After being wowed by some youtube-based video demos for TP, I decided to try it on my ancient Athlon 64 computer and pathetic 1m DSL connection, both well below minimum specs. After downloading the program (45 minutes; yeah, feel *very* sorry for me), dutifully reading a popular online tutorial as well as Christian's documentation for installation, and messing around with the configuration file for a bit, TP finally told me I was 'ready for takeoff'. Well, let the slideshow begin! Imagine, then, my amazement, when I discovered it's really not that bad. Certainly the loading and processing times on my machine would be like watching grass grow for those running TP on the 'right stuff'; but in my little corner of the world, I found that TP wasn't too far off performance-wise than the photoscenery I had created with maps2bgl (which Gunnar no longer seems to be supporting) with much less work involved. Oh, sure, the water masks are a little crude (on fs9) and sometimes the colors are a bit funky and there's pausing required to achieve the best image resolution. And, yes, there are those dreaded black tiles once in a while. But, as my RL primary flight instructor once told me about handling an emergency landing in the mountains at night: Don't turn your landing light on until you're ready to land; when you do, if you don't like what you see, turn it off.Likewise, when those nasty black holes appear in my otherwise spiffy terrain rendering, I just don't look in that direction! :( What TP *has* done for me is bring interest and visual accuracy to flight segments which would otherwise be flown over generic, default MS textures. It's too bad TP won't play nice with my existing photoscenery as that would truly have kicked things up a notch. As it is, having continuous scenery coverage on a three hour flight using nothing but pilotage for navigation was absolutely fantabulous. So, any of you out there running legacy hardware like me (AMD XP 3400+, 7600GS), give TP a try. Maybe you'll enjoy it like I am.Of course, that being said, I think there's finally a legitimate reason for me to consider FSX. And, of course, a new computer.

My system was great for FS9 (7900GS and Athlon 5000 dual core (slightly overclocked)).However Tileproxy with FS9 and FSX are like chalk and cheese.I always get good framerates with photoscenery - probably due to the ack of autogen.Really to run Tileproxy you need a dual core rig.The difference between the 4.75 metres textures in FS9 and the 1 metre textures in FSX is truly amazing. I didn't think my system was really up to FSX. However, I tried it and kept a backup of FS9 for a while. Wasn't long though before I decided that FSX was the way to go.Luckily, I have someone who always wants the latest, fastest hardware and when he upgrades in a few months time, I will be able to get his stuff second hand and that will really make FSX rock.IAN

Hi, Ian, and thanks for your reply. Actually, after having used TP obsessively for the last couple of days I've come to the conclusion that--for people like me, er, hardware challenged--that TP is best used as a photoscenery creator. Instead of trying to use it to fly in real time, I've created scenery areas by simply going to different airports within overlapping coverage distance of each other for the express purpose of caching those tiles for future flying use. Once cached, even my computer seems to run quite smoothly using the cached scenery areas. Areas are created much faster (about five minutes per area) than manually doing it with maps2bgl. An additional upside is that I no longer have to spend oodles of time masking coastlines, a major time saver. The downside is I can't touch up areas of funky colors and other visual anomalies. I can live with that for the most part. All in all, I am absolutely thrilled with this wonderful software. I will never settle for default scenery ever again!Tawni

The downside is I can't touch up areas of funky colors and other visual anomalies...

Tawni,If you have some experience in the retouching area, then why do you think you can't continue to do that... open up the relevant image tile(s) and edit it/them. flush the previously made .bmp scenery files in that area and refly the changed area rebuilding scenery files for internal use. One of these days I plan to remove the bridge imagery that's under some of the scenery object and extrusion bridges - some of which also need fixing or realigning. I'd like to know what software can batch process a number of images and adjust them all the same way... brighten 10%, reduce green by 15% etc...If you need help locating image tiles or scenery tiles, pm my backLoyd

Hi Tawni & Loyd,I was thinking of doing that. But Tileproxy stores thousands of texture images and it would take forever to find the ones you wanted to retouch - and even then, I guess at some point, Tileproxy might overwrite them.The NASA watermasks are good but in South West UK - where I like to fly - the tidal ranges are amongst the highest in the world and the masks are not realy that accurate (though much better than nothing at all).Reducing the blend distance from 500 down to 150 seems to have helped though, but it may have disadvantages in other areas of the world.IAN

I think I tried to go even lower (with the exception of the Internet connection) when I tried to install Tileproxy on my FS2002 PC:

Compaq Pentium 4 1.50 GHz 1.50 GHz 512 MB of RAM 1 GB of Virtual RAM SAMSUNG SV1021H 34GB HD ATI Radeon X1300/X1550 Graphics Card Omega 2.8.442 video drivers 5 GPS WIFI connection Windows XP Service Pack 3 FS2002

It nearly worked. Like you, I got a pattern of black squares across the scenery. But worst than that; I got an error with the LOD13 rings where the tiles immediately below the plane were water tiles, with a ring of black tiles around it. That may have been due to using FS2002; or some other problem; no-one ever gave a solution to it.Performance wise, it would pause every few seconds; although it ran fine was the tiles were already created. I think have a very fast Internet connection will make up for slow hardware a little bit; but not 100%.-James