PTaylor's WebLog : flightsimx

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.

FSX SP1: Beta2 posted

Phil Taylor — Sat, 14 Apr 2007 22:31:00 GMT

Another step towards a final SP1!

We hope Beta2 verifies we have fixed what needs to be fixed.

Then we can take a final build end of next week, and start our 2 week final test pass.

Thanks for your patience!

FSX SP1 News:Intel quote

Phil Taylor — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 01:43:00 GMT

Today Intel announced their new 2.93G QX6800 Quad Core processor here.

As part of this press release, Aces Studio participated with a quote about our improved multi-core support in SP1. The quote stated

“The latest version of Microsoft Flight Simulator* X, Service Pack One (SP1), due out later this month, is a great match for the extreme multi-core processing delivered by the new Intel Core 2 Extreme quad-core processor”

and

“Flight Sim X SP1 greatly increases multicore utilization and will scale as more threads are available leading to reduced load times as well as frame rate improvements and greater visual complexity during flight. The Flight Simulator team at Microsoft is pleased to work with Intel to provide our end users with a great gaming experience."

And I wanted to take some time and explain what this means for FSX and FSX flyers.

Our multi-core support will take advantage of both 2 and 4 cores today, and more cores in the future when they become available via a config setting. This is for both Intel and AMD processors.

At load time, we run the terrain loading on threads across the cores. This can result in reduced load times, the actual percent reduction can vary but it could be reduced by as much as 1/3.

At render time, we run the terrain texture synthesis on threads across the cores. During flight on multi-core machines, as terrain and terrain textures are loaded you will notice significant multi-core usage. As all tiles are loaded, the multi-core usage will fall off, this is expected. As the terrain is re-lit, approximately every minute, you will see multi-core usage increase. As you bank and load terrain tiles, or as you fly forward and force a load of more terrain tiles, you will see the multi-core usage increase.

At render time, we now perform more extensive batching of objects to reduce our API Draw calls. The batch rebuilds are also performed on a thread and scheduled on cores.

For those of you on single core machines, we did do some performance work to benefit you as well. The batching work will help even on a single core. Plus we made some changes to animations to make them perform better and we modified how we draw trees to reduce API SetTexture calls.

So we really tried to hit all the wickets with our performance work. I still don’t want to make any final FPS gain claims, and will stick with my conservative 20%. We expect it to be more, but we need to get Beta2 out and see where we are.

As far as the release date for SP1, we need to get Beta2 out and see what remains. The last day of April is still possible, but any significant Beta2 bugs will cause us to fix them and delay – we want SP1 to be right for the community and are not tied to a date.

Note - hyperthreaded is not multi-core. Our current plan is to treat HT machines as single-core since we noticed extensive collisions between threads which caused stutters.

Two things, today is my birthday and we have posted FSX SP1 Beta to the beta forums

Phil Taylor — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 02:48:00 GMT

It should be live within the hour.

There are still a few issues to work on, but its good enough to get feedback on. Now thats a nice birthday present!

To those of you in the beta, we hope you like it. We expect to drop a beta refresh next week to address those issues, so please work around them as we have described.

To those of you not in the beta, we are still on track to deliver FSX SP1 final before the end of April. Just be patient a little longer.

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