January 31, 200422 yr hello all!this may be old news to some, but hey, if it helps even one of the little ones... :)i got mildly annoyed of late by the blurred gauges in the virtual cockpits of my 2002 favorites ported to fs9. i investigated the matter and found a parameter in the panel.cfg, which would seem to influence the resolution of panel bitmaps, including gauge faces.in the blurry ones it was usually set to 512, sometimes 256. changing it to 1024 made all my vc gauges sharp and sweet. oh joy!peace!vilk
January 31, 200422 yr I guess he's talking about the pixel_size parameter in the virtual cockpit sections. Increasing this parameter to pixel_size=1024,1024 really helps with some virtual cockpits. I think several of the default planes like the Cessna 172 and Baron 58 benefit from this change.Please remember to make backups of your files before you change anything ...VOlker :]
January 31, 200422 yr heavens, ain't i dumb!:Dthanks for your patience and help. i just cut and pasted a paragraph from an e-mail i had written earlier to a fellow simmer. the name of the parameter, pixel_size, of course, was in the previous paragraph...i discovered it tinkering with the geforce 150, so i guess many more crates might benefit from the tweak.peace!vilk
January 31, 200422 yr confirmed, works magic on the default 172, 182 and, wooohooooo, the realair 172! :)just search the vcockpit sections of all your panel.cfg files for pixel_size set to 256 or 512. comment out the original in case of local deviations from the rule and change pixel_size to 1024. keep the old ratio (i.e. pixel_size=512,256 becomes pixel_size=1024,512); otherwise some panels may come out distorted.vilk
January 31, 200422 yr hey, how do i know? i say "yes" and next thing i know you come after me with a baseball bat cuz yer sim crapped out. :Di just discovered it myself, still experimenting. comment out the old line, put in a new one below and see what happens.cheers!vilk
January 31, 200422 yr this is timely, im building a VC panel right now and was just playing with this parameter last night. I actually went the other way, lowering my pixel size to 256 from 1024. I was getting a cylical frame hit of 8fps about every second. With FPS in the mid 20's its ok, but if the average drops to 15 your going down to 7fps, not good. so, by setting some parts of the VC to 256, and the main stack to 1024/512 it really helped. sharp gauges for sure, FPS hit for sure. Just to find the balance.joe
January 31, 200422 yr hmmm... i noticed no fps drop. nuthin'. nada. which is not to contradict you, i know too little about design, just making an observation.i finished a major 2D/3D cockpit overhaul yesterday on my favorite cessna 150 from gforce (the original cockpit really kept me from flying this jewel for too long :)) and i never thought performance once while testing. simply because everything was smooth as a baby's cheek.same high-teens-to-low-twenties before and after in the same, rather demanding, scenario (3000ft, over a major city, tons of clouds, winds, precipitation, lock at 24, sliders mostly maxed out at 1280x960).
January 31, 200422 yr I can confirm it too now, very nice sharp textures. No FPS hit but then again only tested it with the default cessna's :)Thanks again for the tip :)
January 31, 200422 yr my pleasure. so much satisfaction from so small a thing. who would have thought!:)
February 1, 200422 yr vilk the VC i was working on had 6 Vcockpit entries and that can drag the fps on my rig. So by lowering the pixel size of say the compass and the switch panel, it made a big load smaller. just making the main set of instruments sharpest makes it looks nice. but im still figgerin all this out too. I dont think you would see any fps hit on the default VC setups, they dont even have lightmaps :)it's nice to have the choice.joe
February 1, 200422 yr yup. i totally see how you could be getting a hit with 6 glittering panels. fortunately only two in my crate. :)
February 1, 200422 yr Hi Vilk,Thanks for posting this tip. I may have come across this before but not have paid any attention to it or made note of it becase of being too busy with other stuff. But I tried this out an the P-38J Lightning by David C. Copley which is a really great plane and has a good VC, except the gauges in the VC were pretty blurry, but not after applying this tweak. It made quite a noticeable and nice difference. :-coolThanks Again, :-)Jim
Create an account or sign in to comment