Well folks, I'm still employed at MS (or rather re-employed at MS after having been canned with the rest of the group). And I'm working on an as-yet-unannounced project. So as long as the muzzle is still on, I'll try to cover some FSX stuff and some general...

Lotus has a really great post about aircraft performance in FSX . I highly reccomend reading the whole post. It's a bit technical, but does put into practical terms a lot of the ideas about how to create performant aircraft (especially for multiplayer...

I captured a tutorial about creating a Jetway using our IK system and Gmax over a year ago. Due to software weirdness and a general lack of time, I was unable to render the video out. However, thanks to Nick Whittome (a genius at getting me to do stuff...

We just released three new multiplayer racing missions for Acceleration on FSInsider. I haven't tried them out yet, but I hear they're a lot of fun. Plus, you can't beat the price!

There has been some confusion about what tools will work with which version of 3ds Max and I hope to set the record straight today (for those who might be using our SDK and 3ds Max). In general, the SDK tools that were released for 3ds Max for FSX and...

I must say, I am really excited about where we are heading as a team in terms of tools and content creation pipeline. I think we've finally gotten on track. And by "on track", I mean we're actually on the rails. We may still be sitting in the station...

I first came across our vertex limit issue when trying to debug the export of the trike model. For some reason when we tried to export the Aircreation, it would continously throw up errors about exceeding the max vertex limit. Huh? We'd never run into...

There seems to be a consensus amongst people I know (based on highly scientific poll results of course) that 2007 was one of the most strange, stressful and just plain bizarre years on record. Maybe it's just that all my friends are hitting their mid...

For this issue of the ever-continuing "Performance Art" series, I'll talk a little about flat-shaded or colored polygons and the use (or overuse) of bones in a model. Always use a texture: In the past, when the memory on graphics cards was very...

Gamespot put up our E3 preview video for the Acceleration expansion pack for FSX. You can watch it or download it. Enjoy!

As next gen technology came online, people started repeating this mantra: "Polygons don't matter anymore." For the longest time (okay, about a week) I was stuck thinking, "Awesome, we can throw any amount of geometry at the new cards and they'll just...

So we know that draw calls are a major killer for us. So you would basically assume that the more draw calls there are, the worse the performance. Well, this is not always true. There's a funny scenario happening in the Adrenaline Expansion Pack right...

Okay, so I'm not going to get dressed in a sheet and speak in a made-up language while someone projects images from my childhood on me. I'll leave that to the qualified people. Instead I'm going to talk about performance art in the sense of art that is...

You can download the English , French , Italian , German , Spanish or Polish versions from our website. The Japanese version is a day behind and should be up soon. I think you will be pleasantly surprised with the performance improvements in SP1. A...

The new FSInsider site has gone live. There's a total redesign including a neat new look, more content and more regularly updated content. If you're interested in finding out what we do here, it's a great place to start. Also, there's a Flightsim specific...

...but I guess we're going to have to worry about them there as well. Check out this record breaking high speed train in France. Tres grande vitesse indeed!

So I got this new machine at work. It's one of them new-fangled Core 2 Duo machines that Intel's making. And man does it show just how CPU bound we really are with all of our draw calls. The machine specs are: Intel Core 2 Duo CPU (a huge leap ahead of...

I've heard from our good buddy Nick that the IK on the jetway is a bit confusing, even with the documentation provided. I could see how that would be the case since IK in general is a pretty steep learning curve and the jetway is a pretty complex bit...

We've all been very hard at work on a variety of simultaneous projects in this studio. As you know, we announced the next version of Train Simulator a little while back and we've been hinting at / talking about the SP1 update for Flight Sim as well. Well...

You may be thinking about eczema, but I'm thinking about that funny thing that happens when you skin up a model and then export it into Flightsim only to discover something has gone horribly awry and your model suddenly looks like something out of a Japanese...

Well, while we're hard at work on the performance issues of FSX and getting the SDK updated, we decided to do some work on another project you might be familiar with. MSTS next has been announced. And it will be built on the FSX platform. And that's all...

I got this question the other day and I thought I should answer it, since I've seen it in a few threads since we shipped: "Since I use FSX as a real training device, I would like to know if in the incoming patch there will be an optimization for 2d...

Our SDK SP1 can be found up on the insider site in the Developer's Corner , on the Downloads page and at the Microsoft Download Center . It contains a full set of tools for Gmax (including some new scripts, the updated attach point tool and animation...

Of course, that may just be my unshowered goodness coming through. At any rate, the smell that I refer to, is a good smell. It is the smell of an SDK update, complete with full Gmax tools and scripts as well as much bug fixing and whatnot for the Max...

Okay, maybe not crow entirely, maybe something more like pigeon or seagull. This was posted in response to my earlier rant about performance in FSX: "It's been said that the performance drop between FSX and FS9 is greater than between any other two...