Quick follow-ups:
– In v9, the AI planes don't ever taxi, so you can't measure the cost and/or optimization of ground contact in v9. (In fact, ground contact costs are very low with lots of AI planes because they don't taxi.)
– In v9, foil-airstream calculations dominate the FM when a plane is in the air – 17% of CPU with 20 planes on my machine. (In this configuration, total FM takes 50% of CPU, so you can see how multicore is a big win here.) I believe Austin has already restructured the code to be faster in v10.
– Scenery checks are always there – 5.5% of CPU time spent checking for ground height in the autopilot AI as it tries not to crash into things. (This relatively high cost for a simple collision check is partly because the spatial coherency is bad, which causes collision cache thrash.)

MatthewS, we are not going to make a version of simconnect – we'd be asking to be sued. A third party could make a simconnect -> XPLM bridge just like they have made an FSUIPC bridge.

MatthewS & Judith, a forum may be a better place to discuss simconnect.

Of course, if the flight model will indeed become completely independent of the main thread, I couldn't care less, but in version 9, the AI certainly is a big performance hit (on my first-generation Mac Pro anyway).

Off topic (please feel free to delete the following if you feel it's inappropriate here):

MatthewS, how many FSX add-ons are actually out there that only use SimConnect, without also using FSUIPC or some other IPC mechanism, like the panel SDK? I'm only aware of a very few. And there's already a reimplementation of the FSUIPC interface for X-Plane, in the form of XPUIPC (which is far from complete, but quite usable with a lot of FS9/X add-ons).

Judith

Im sure the XP10 ATC is much better than the FSX ATC, but FSX has 3rd party ATC modules (eg Radar Contact and Proflight) that completely replace the default FSX ATC. I very much doubt the default XP10 ATC comes close to these 3rd party products.

It would be nice if whatever API primitives the default XP10 ATC uses to direct aircraft can be exposed via the plug-in SDK so that 3rd parties can develop their own replacement ATC plugins and turn off the default XP10 ATC.

But also I guess if a XP10 version of SimConnect.DLL could be written then a lot of FSX utilities might work "out of the box" with XP10. Imagine if things such as Radar Contact (http://www.jdtllc.com/) could work with XP10 without changes, just a new XP10 specific version of SimConnect.dll

Regards, MatthewS

I don't know how many we'll support. It might be 20, it might be more. They might be virtualized, they might not be. I will describe how the feature set is planned in more detail tomorrow.

If you set up a check list of FS X vs. X-plane 10 ATC, I can almost guarantee that you will be disappointed; what we will ship in 10.0 will basically be brand new; it will (like the scenery system) take a few patches to mature and develop some of the deeper features.

Using a real flight model is _not_ an "excuse" for 20 planes – it's not an either or trade-off. We didn't go "do we want 20 planes with real physics or 100 planes with some fake physics."

Rather, like all development, the system is built incrementally.

If its only 20 then its going to look very poor in comparison to FSX that can handle over 100 on the ground and in the air at one time.

Sure the FSX AI physics is poor compared to what your suggesting for XP10 but who cares when you can land at EGLL with 50 planes sitting at gates and other 30 or so in the air, including some on final and some having just departed.

I think far more people would be impressed with busy airports and realistic traffic levels than with how 'super accurate' the AI flight model is.

I feel that you're using the accurate AI flight model as an excuse for not having realistic AI traffic levels.

XP10 will look a very lonely place if big airports have just a handful (20) of AI aircraft.

Regards, MatthewS

I find that a part of the XP community are feeling afraid that their 3 year old computer wont run XP. If it was a medium end computer: It sure will! But technology advances and with refined and faster technology we also expect higher quality content to reflect the hardware found in our computers.

There really is not much to add as I am feeling confident the XP team already are implementing sliders with broad intervals in options for graphics, effectively making a huge spectrum of options available to make the simulator look just right for everyone's computer.

Just having bought a new Sandy Bridge computer for XP10 running at 4.5GHz with a GTX580 card and 8GB of RAM all I can say is that on my part I am ready to try out next version of XP. Kudos to ben for keeping us updated with all these details!

-Carrotroot