Sim Pilot Forum

Folks,

You will soon see why this interview has to be heavy on stuff from me and light on stuff from the interviewee -- why it is Dead On The Heavy Funk, to use the title of an album by the departed James Brown, my musical idol. In fact, with a nudge-nudge-wink-wink to the public relations people, we might as well begin with a link to a ground breaking music video, my absolute favorite, “Truth Is Out Of Style”, written and produced twenty years ago by a hip college student named Mark Griffin, a/k/a MC 900 Ft Jesus . . .

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhdyV7kO_ZA

Ah, you’re back. Now ... In the immortal words of the mythical bumblebee mascot of the SeaBees of World War II, who at the time were converting the Guadalcanal jungle airstrip that was soon to be known as “Henderson Field” from a muddy <bleep bleep> to a premium pierced-steel-planking-on-crushed-white-coral USA-style forward fighter operations base, all this while under constant and intense enemy small arms fire from the surrounding jungle, supplemented by the occasional enemy artillery shell ...

Ahem ... Run-on sentence, and jingoistic as well. Let’s do a system reset ...



The SeaBees’ Motto Department

What the CBs’ amusing little sign said was, “The difficult we do immediately. The impossible takes a little longer.”

And that’s right, folks, it did take a little longer. As I write this piece it is the wee hours of 17 January, just prior to sending it off for review by Microsoft’s PR folks. I have been working on lining up this interview since New Years Day.

Now ...

The bad news is that, for reasons discussed below, this interview is going to consist of a single post by me and a single reply by our latest celebrity guest.

The good news is that the guest is ... Phil Taylor himself. (Plays “tada.wav”.) Note that if I have to tell you who Phil Taylor is, you need to take up a different hobby.



Phil Taylor, Aces Studio Core Platform Product Manager Department

Phil, welcome to “Off Topic with Mike”, and thanks for being a good sport. Your PR people are very zealous guardians of your time (and theirs) and they have granted me only a one-off. As I said to your minder, this interview will not be the usual Q-and-A sprinkled with the usual clever patter of yours truly ...

Ahem ... Garbled syntax, we’ll try it again. But first, folks, a little digression is in order ...

Years ago a friend of mine claimed that the town of Newton, Mass. was clearly a misnomer. “Either the name of the town should be changed to Kilogram, Mass” he said, “Or the name of the state should be changed to Forceachussetts.” (I told you that there would be a physics quiz, didn’t I?)

Anyway, Phil, ordinarily I use the give-and-take of my conversational interview style to establish a rapport with the guest, and to try to get at the guest’s human side. I’m not going to be able to do that with you because I’m not going to be allowed to respond to your single post. Or rather, if I do respond, there will be no subsequent reply from you. In addition, as I told your PR folks, since there will be no interaction I inevitably must concentrate on Aces/FS-related issues because at this point I know nothing about Phil Taylor the person and I don’t really know where to begin.

But I have to start somewhere ...



Flight Simulator Product Manager Department

In a previous existence on another astral plane I was a product manager at DEC during the 1970s, so I can guess at the nature of your job. However, I don’t want to speculate. I’d like the readership to hear from you what a product manager does at Aces, and how this relates to Flight Simulator. Also, I saw your jewel of a post on Avsim regarding the fabrication of GPU chips, including the interplay between manufacturing yield and product functionality. “Boy” I said to myself. “This guy is One Of Us, a
hardware/software/marketing/development person. I’d really like to get to know him better.” Which is why I asked you out, so to speak.

So my question here is, what is your professional background? They don’t give degrees in this stuff, there are no courses one can take, few relevant books, so what has been the trajectory of your career to date?


Phil's reply ...

I was originally going to be an Ocean Engineer and was in one of the top programs in the country for that at the time attending Florida Atlantic University. Then I took this little graphics class on Apple IIs ( a graduate class actually ) and I was hooked. Within six months I had transferred to a school with a better Comp Science department (the University of Maryland) and finished off my degree there. My practical training continued while in school, as I worked at Goddard Space Flight Center as a scientific programmer while finishing my degree.

