FSXHost?

[Russell Gilbert]

If you get disconnected from the session for some reason will you have to close the Sim or do you just have to reconnect with your client program ?

I'm happy to report that you can just reconnect with the client program, you don't have to restart the sim.  There's a way that the client can detect that the sim's there, regardless of which program was started first, so it shouldn't matter.

Russell

[wealthysoup]

would it be possible to get aircraft of a similar size weight and power for the addon aircraft models if a match isnt found (taking data from the aircraft .cfg file)?

I think it would probably be best to have a box to check to automatically download and install these planes from a central server when your not flying (or when your flying but limit the download rate) then when you join a fs session the low poly models show up instead of the default cessna 

[Corrupthawk]

Let's not overload him guys.  I'm sure he won't dissapoint us with what he brings to our simulation world.   As to the repository, I think, right now, that could be put on the back burner, but I do believe he will give us some sort of mapping system to work with.   The main thing I believe that people will like about FSX is the smoke trails and external lights.  If both of these can be seen using FSX thru FSHost that is what will bring the reality to the game. 

Whenever Russel does come out with an FSHost for FSX it will possibly be a Beta version.  Meaning that he can still work on it while everybody is enjoying being in an FSHost server.

[Russell Gilbert]

Hi guys, another update.

Got several more pieces working over the last couple of days.  Everyone else can now see the local FSX plane, and you can see them in FSX as well, so it's working in both directions now.  Also got the beginnings of a chat window working.  It does the job, but right now it only works if FSX is in windowed mode -- it can be maximized, just not true "full screen".  More will will be required there, but at least text communication is possible.  I've got it working so if the remote players change planes, it changes them in FSX as well, although not the reverse yet -- if you change your FSX plane, they don't see the change, but that'll be soon.

I'm thinking I can probably get a beta to you guys next week, and then continue working on some of the finer details while you play with it and find bugs.  There aren't enough hours in the day -- it's getting to the fun part!   

More soon,

Russell

[GSX]

Russell,

Just a couple of questions and maybe a few comments.

From the preceding comments you stated previously I gather that FSX will be compatible with FS2002 and FS2004 sessions via FSHost. However, DirectPlay has not been a real functional multiplayer layer in that port specifications are very specific. We have seen on our servers that most players have poor configurations and this can have very bad results at times as we all know. We now have software that list every port used to connect to FSHost for the client machines, which helps us to identify problem players configurations. I am not sure at this time what the multiplayer scheme is for FSX, but it is obviously different. I know that the SDK for FSX is on dvd 1 of the deluxe version but I have not checked yet. Would be curious to see if it has any multiplayer sdk info on it. Anyway the point is, do you plan to use (if the information is available) the multiplayer system for FSX, in a FSX FSHost server that would not use DirectPlay (I know this would not let FS2004 and FS2002 and FSX sessions on one server), but I have a feeling that the multiplayer system used in FSX is much more stable from my short experience with it. I know this is kind of a crappy opinion, but if it is better than I would like to see a FSX server using the multiplayer technology built into FSX and not DirectPlay. I would love to see more stable servers out there. The lack of stability is not the fault of FSHost but of DirectPlay. My understanding is that FSX uses a client-to-client methodology unlike the peer-to-peer of direct play. Of course client-server model would be the best, if FSX would support that, of course limiting hosting servers to those with high bandwidth. These are just a couple of thoughts knocking around in my skull. I suppose tonight I will delve into the FSX SDK and see what I can find out about mp implementation for FSX. The client side "pipe" software for FSX sounds great to make it integrate with DirectPlay sessions of FS2002 and FS2004. We do really appreciate FSHost, makes it possible for the flight sim community to host their own servers which is a great gift. To bad when I loaded FSX that we have only two choices for mp sessions, very lame.

[GSX]

Well I have serveral thoughts about FSX performance, and I am sure someone will tell me if I am wrong.
But here goes....this is a response to a post by Bob.....

I have to admit that all in all FS9 looks a lot better than FSX. The minimum specs for FSX are actually very lenient. But the performance seen out of FSX is very poor even on powerful machines.

