Arno Gerretsen : ESP

Lockheed Martin and ESP

arno — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 20:28:00 GMT

I guess you must have heard this news already, but last week it was announced that Lockheed Martin has licensed Microsoft ESP. I was at the I/ITSEC exhibition at that time and in the Lockheed Martin booth they indeed had a solution build using ESP on display, a PC-12 trainer. It is very interesting to see that ESP is still living on in some way.

It should be stressed, this was discussed in some forums already, that this does not mean that the gaming version of FS is still living on. The license to Lockheed Martin excludes the entertainment segment. But it would be interesting to see if they plan to improve ESP and sell it on to other companies for professional use...

100.000 Microsoft Flight Simulator Fans

arno — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 07:27:00 GMT

If you are on Facebook, consider joining this group that Francois Dumas has started to show your support of FS.

Some more news

arno — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 07:23:00 GMT

Over the night some more news on ACES has appeared, I'll just post the interesting links here:

http://www.futuregpu.org/2009/01/end-of-era-aces-studio-and-flight-sim.html

http://pc.ign.com/articles/947/947737p1.html

Microsoft closes ACES studio

arno — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 12:11:00 GMT

Yesterday while driving home I heard on the news that Microsoft would be cutting jobs. But at that time the thought never came into my mind that the consequences of that would be as big as we learned today. While looking at some simulation related news at work today, I suddenly came across the message that the Microsoft job reduction would have big influences on the ACES studio, which makes Flight Simulator, as welll.

After looking around the web for more information, things became more clear. Former ACES team members posted more information, like Steve Lacey on his blog or Phil Taylor on the AvSim forum. All the current information seems to indicate that all development on FSX, Train Simulator 2 and ESP have been stopped at this moment. I guess the coming days will make things more clear how things will evolve.

But how this affects the people that worked at the ACES studio is of prime importance at the moment of course. I hope they are all well and will find other employement soon. All I know is that they made a very clever simulation product, that is capable to simulate the entire world in great detail. Something they can be proud of.

DevDays video

arno — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 08:26:00 GMT

Last May I gave a presentation about ESP and FSX at the DevDays in Amsterdam. Until now I never found out what they did with the video recording of that session, but today I found it back on the MSDN website. It is in Dutch, so unfortunately not everybody will be able to understand what I am saying.

New categories

arno — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 15:13:00 GMT

I have added two categories to the FSDeveloper forum. One for autogen related questions and another one for Microsoft ESP specific discussions. The ESP forum is meant for things that are related to ESP only, if it is a design question that applies to FSX and ESP both please use the existing subforums for scenery and aircraft design. I have also tried to move all posts that should belong in these forums to them already.

Back from London

arno — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 19:41:00 GMT

Yesterday I visited the ESP Developers Conference in London and I must say that it was very interesting. Being active for a long time in the FS community already the overviews of the SDKs and the basics of extending ESP did not provide much new things to me. But especially for the panel and gauge side, which is not my area of expertise, I did learn some new and interesting stuff.

But the main part that made the conference interesting was meeting the other people there. For example it was nice to meet Todd Landstad from ACES, after talking with him earlier this year when I gave a presentation about ESP on the Dutch DevDays. Fellow MVP Lefteris Kalamaris was also there and a lot of other people as well, but if you don't mind I won't mention them all.

A third aspect that made it a good trip for me, was that it gave me a lot of new ideas for possible future developments. But I will blog about those when they have turned into more concrete plans.

ESP Developers Conference

arno — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 14:20:00 GMT

I am a bit late, so you might already have read this somewhere else. Microsoft is organising an ESP Developers Conference in both Orlando and London. For more details check the ESP blog.

The one in London is at the 19th of November and I am tempted to go there myself as well. At the moment I am looking for affordable travelling options. So maybe I will see you there.

ESP in MSDN Magazine

arno — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 06:23:00 GMT

There is an article about ESP in the current MSDN Magazine. It gives a short overview of the platform and the ways you can extend it. Those that now FSX already might not learn so much new from it, but if you don't know ESP or FSX yet it seems like a good introduction.

ESP at DevDays

arno — Wed, 21 May 2008 17:56:00 GMT

Tomorrow and on Friday I will be giving a presentation at the Dutch Microsoft DevDays titled "Flight Simulator
Secrets Exposed: The Microsoft ESP Visual Simulation Platform". I must admit the titles comes from a presentation by Todd Landstad of the ACES team that I luckily could make use of when preparing. Originally it was planned that somebody from ACES would be giving the presentation, but I am happy to replace them as a local FS MVP.

The presentations will give some background information about ESP and the Flight Simulator history where it comes from. After that I will get into the details (the secrets) that make Flight Simulator (and thus also ESP) such a fascinating product. I will also talk a bit about cases that show how the products can be used for professional (non-entertainment) uses.