Once out of school, I stayed in the Washington DC environment working on a range of projects from small systems like:
· Intran on Perq bitmapped workstations before the Mac shipped
· Claritas on a geo-demographic mapping application in the Windows 1.03/Windows 2.0 days
and big systems work like:
· SAIC on a C3 system with world-wide near real-time mapping for a friendly foreign Navy
· TRW on an EIS graphics application for Air Force Systems Command
Once I learned Windows, though, I left the big iron and never looked back.

After the Claritas job I spent two and a half years as a Windows systems consultant/contract programmer for Boeing, AT&T, GE, Chase Manhattan, and Microsoft Federal Systems. Then I landed a gig on the West Coast at a small little shop named Softview that made what became TurboTax for Windows. From there I went to Silicon Valley to work at Borland, wrote a book on 3D graphics, and was then part of the small Windows team at Kaleida Labs working on ScriptX where I designed and developed ScriptX 3D using RenderMorphics RealityLab. I left Silicon Valley to work at Dynamix on DirectX games.

After a year and three ship credits to my name at Dynamix, I was hired by Alex St. John to be the Direct3D technical evangelist. I worked in that role as a very public face of the company from Direct3D3 to Direct3D8.0 (1996-2000) when we introduced shaders and revolutionized desktop graphics. At that point, I joined the DirectX product team as DirectX SDK PM and shipped the DirectX8.0, 8.1, and 9.0 SDKs. I was also the PM for Managed DirectX in the DirectX9.0 ship cycle.

From there I left Microsoft to join ATI as Director of Strategic Relationships managing the ATI-Microsoft relationship across all five ATI business units; desktop, laptop, multimedia, handheld, digital TV. I learned a lot about the general PC business as well as the hardware business from the Silicon IP/ FAB-less IC perspective.

While that job was interesting, after 2 years of that I really wanted to get back to product development work. I came back to Microsoft as PM for the VS SDK, working with the partner ecosystem. During that job I became an Agile convert, we used SCRUM for the VS SDK and shipped 14 SDKs in 15 months. We also won a divisional engineering innovation award for that effort, which felt nice to get recognized for such groundbreaking work.

Then the opportunity in Flight Sim opened up and I came over here in July of 2006 right before “Flight Simulator X” went final, and it has been a blast. The product is amazing, the community is full of passion, and the future looks bright for all three products. And this plays right into my technical and community-focused strengths. I expect to be here for a long time to come.



Aces Core Platform Product/Program Manager Department

When I saw that your forum signature was as product manager not of Flight Simulator but rather of the “Aces Core Platform” I said to myself “Hm-m-m-m. There have been rumors, and subsequent to the Devcon meeting of November 2007 there have even
been apparent leaks. I’d like to know more.”

So, Phil, if you can speak to any of this stuff without getting into anything proprietary, and without generating any adverse PR impact, I’m sure the readership would be very interested.


Phil's reply ...

It is no big secret that the studio has added two product families, “Train Simulator 2” and ESP, in addition to the “Flight Simulator” franchise. That has led to growth and the need for a new organization. Our new organization makes too much sense; we now have three
product teams: one for each product family (Flight, Trains, ESP) and a Core Team that delivers the core engine that each product family uses.

As part of that reorganization I have moved from being PM for Graphics and Terrain to being the Lead PM for the Core Team. So I help set the direction for Graphics, Terrain, Platform, PIT, International, Geo-DB, and Geo-Tools plus a lot of interaction with the Technical Art team. That is seven areas as compared to the two I used to PM. It’s a huge increase in scope and responsibility and is a real challenge. But I love it.

I blogged about exactly this topic earlier this year at:
http://blogs.msdn.com/ptaylor/archive/2008/01/16/aces-studio-organization-yesterday-and-today.aspx , the Studio organization and my role change is no secret either. I am still settling into the new role, and certainly the work load is keeping me busy, but I am really enjoying it and hope to contribute to making future products that delight and amaze our customers.



You’re Not A Real World Pilot Department

When requesting the interview I indicated that this would be the kind of question I would be asking. As I recall you replied that you are in fact not a real world pilot, which is fine. But now I have several related questions in this area ...

Do you fly FS yourself? That is, while nobody expects you to play product tester, do you nevertheless fly in the world of simulated aviation? If so, what types of aircraft do you prefer? Do you ever fly online? Blah blah blah. Just tell us whatever comes to mind because that will show us more about Phil Taylor, human being.