Consider this:

I own several reasonably powerful pc's and here is what I get out of FSX

pc 1

P4 HT 3.2 Ghz
2 Gigs of ddr2 Ram
Sata HDD
ATI x1600 Pro (512MB Ram)
.....not going to list all the other addins, but you get the idea
-performance, 7 fps average, with max graphics settings in FSX, and it does not look better than the 50-80 fps I get out of FS9 with full graphics settings

pc 2

AMD Athlon Dual Core x64 3800+
2 Gigs of ddr2 Ram
Sata HDD
ATI x1600 Pro (512MB Ram)
-performance, 10 fps average, with max graphics settings if FSX, and it does not look any better than the 50-80 fps I get out of FS9 with full graphics settings
the best performance I can get out of this machine is 20-24 fps at medium graphics and it looks worse than fs9 at the same graphics settings
this pc performs better than pc 1 I listed above
note: i also checked the processor usage, FSX only uses one core on this dual core machine and it uses only 60% of that processor at maxed out graphics, so the bottleneck lies elsewhere, i have some benchmarking software and will check into this. fsx is memory hungry, i tried it with 1 gig in this machine, and it used all of the available memory, and was actively swapping. With 2 gigs FSX was marginally faster, more to come if you all are interested. even with the maxed out settings, textures still look like crap. in the same pc with 1 gig of ram fs9 with typical background software does not use much more than half a gig, interesting eh. i may buy the ati x1900 xtx for this machine just to see how much it improves the graphics, but i have a feeling it will help only marginally.

of course both machines have fully updated gc drivers, xp updates, and direct x

I believe quite simply that in order to truely appreciate FSX and see what it is capable of we are simply going to have to wait until Vista and Direct X10 come out. There are some MAJOR changes between DX9 family and the DX10 family. I do some Directx 9 programming in C++ and there is some coverage of the new features and changes coming in Direct X10 and it seems to me that Direct X10 is going to really improve the graphics quality, especially its ability to use the abilities of the newer cards coming out on the market. Its hard but I am not trying to judge FSX to harshly because we are all flying on XP machines with the direct x 9 family, with FSX not even being designed/optimized for XP, but rather it being built for Vista and DX10. We are probably lucky to be able to use it with xp. Microsoft should have waited to release it until Vista is released. Anyway that is my observation and opinion. Ok there you go, now someone pick it apart ! lol

[Russell Gilbert]

...do you plan to use (if the information is available) the multiplayer system for FSX, in a FSX FSHost server that would not use DirectPlay...

Actually I'm sorry to say that not only is there no multiplayer SDK for FSX, Microsoft has said that there never will be, and they don't want us developers using the multiplayer system in FSX at all.  Hard to believe, but that's what they said.  My guess is that since they've gone to GameSpy for the servers, they're probably doing what other GameSpy-capable games do and are using GameSpy's proprietary multiplayer code.  GameSpy probably also doesn't want anyone connecting to their servers with 3rd party applications.

Microsoft has a new SDK called SimConnect now, which the developers can use to interact with the sim (sort of like FSUIPC), and they want us multiplayer developers to basically build our own multiplayer functionality as a separate add-on.  So FSX will be running in single-player mode, but my new client application will use SimConnect to create fake "AI" planes in FSX to represent the other players in the multiplayer session, and it'll also use SimConnect to get your local "real" FSX plane's position info and pass that up to the FSHost server and the other players in the session so they can see you.  I also have to use SimConnect to make things work like doors, propellers, flaps, lights, smoke, etc., as well as building my own chat window.  In a word, it sucks.  The only good side is that I'll have more access than I had before, so things like smoke are now possible, whereas they weren't before.

My understanding is that FSX uses a client-to-client methodology unlike the peer-to-peer of direct play.

Actually from my tests, I believe it's still using peer-to-peer mode.  Each player sends their data to all other players in the session, it does not appear to be relaying it through a central server.

And I agree about DirectPlay -- it's unstable, unreliable, and frustrating.  I'd love to get rid of it.  But doing it the way I'm doing will make things go much faster, and I won't have to rewrite major parts of FSHost.  It also means that it'll stay in peer-to-peer mode, which is good and bad, but at least it won't require the host to have enormous bandwidth requirements for large sessions.  And for FSX-only sessions, I'm hoping you'll be able to host far more people before DirectPlay becomes unstable, since the data rate from my client program will be so much lower than FS2004.

Russell

[johannesmueller]

Russell - which forms of legal drugs can we send you to help you in your quest to dominate FSX?

John

PS just wondering ... would it be legal to reverse-engineer the GameSpy network traffic? If illegal in the US, would it be legal for US players to use foreign code that does something similar? Or is it "just" against the ToS to use "non-certified" code to access the GameSpy servers? If so, perhaps we could set up an alternative or run a local proxy for FSX GameSpy to DirectPlay translation... Just dreaming, ignore me . Does anyone remember that job Microsoft/Aces had listed for the FS which required know-how in massive online multiplayer games? Was "use GameSpy" really all that came out of that? Sigh.

[Russell Gilbert]

Ok, guys, here's FSHostClient 1.0 beta 1.  Go get it! 

http://chocolatesoftware.com/fshost/?fshostclient.html

Note: let's please move all future dicussions about this beta version to the new Beta Test forum for FSHostClient.  You'll see it if you refresh the front page of the forums.  Thanks!

Russell