Millennium Falcon Simulator Ride Will Have 8 GPUs To Run

It appears that the new Millennium Falcon Simulator ride being planned at Disneyland and Disney's Hollywood Studies will have a beast of a processing unit.

Each and every implementation of the sim will be powered by a Boxx workstation running eight Nvidia Quadro P6000 GPUs connected via Quadro SLI, so this definitely won’t be something available to consumers. Disney had to build multi-GPU workflows, which they helped Epic Games integrate into the company’s Unreal Engine which will continue to use that code moving forward.

I know that something like this can be quite thrilling. I've seen how popular the new Flight of Passage at the Pandora land can get. But I can't help hoping that there would be an E-ticket PHYSICAL ride, rather than a simulator. There seems to be a reliance on too many of those lately.

Zz.

WDW Resorts To Charge For Parking

This came out of nowhere.

Disney resorts at WDW will start charging guests to park their vehicles at the resorts.

The amount will vary, depending on the level of accommodations. At what Disney refers to as a value resort, which includes the All-Star hotels and Pop Century, the charge will be $13 per night. For the moderate resorts (such as Port Orleans or Coronado Springs), it will be $19 a night. On the deluxe end of the scale – including Animal Kingdom Lodge, the Yacht and Beach resorts and the monorail hotels – it’s $24 per night.

The report does not say whether this applies to DVC resorts, DVC members, and passholders. I'm guessing that it will not, since DVC members and passholders can already park for free even at the theme parks.

Zz.

Mobile Food Ordering Adds Dining Plan

I reviewed the MyDisney Experience park app's mobile food ordering service at WDW a couple of months ago after we tried it during our December 2017 trip. We loved it, and can't think of any reason anyone would not want to use it for ordering at many of the counter services at the parks and at a couple of places in Disney Springs. The only significant part that was missing from this ability is the use Disney Dining Plan with the mobile service.

Well now, with the recent update of the app this past week, it appears that they have included the ability to use the Dining Plan to order food via the mobile app. I fully expected this because they tend to roll out the app in stages as they figure out its capabilities, etc. So it is not surprising that the Dining Plan is now included. Not that we will use this feature since we seldom get the Dining Plan, but I know that this was a common question and feature request.

So folks, if you have a smart phone, there really is no reason to not download the app, and if you're planning on eating at one of the quick service places at a WDW theme park, you'll be out of your mind to not use the mobile food ordering feature.

Zz.

"Christopher Robin" Trailer

Disney has released the new "Christopher Robin" trailer. Oh, the nostalgia!



Zz.

"Coco" Was Almost A Full-Blown Musical

Lee Unkrich revealed that "Coco" almost became Pixar's first full-blown musical.

Although those half-dozen tunes didn’t make the film, you can hear several of them as bonus features on the DVD/Blu-Ray release of “Coco” that arrived Tuesday. Hearing those artful songs might prompt the question: Why didn’t they make the movie?

“I pivoted for a few reasons, the main one being that the film felt like it was trying to be something different than what we were trying to force it to be,” says Unkrich, who worked on “Coco” for about six years after his Oscar-winning direction of “Toy Story 3.”

And as he has stated, it will be a bit ironic to have musical numbers from the very beginning, considering that any form of music was banned from the Rivera family.

Definitely looking forward to hearing the rest of the tunes that didn't make it into the film. Still, with all the music already written, who is going to bet against Disney bringing "Coco" to Broadway?

Zz.