Phil's reply ...

I am not a private pilot, but have had friends who are and have flown with them. And yes that includes taking the controls. So while I haven’t done landings, I have done full approaches including interacting with the tower, adjusting flaps and power, and making all the turns until the numbers on the runway were mighty big in front of me. J. And that is ignoring all of the “regular” flying I did in maintaining a course, turning around a
point, turns with a constant bank rate, etc. that I did. Of course, that was all over a decade ago so it has been a while since I was up.

As far as my “hangar” in “Flight Simulator X,” I have 104 planes that I have downloaded. So I actively scour the community sites for good freeware planes. I am especially proud of my seaplanes; I have 14 of those, 12 plus the 2 that come with “Flight Simulator X.”

As I was growing up my father was a naval aviator and flew patrol aircraft. Late in his career that was the P-3 Orion but earlier in his career that was the P5-M. My fathers’ P5-M was the last tail number manufactured; so seaplanes always strike a place in my heart as well as remind me of the times I spent growing up “on-base”. If you see me at a conference, buy me a beer and ask about the time me and my buddies sank a sona-buoy raft in the BOQ pool on North Island.

I just do not have time for online flying, although I see what people are doing with it and wish I had the time to invest.



Superb Technician Department

With you being a superb technician on top of everything else, you must by now “have the picture” regarding the flow of information within FS - - of what the gears look like and how they mesh, so to speak. How long did it take to develop that feel? Days? Weeks? Months? Did it come about exclusively through meetings and reports? Did you read any code?


Phil's reply ...

Good question.

It has taken months because the product is so broad and deep. I still turn over facts in areas that expand my understanding, and my role has expanded recently so I think the process will continue for quite a while as I have quite a few new areas to learn.

Meetings, reports, presentations, whitepapers all help. Writing a spec for a feature area really acts as a forcing function, though in that it forces you to come to grips technically with an area and have that understanding peer reviewed.

Yes, I read areas of the code. I even watch the check-in mails to see how progress goes and review “interesting” check-ins just to educate myself. It is also a good way to see who is doing amazing things and send them a note. Developers tend to appreciate people noticing their work - especially early in the game.

And to keep my graphics programming skills fresh, I have a “test bed graphics application” that is a maze generator app that I have converted from DX6-DX7-DX8.0-DX8.1-DX9.0. I need to update it for DX10. It contains various rendering experiments I have performed with
· Various culling techniques, batching strategies, and texture handling strategies
· Character animation (“Quake 1” and “Quake 2” models using vertex animation, “Half-Life 1” models using software skinning, and DX9.0SDK models using hardware skinning
· Light-mapping and multiple u-v pairs and vertex streams
· Particle animation systems
· Flocking of groups of related objects
· Cube-mapping and environment mapping
· Playing video on a 3D surface
· Alpha transparency, making various objects and walls see-thru

I also did some experimentation with audio using this system where I used both sample-based wave audio using DSound (one-shots and streaming ) and score-based audio using DMusic, combining them together with spatial and time based triggers. One flavor of it even had networking support, but the most recent version has that removed. It has served as a really useful test bed over the years.



Project Management Department

When I say that FS is a very complex system, I’m speaking from the viewpoint of a technical system programmer. The “surface anatomy” is what typical end users see, but the people on the development team know the internal anatomy and physiology, and they must know in detail the subsystems they work on, even if they’re not individually responsible for entire subsystems.

My question here is, Without violating company confidences, how is such a complex system managed at Aces in a development sense?


Phil's reply ...

We handle this in a couple different ways.

We have teams responsible for functional areas like graphics, platform-wide issues, internal tools, and other areas. So the general knowledge of an area is collected across a group. Within that group, there are specific area “owners” who either know an area or are expected to learn it and make it theirs.

For areas where there has been movement within the studio, someone who transitions to another role still acts as “area owner” until a replacement is found and trained up. That helps ensure a minimum of gaps. And we have a spreadsheet to maintain that list so roles are clear.

And then we have long-term Studio people who have been here 10 years or more, and they serve as sounding boards for big changes.

In closing, it has been great chatting with you and I hope you find my answers informative. And remember, any day in the air is a great day!

