I enjoy jcomm's posts as well; his enthusiam is infectious and in regards to Flight I totally understand it

Ignore the user who made the totally unnecessary commentary. I also always enjoy reading your posts, you do a much better job expressing your point than me and most of us here, often with the same point of view I have about simulation.

 

I've been a FSX user since the beginning, and I can't count how many times FS has crashed to desktop, even following all the tweaks and guides. I know some people are going to say I have something wrong, but man, it's more than that. I can run my favorite games for months without ever crashing or something bad happening, I can play them for 8 hours straight, not with FS. Unfortunately it's not a "Plug and Play" Simulation. There's ALWAYS something you need to do to improve something else.

After all, there is not much else to talk about Flight. Or am I missing something new and exiting?

 

Indeed - there should be room for all kinds of discussion here otherwise it will all get very tedious. But personal attacks we do not need.

While I don`t have FSX (or any other flightsim in fact) it`s always amusing to see people writing about how they went back to it, realised how much work is needed just to get it going and returned to Flight. It just proves that MS made a howler buy stopping development as eventually , with more and more areas to explore and more aircraft to download it could have become very popular and well worth the effort. And of course they would have made plenty money from DLC as well.

 

It`s post directly comparing the two that I don`t like as Flight was never meant to be an FSX replacement , more of an introduction to the world of flight sims. People saying how they enjoy Flight over other sims is quite different.

Technically speaking, Bob is right.... So, I'll try to confine my posts here at the MS FLIGHT forum only to my MS FLIGHT experience!

 

When I get the time I will try to find out if it is possible to edit the weather theme sources in my MS FLIGHT and change a few parameters, trying to tweak temperature and pressure!!!! I'll report back :-)

 

you have a head like a cement block, apparently.

 

Well, my girlfriend advised me! You should never have used your photo as an avatar!!! Bob, I'm afraid I really can't do nothing about it...

I actually observed with quite a bit of interest as Jcomm began his move back to FSX. I watched as he got more active in other forums, and nodded as the expected problems and questions began. As always, people came forward helpfully, and the list of suggestions on the care and feeding of the sim was all too familiar. Re-install this..... tweak that, read this or that guide...... tweak some more.

 

Through the whole thing, I was struck again how as a community, we have gotten so use to this state of affairs that we don't even seem to notice what a high barrier to entry to outsiders this is. For myself, even with years of experience in the care and feeding of a healthy installation, I haven't been able to garner any enthusiasm for the tedium of a reinstall, especially after experiencing the ease of modern auto-installation and it-just-works DLC.

 

In the last few days, I have entered other forums and seen post after post encompassing that same paradigm. Jcomm was right in there, plugging away at it, but, honestly it didn't look like a bit of fun, and I'm not surprised to see his post here. What I really wonder (again) is how we grow this hobby when ease of use is still back in the days of the dinosaur and so many of us cant even see the issue, we are so accustomed to it.

 

It reminds me more than ever what a lost opportunity Flight was.

It reminds me more than ever what a lost opportunity Flight was.

 

Exactly my thoughts/feelings, and what I was trying to pass on my topic :-) I believe everybody agrees on this. Hour hobby is sometimes a PITA that contrasts with what we really should be doing with a sim - flight, rail,.boat, .... - simming :-)

Setting up FSX may be daunting to new users but using Word Not Allowed's guide I was done tweaking in 10 minutes and after that I am really enoying FSX: it's runs pretty well with pretty high settings. You do not HAVE to keep on tweaking all the time...!

 

Maybe current PC's can run FSX quite nice without any tweaks, as Bert said, but only with settings pretty low, at least on my system. Without the tweaks FSX runs very sluggish with my preferred settings... When I installed it and ran it without tweaks, it was choppy. Now it is smooth. Almost as smooth as Flight.

 

I really like the much better functionality of for instance the RealAir Legacy: so much 'deeper' then any plane in Flight! Really everything works and after buying the Reality XP GNS 530 it's as complete as can be.

 

Flight is great when it comes to being able to run it without having to fiddle around with settings and cfg's, it also great when it comes to atmosphere, specially thanks to the weather (that nice slight haze) but certainly the shadows. But FSX is so much deeper... And with the right addons (Orbx and REX for instance) it also looks more real: Flight looks great but like a great game. If you know what I mean.

 

But of course it's easy for me to talk: I've had experience with tweaking FSX for years (so apllying them only takes me a few minutes) and I also already had several addons... The addons I am currently using in FSX (and without those FSX wouldn't satisfy me at all) add up to something like 200 euro's... and then I am ONLY using the ones that I'd call mandatory... So for NEW users I can understand FSX is rather crap and daunting and Flight is a lot easier to get into.

 

After all, there is not much else to talk about Flight.

 

I tend to agree... so I removed that sticky topic.

The fact is, that with a good current technology PC, you do not need to do any tweaking of FSX to speak of.

 

Most of the published tweaks are totally unnecessary.

 

Just set the desired graphics with nvidia inspector, and go fly.

 

The most overlooked piece of tweaking advice, is to delete the fsx.cfg file after fiddling with all the settings,

and start with a clean version!

Yeah do that and you will miss also HIGHMEMFIX=1 fix and will probably get a lot of crashes.

