Anyone running realityXP with the 421C?

[Guest gasebah]

Hi guys and gal (guess it is Heather only),anyone doing this. I had frequent lockups lately and it took me a long time to find out what it was. Now I am absolutely positive: The C421 crashes with realityXP. Not immediately sometimes sooner, sometimes later but it will crash on any flight longer than 30 minutes. I was wondering if this is a known issue. I know that the default Cessna GPS was made by realityXP so I wonder if there is a direct conflict (using the same.dll maybe).Can someone shed light on this?Alex

[John_Cillis 2,406]

I thought about your other recent post, as I started to note that every time I flew the 421, my system would slow to a crawl. I'd already knew that the 421 had an impact on fps, and just to experiment, I checked mem usage while it was running. I was stunned to see that it was using 30-40 megs more than most of my other A/C, even w/reflections off. Since my system only has 256 megs, this was causing some swap file usage, and a rare lockup.Since I fly the 421 w/o reflections, I decided to take a look at shrinking the texture size. I was already using DXT 3, but I fired up DXTBMP, and tried an experiment--I saved everything except the prop as DXT 1, removing the alpha channel in each bitmap along the way. This shrank most textures from 4Megs down to 600K or less. There were three benefits--fps in spot view jumped from 17 to 22, texture loads when switching views were much, much faster, and free mem on my system jumped from 40 to 80 megs (and swap file usage ceased). A 4th benefit--I noticed my system was more prone to blurries with the larger textures. After installing the smaller textures, the system was back to its old seldom blurred self. I made one other mod to the textures--I made the prop spinners match the fuse color.This removed the A/C reflections, but I seldom fly w/reflections on, and I kept the old textures in case I want them for screenshots, etc... I modified the aircraft.cfg so my 421C displays default and repaints using the labels "standard" and "small", so I can choose between the textures.By removing the memory and cpu demands on the aircraft, you might free up enough resources for the 421C to cope better with realityXP....-John

[Guest gasebah]

Hi John,I have to say that I really appreciate the thought. Know why? With my new hardware setup it is so much fun flying in the VC that I hardly switch to the outside view anyway. Generally I have all settings maxed out except mesh, but I really ask myself now why I should pressure my system with reflections, and alll those high quality textures. I will try stuff out.Alex