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<An aside: I (Mike) consider the 20+ years of the development of Windows to be one of the great unsung engineering projects of all human history, right up there with the construction of the Great Pyramid in terms of its pioneering nature. It may be that this stuff is generally known only within Microsoft, but it is bound to be the case that sooner or later whatever management techniques have evolved are going to become known to the outside world, and they are going to have a profound influence once people realize the scope of the project and how effective the techniques have been.

Anyway, one of the things that impresses me the most is that the basic architecture of Windows is unchanged from the earliest releases right through the MSDN developer information for Vista. The whole philosophy of callbacks, and the open-ended leave-in-hooks-for-upwards-compatibility way that application interface data structures were approached, is brilliant.

I suppose that this was Bill Gates’ main contribution -- providing the inspiration and driving the meetings that defined an architecture that is remarkably consistent and that has had amazing “stretch”.>



Brevity Is Not A Virtue In “Off Topic With Mike” Department

This is really hard, folks. It’s as hard as my fsOC forum interview with skylab was. This gentleman was an airline pilot for thirty years, after which he became a railway locomotive engineer, if you can believe it, which I do, and I have a very refined BS detector.

Anyway, that interview came to an extended pause after I lobbed the following softball to skylab: “Did anything amusing ever happen on the railroad?” I asked him. “Not that I can recall” was his answer.

So please, Phil, don’t leave me twisting in the wind like that. Volunteer color information yourselves. Anecdotes, war stories, all of this stuff would be eagerly read by me and the readership.



Please Help Me Out Here Department

I’m finished. I can’t, at the moment, think of any other non-personal questions that I would like to ask, and given the tone of what’s above I don’t want to ask any further personal ones.

However, you can help me out. Please now also answer the questions you wished I had asked, or that you expected me to ask but did not.



Fin, Zu Ende, Konyetz, The End Department

Phil, thanks for your time and information. It is greatly appreciated.

Post edited by: xxmikexx, at: 2008/02/01 07:47

Post edited by: xxmikexx, at: 2008/02/01 07:50

The sona-buoy casing raft story is absolutely true. The funny part is, sinking the raft in the BOQ pool was bad enough, but when our dads realized we had cut the officer wifes' clotheslines to put the raft together that really got us into trouble. Good thing my one buddies dad was Admiral of the carrier fleet and the others' dad was Commander of the air wing that flew on the carrier; as that meant my dad didnt get all the grief over it.

Another one is, the middies would come into NAS Corpus for air training during the summer. The best company got extra vacation time. Stealing the Admiral's flag off the top of the HQ building was worth a bundle of points towards the goal of being the best company. I was there during one of these raids.

Lot's of fun stuff like this occurred on base when I was younger. Of course, this was the 60s and 70s so the rules were much relaxed. I cannot imagine being able to walk the flight line while live ammo was being loaded and retrieving ammo boxes and sona-buoy casings directly from the Chiefs any more.

Post edited by: PhilTaylor, at: 2008/02/02 00:37

Hi Mike & Phil,

glad to see you did this interview and it's been a great read! Thanks for organising it Mike and thanks for participating Phil.

I remember Dynamics fondly, they made great games. I played their Aces series, and their fantastic adventures too. I never managed to finish Willy Beamish though because there was a bug somewhere in the middle of the story.

I've done my first mutiplayer race this week and I really enjoyed it (well, I was only flying by myself, still need to get onto gamespy). Maybe I have to organise a celebrity race sometimes soon.

Cheers,
Christian

Folks,

By the ground rules for the interview agreed to by me in advance, Phil will not be posting again to this thread. He's a very busy man and it was agreed that I would not impose.

However, there is no reason in the world why we can't go on to have our own discussion of related matters. So, if the usual suspects, and/or any of the listeners, care to join in, I have this to say:

A year ago I was very negative about FSX in terms of its performance. However, a clean install of FSX followed by a clean install of Acceleration has resulted in a setup whose performance is exactly what I had been hoping for a year ago. Not a barn burner with all sliders to the right, just a decent peformer that I am happy to fly.

For a variety of reasons I don't get to fly much these days so I haven't actually run any of the Acceleration stuff itself yet.

But when I get a round tuit (and somebody posted a picture of one on Train-Sim!), I will report my experiences with it.