You don’t _need_ several cores for AI aircraft. It’s just that if you have them, we’ll use them.

Ben: the flight model is very cheap!
Users: you should use a fake flight model – you are wasting resources.
Ben: but the flight model doesn’t use much resources.
Users: it still sounds like you are wasting resources.
(repeat ad infinitum)

I think the real issue is _virtualization_: are there times when an AI flight doesn’t need to be “backed” by a real airplane _at all_? In this case, the savings at hand isn’t just the physics flight model CPU time, it’s ALL of the costs of an airplane, e.g. RAM, memory for the textures, bla bla ba.

Will we virtualize flights? Almost certainly. For 10.0? Who knows…as I have said in the past, we’re not going to delay shipping 10.0 if we think it is already superior to v9. (This point was pretty much lost on a whole chunk of readers, who suggested that LR simply delay v10 indefinitely until the particular feature they wanted was finished, because v10 would be pointless if it wasn’t “perfect”, where perfect meant “has the random feature X that I want.)

I think we’re missing the point here on the real vs fake physics debate:
Considering that for the most of the time AI traffic would be miles away and in the sky (i.e. no need for advanced ground collisions) real phisics sounds quite like a waste of resources 🙂

Perhaps you have a clever physics level of details algorythm that scales down complexity with distance from cam?

Just remember there is a gap in the flight sim market and to attract fsx users you must consider running hundreds of ai flights around the aircraft and not everybody owns a 16core beast machine yet 🙂

Luca

Better than nothing! We’re now moving on to elastic effects if we can find a simple algorithm. Wait, there’s a sale on for exaggeration microscopes….

I think Austin has wing flex in v10 but I am not sure. If he does, you’ll still need to set up the parameters in Plane-Maker, and if you use an external OBJ, you’ll need to tie animations to the physics.

SO cool! Pretty please post some more vids of this happening. I believe all of us understand XP10 is not finalized yet and that it still is a bit buggy. But just seeing a vid of a bit more of the new AI system would be awesome!