FEX Question

[Guest Brad33712]

Maybe I should know this, but once you install a set of cloud, sky, and water themes into FSX do they stay even after restarting your computer?Thanks,BradWindows XPE8600 Core2 Duo 3.33GhzAsus P5E3 X48 chipset motherboard2Gb 1600Mhz Corsair RamEVGA GTX 260FSX + Acceleration, UTX, GEX, FEX, ASX

[Guest jaskanFactor]

Yes they are permanent, until you select another set from FEX to overwrite them. So does not matter about pc restart.

[Guest]

To add to what jaskanFactor said: you also don't need to run or keep FEX running when using FSX. FEX replaces specific default files in the FSX directories with new ones, which have the exact name: nothing is added, only replaced! When FEX has installed those textures the work is done and you can forget about FEX until you want to install different textures. If you like the installed FEX textures, you can even completely deinstall FEX! I did that on my previous computer which had very little HD space! After that I've flown for about a year or so with the installed FEX textures. :( I don't say this as a recommendation or anything, but this shows you FEX is only needed to install the textures and that's it.

[sightseer 895]

You could also do what I did recently and that is to take advantage of FSXs 'random sky' feature.FSX comes with 10 different skies (numbered 0 through 9). When FEX installs a sky, it creates 10 identical skies and numbers them 0 through 9. FSX is still randomly picking each time you start it up (actually it doesnt always change each time you start -- not sure why) but you alwas get the same sky because all the texture sets are the same.I used FEX to install about 5 of my favorite skies and after each installation (you can set the option to only install skies which makes this part pretty quick) -- after each installation, I made a backup and used a directory name that identified the themes used.Here was the tedious part:I picked out 5 FSX Default skies that I thought I might like (just based on what their sunset bitmap looked like... you can open those in a photo editor)**NOTE: Never work with original files!** and I put copies of those in a temp diectory. I think Im using 0, 1, 3, 4 and 5.I then took a complete set of sky textures with the appropriate number out of each FEX backup directory and copied them to the working directory. There are more textures than FEX replaces. There is a predawn1, postsun2 and a midnite file that are apparently not replaced so a 'complete sky set' (as far as FEX is concerned) consists of predawn2, dawn, postdawn1, postdawn2, morning, noon, afternoon, presun1, presun2, sunset, and postsun1.Since I was using default skies with suffix numbers 0, 1, 3, 4 and 5, I added in textures from FEX that had suffixes of 2, 6,7,8 and 9. I took all sky textures with the suffix of '2' out of one backup directory and all sky textures with a suffix of 6 out of the next backup directory and so on until I had ten complete sets which I then installed into FSX.Its a great way to have a different sky each time that is random and unexpected.