 

I have to disagree with you. I have I7-2600k 3.4ghz, 8GB of RAM and ATI Radeon 6990, so very high end system. Still before I ran my FSX.cfg through Bojotes tweaking tool my FPS was like 10 or 15 when flying some complex addon airliner in good quality addon airports with no AI at all. After tweaking tool it stays constantly beetween 20 and 30 in these same areas and also with 50% of Mytraffic AI (other than in some really big airports like Heathrow). I do still have to keep autogen off when flying with airliners, but with GA I can turn also it all the way up with no problems.

 

Even with overlocked systems like this you usually won't get optimal performance without proper tweaks, and mine isn't overlocked yet.

My experience with FS9, FSX, and Flight is that they all ran perfectlysatisfactorily on consumer PCs out of the box.

 

Major problems only arose with 3rd Party addons. These addons were created in an uncoordinated manner by different developers to varying standards. In some cases, they went beyond the SDK documentation in a search for additional features.

 

Flight simulators run in a loop which means there's only a limited time in which to carry out the necessary processing. Some enthusiats overloaded their systems by adding many addons, each with addtional demands for processing. This eventually caused something to give with adverse effects on frame rate.

.

Flight had the advantage that addons were under Microsoft's control. They could be tested against a existing addons, built to known standards in a controlled environment.. If need be, they could be fine tuned to minimise any adverse effects.

FScamp, I wish I could say the same. I ran that tool and not only did it look worse in fsx it still ran like crap. I still have the generated cfg file so i'll go back and see what's wrong- maybe. It's times like that I just reboot and fire up Flight.

 

Interestingly enough I just got a multimedia rig for my home network and it's an [ i7 3770 3.4 nvidia 640], so I thought what the heck and I installed fsx and it runs great. No tweaks, no mods just some good quality aircraft and ORBX with UTX,Bluesky and FSGenesis. I'm debating REXe performance wise. I average 40fps minimum no problem and no crashes. I do fly GA so I'm trying to keep it simple. Lancair legacy is the most in-depth add-on I have, and I'm going to keep it that way. I run gmap on my samsung 10.1

My experience with FS9, FSX, and Flight is that they all ran perfectlysatisfactorily on consumer PCs out of the box.

 

Flight had the advantage that addons were under Microsoft's control. They could be tested against a existing addons, built to known standards in a controlled environment.. If need be, they could be fine tuned to minimise any adverse effects.

 

Well, I ran FSX after installing it and after patching it twice and simply flew without changing settings: I did the default flight with the trike above the island and everytime performance was clearly choppy. So I disagree: it does not run well out of the box. After tweaking it, it ran fine and after adding addons to it, it still ran fine...

 

About the advantage of Flight DLC coming all from MS: we will never know if that's true... Some people say Flight runs so great because it lacks a lot of functions. Now I always said that Flight does have great shadows and reflections and still runs great, so it does have some improvements compared to FSX. However, we will never know how good Flight would have run with AI or 'deeper' systems in planes... There is only so much you can finetune...

I have a moderately tweaked install of FSX, that runs very acceptable without crashes. I have a few addons that look pretty darn good to me, namely scenery and weather related addons. I really, really enjoyed it until the release of Flight, and so far to this day I have yet to launch it again. I am sure I will eventually whenever boredom might set in with Flight due to no further development, we will see.

 

The last couple of days was actually the first time I had launched Flight since the announcement, and found it was still as beautiful , smooth, and simple as it was before. I really enjoyed my time with it once again. And I still can get into using Plan G with my GMap, and learning VOR with Jeroen's tutorials - so I don't think I will get too bored anytime soon.

 

I am however starting to spend a little of my simming time with DCS A-10C, starting to go through the training, but it will probably be the fall/winter before I can spend near the time with it as I need to. Flight undoubtedly will continue to get the majority of my small amount of simming time I have available currently, namely due to it's ease of use and beauty.

o I thought what the heck and I installed fsx and it runs great. No tweaks, no mods

 

I do wonder what ingame settings you use then! FSX seems to behave completey different on every PC.

 

I ran that tool and not only did it look worse in fsx it still ran like crap. I still have the generated cfg file so i'll go back and see what's wrong- maybe.

 

I don't believe in tools like that. Even though quite a few people are quite happy with it. I don't use it: I've got just a few tweaks and they work for me. That tool changes and adds a lot of stuff in the cfg and you have no clue what's happening.. I don't like that. I like to know what works and why and how.

I do wonder what ingame settings you use then! FSX seems to behave completey different on every PC.

 

 

 

I don't believe in tools like that. Even though quite a few people are quite happy with it. I don't use it: I've got just a few tweaks and they work for me. That tool changes and adds a lot of stuff in the cfg and you have no clue what's happening.. I don't like that. I like to know what works and why and how.

 

Couldn't agree more. I use no tweaks, just watch what i add and fly and have had no issues. I believe that when you apply tweaks you end up losing something, whether it's noticable or not. At least doing it manually i know what is being done to the sim.

 

On jcomm, I have to agree with Bob. While I can appreciate his pasion, It's hard for me to take him seriously since his feelings on his sim of the week bounce all over the place