Generally X-Plane doesn’t get too close to the bleeding edge of technology..we think it makes more sense to spend our dev efforts on proven technologies that won’t disappear and improving the sim, rather than jumping on technology bandwagons early (and having some of our work be useless when the technology never comes out).

What would have happened if we adopted HD-DVD as our distribution format? 🙂

What would have happened if we adopted the PhysX card for physics? 🙂

So…we’ll wait and see if RTRT turns into a new rendering technology or just marketing hype. If it turns out to be viable and useful and meets x-plane’s needs, THEN we’ll look at using it…but we are miles away from that point right now.

If I had to place a bet, I’d bet against RTRT for a number of reasons…but the main point of this post is that LR shouldn’t “bet” on the outcome of RTRT, we should wait and see.

If you are interested in the growth of technology and it’s interaction with games, I suggest watching John Carmack’s keynotes from QuakeCon. It’s long (one video is 2 and a half hours) but basically you’ve got an expert in the field speaking freely about the direction of technology, and he brings up a lot of good points that counteract some of the hype out there.

Of course x-plane is very different from a 1st-person-shooter, but Carmack has things to say about all games that apply.

/Christer

I believe that in the particular case of the installer file decompression it doesn’t have a natural upper-limit…we ask the CPU how many cores it has, and then we use as many as it replies. So it runs on two cores on my iMac just because that’s what the host replies.

This isn’t always possible. For example, when we shift scenery, we process the tiles with one DSF per core — since we at most have to shift 3 tiles (for a north-south shift) we never use more than 3 cores for this, even if you have them.

When we load DSF tiles, we use one core at the most; the loader has to fully finish one DSF before it can start prepping the next one (due to the way the edges are sewn together) so even if you have an 8 core machine, only one core is loading new DSFs at a time.

We always try to take the maximum parallelization when we can, to use more cores when they exist, but a lot of the time (particularly in the sim) natural limits on the algorithms cut down the number of cores we can use quite a bit.

This comment doesn´t cover this topic but I cant find your e-mail adress to send you this anywhere so I post my feature request here. I hope I dont break any blog rules by this.

The request and question I have is if you are planing on using any advanced light effects in X-Plane such as the one on http://www.windwardmark.net? Please have a look at this site.

I think it will really improve the visual a lot, especially in cities and mountain areas. There is a requirement for shaddow effect in the sim to handle this “plugin”. Maby even this is in the pipeline for X-Plane?

Best regards.

/Peter

Parallellism is revolutionizing the way computers interact with software, and the developement is going at FAST pace! 8 cores will be reality in -one- year!