So if you happen to be at the DevDays, speak Dutch (sorry it is in Dutch) and want to know more I hope to see you. Below you will find the times of my presentations. I don't think it is very interesting to attend both though, as I will reuse most of the material, only the focus will be a bit different depending on the audience.

Thursday 22 May: Geek Night 18:15 - 19:15
Friday 23 May: Academic Day: 13:30 - 14:40

DevDays

arno — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 07:09:00 GMT

For those of you in the Netherlands this might be interesting. This year I will be attending the MS DevDays in Amsterdam. I am going to give two presentations there, one about ESP and the other one about FS. At the moment the exact scope is still under discussion, once I know more I will post a bit more about it. So if you happen to be there and want to know more about FS I hope to see you.

ESP Developer Center

arno — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 07:02:00 GMT

The MSDN Developer Center for ESP has gone live. This is another great source of ESP information, besides the blog and forum mentioned before already. And as you can see they also feature the FS (or should I say ACES) MVPs there. This time it is my turn. Maybe good looking Nick will be next.

Some more ESP news

arno — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 19:09:00 GMT

Here is some more exiting ESP news.

The ESP team now has its own blog as well, so be sure to check it out.
You can find some ESP code samples on the MSDN Code Gallery, just search for ESP over there. That should provide you with a starting point when exploring ESP further.

Seems like ESP is getting more alive now, I can't wait to see what else the future will bring.

ESP forum

arno — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 06:47:00 GMT

An forum for ESP has been opened at the MSDN forums. So if you have ESP development related questions, be sure to take a look at this new forum. I am sure this forum will become more active, once it is known that it is there. For now you will have to do with some questions from fellow MVP Nick.

ESP as Serious Game

arno — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 08:22:00 GMT

ESP seems to be getting more and more attention. I just came across this post on this site about serious gaming. I think it is an interesting development that ESP gets know better.

SimConnect and CIGI

arno — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 21:35:00 GMT

For some while already I wanted to learn a bit more about SimConnect and this week I found a good reason to do so. I wanted to try if I could connect FSX to CIGI. CIGI stands for Common Image Generator Interface and this is a common way in professional simulations to talk between the simulation host and the image generators. At work we also make use of CIGI for this.

What I wanted to do is try to use FSX as an image generator with our simulation host, so for that I needed to connect FSX to CIGI. This is where SimConnect was very useful, after some hours of trying I am now able to control the user aircraft with the CIGI interface and I can also add other traffic (AI) and control them from CIGI as well. This is a nice demonstration that the concept works.

Until now I only tested it with the host emulator that CIGI delivers, so a next step will be to attach it to the real simulation at work. Should be interesting. Of course I am not ready yet, as other things like the weather should still be connected as well.

I guess such a CIGI connection might also be very useful for ESP, it would open a lot more possibilities in the professional flight simulation world. Sounds like great fun to play with that some more at a later time...

Microsoft ESP

arno — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 13:57:00 GMT

I know this is old new, and I guess you must have read about this multiple times already by now. But as I think it is still very interesting I am writing this blog post about ESP. ESP is a new simulation platform that Microsoft has recently announced and it is based on the same simulation engine as FSX. Or to quote the description from Microsoft themself:

"Microsoft ESP is a visual simulation platform that brings powerful, high-fidelity simulations to widely available, low-cost Microsoft Windows®-based PCs. Organizations that rely on Microsoft ESP can improve their workforce readiness more efficiently and cost-effectively than with traditional computer-based animation or simulation tools. Combined with its developer-friendly Software Development Kit (SDK), Microsoft ESP provides government and commercial entities and modeling and simulation specialists with an affordable, portable, and highly extensible platform for training and learning, decision support, and research and development modeling.

Simulations built on Microsoft ESP can engage users in immersive experiences with very realistic land, sea, and air environments—making them ideal tools for training. With a high-speed Internet connection, up to 30 users, including students, instructors, and support personnel, can participate simultaneously in Microsoft ESP simulations from any location in the world. In addition, the platform’s built-in analysis and full playback capabilities facilitate evaluations of crew performance, mission planning, and decision-making."

I find this a very interesting product, as the use of the FSX engine can also have great benefits for non-entertainment use. For example at work we sometimes already use FS2004 as a quick visual for our simulations, simply because it covers the entire world by default. That is not something that can be said about any image generator. This can save us a lot of time in having to design or update visual database to include a certain area. And also with the FS SDK tools it is possible to add new data faster to FS than for most other image generators. And another interesting reason to use FS is that because it has been designed for entertainment usage, the resulting graphical image is a lot better in general.

So the fact that Microsoft has now announced a professional version of FS sounds very interesting, given the benefits I mentioned above. I have also written before about my efforts to convert between FS and OpenFlight (the format used in most other image generators). Now with ESP I see a lot more connections between the FS and the "professional" world and I am certainly looking forward to explore those new options. So hopefully I can report some more interesting things later on.