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...

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...

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...

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...

So I'm off the rants and onto something more useful... a website that has a whole bunch of great stuff regarding missions in FSX. It's called FSXMission.com (imagine that) and has a whole bunch of downloadable missions as well as some how-to videos and...

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...

Here's one from Gamespy . Some of the big takeaways.... DVD only! Yay! Finally! I can't tell you how long we've been wanting to do this. They're about $35 for a cheap one, so that shouldn't be too huge of a hit for folks who want to fly (after all, the...

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...

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...

The forums are already buzzing, and flightsim.com has a great preview here . Avsim also has some screenies and the standard Q&A , as well as a new FSX Forum . PCGamer has issued a correction for its original release date of February . As the technical...

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...

So I got this comment from my FSX FAQ about why you can't turn all the sliders up: "It really bothers me to see MS design a game for hardware two years out. I want to play the game today (when I bought and PAID for it), not two years from now. Do...

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...

This is kind of fun, you can find out how much your blog is worth at this business opportunites site. Here's mine: My blog is worth $0.00 . How much is your blog worth? Yay!

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...

I'm probably coming late to the party here, but there's some really cool stuff over at SceneryDesign.org , a nice little site put together by 3rd party scenery gurus Arno and Nick . It's got tools, documented formats and a wiki for all of your Flight...

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...

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...

High End 3D has a good interview with Dave Wharry (VP Global sales and Marketing, Alias) and Marc Petit (VP of Product Development etc. etc, Autodesk) about the future of Max and Maya here . One of the most interesting bits is that they currently aren...

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

Autodesk has made a couple of huge announcements this week. The one that has most shaken the games community in general is that Autodesk has signed an agreement to buy Alias . There's a real hilarious depiction of the fantacism that people have about...

Our brand spankin' new FS Insider website has gone live today. Lots of great stuff there, including some information about Flight Simulator X, some great downloads and a whole mess of other stuff. We're going to be updating it regularly with lots of great...