phil taylor

Phil Taylor, the very public face of the Aces Team behind Flight Simulator X, is departing Microsoft on Friday to join Intel on what sounds like a very interesting project.

I’d like to publicly thank Phil for his openness and approachability and for being a constant source of “insider” information, the like of which was pretty much unprecedented. I didn’t always agree with some of his thoughts, but always respected his opinion

You can read Phil’s departure message here.

Good luck in the new position, Phil and thanks for your valuable contribution to the flight simulator community.

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Following the announcement from Carenado that they will be concentrating exclusively on products for Flight Simulator X, Phil Taylor has given a rather large hint about how long it will be before the next version of Microsoft Flight Simulator in his latest blog post:

Carenado, a major add-on aircraft developer, has announced they are going “FSX only” with all future development. See the update here.

With FSX 2 years into its cycle, and 2 years or so remaining, it is time for this and I expect over the next 6 months or so we will see more announcements like this.

Additionally, it’s official and from the horses mouth - Flight Simulator 2004’s days have passed!

FS2004 has had its day, and it was a very good day indeed. But it is time to move on.

I’m not so sure the thousands of dedicated Flight Simulator 2004 users will quite see it that way…

In another fascinating insight into the workings of Flight Simulator X, Phil Taylor’s latest blog entry explains exactly why Autogen has such a dramatic hit on performance:

Now, a typical scene has 50 1km x 1km cells in the scene. Autogen trees are pegged at 4500 max per cell (when the slider is all the way to the right). You can set the max up to 6000, so let’s call it 5000 for easier math. 5000*50=250,000 trees.

Holy Autogen Batman! Yes, this is why autogen brings the system to its knees. Crysis doesn’t try to render 250k trees.

Now, as much as I admire the team for their creation, I really do have to ask myself why these calculations weren’t done a few years back during development! In Phil’s (and the team’s) defence, he does confess that they should have done so and at least they’re looking at them now. And it’s good to know WHY it has such a performance hit.

You can read the rest of Phil’s article here.