It's become a sub-hobby in it's own right. Sliderightitis. We tweak, we prod, we overclock, we buy new cards and computers? Why. To move that slider from dense to extremely dense, or from extremely dense, to ungodly dense. Remember Risky Business when Joel played with his Dad's Stereo."Joel, do you notice a preponderance of Bass?"His dad had every frequency of that EQ just "right", and when dad leaves, what does joel do? Pushes them all the way to max.Don't we do the same? FS2002 has default settings for Low, Medium, and High Quality settings, yet, I bet that absolutely NO ONE reading this Forum has a setting other than CUSTOM,Hey, even I'm guilty! My base line is HIGH, but I need the extended textures checked, so that's the first hit, and I push the default frame counter from 25 to 20 this gives me some overhead to push those extended textures. Guilty as charged.The fact remains, that the default settings for FS2002 are pretty fine. And I hope that some of us try FS2004 awhile using the defaults before, like Joel, we push all the sliders to the right. Slider Tweaking will always be a part of this sim. Lets just make sure we get some flying in there as well. :-)

I've got it pretty bad; but I haven't messed with anything once I found a sweet spot. The only things I do without are any type of water effects and my clouds are on 65%. My autogen is set to "Normal" mainly because I don't like it all that much, and my AI traffic is around 33% because I have way to much AI in my setup.All this and 16 fps on a 1.3 Gig AMDwith 512 meg primary and a 64 meg vid card aint too bad...

Yeah, I'm guilty too. I keep moving the sliders a little further to the right just to see what will happen. Since I fly helos almost exclusively right now, the smoothness of the sim is important. But that doesn't stop me from pushing the envelope.But for the most part, now that I've gotten an acceptable mix of eye candy and performance, I'm mostly pretty happy. I may even move a couple of those sliders backwards just a bit. Usually I can't hardly tell the difference anyway. :-roll It sure is fun though! :-hah-Lindy :-rotor :-wave

Good to hear from you Lindy, Did you finally retire PP99? I finaly had to let it go. My system bit the dust, and I had to get a new video card that didn't do Voodoo, so that was the beginning of the end. (Actually FS2002 was the beginning of the end, but that's no shocker). I see some ol' diehards still hang out in the PP forum, but I just can't do it. It would make me homesick for PP99 again, and I've already gotten rid of it.So, it seems I am on the Microsoft bus to stay.