Hi and the very best of the Christmas season to everyone.

 

"Santa" brought me an external HD with SimSavvy installed. Luckily she was able to get this order processed prior to this scenery being discontinued.

 

I see reference in the supplied paperwork to load all states being used but to only load the states needed to alleviate performance hits in some computers. I always thought that scenery was only loaded by FSX when needed according to the location of the aircraft, and so states across the other side of the country wouldn't be loaded, much less cause a performance hit. Can anyone confirm this?

 

Thanks, Bruce.

 

I think your statement and thoughts are correct but these are massive files (assuming She got the 50 cm scenery). It is the FSX load time that is impacted.

 

Load all the states you think you may be flying and use the chechmark to turn off the states not in use. This way they will not be loaded when you start FSX but will be ready to load with a chechmark. You can do this while flying.

 

I have them all but seldom have more than 4 or 5 actually active at any given time.

 

Ray

 

Find the Sim-Savvy Avsim review and read it.

Scenery does load when you use it. But FSX has to create a database with each .bgl file in your scenery with long/lat coordinates so that it will know what file to load when. The more files you have, the more time it takes. Having said that, you probably can load all your scenery at once if you have a decent processor (mine is an i7). It might be a good idea to load the scenery off the external HD on to an internal 1 Tb HD because it will load faster through a SATA connection than through a USB connection.

 

The phrase "alleviate performance hits on some computers" is so vague that I think they are probably just covering their butt. If you have a computer with 1 Gb of RAM and an old Pentium processor running on Windows XP, you will have problems with FSX no matter how much scenery you use at one time.

How large (storage wise) are the states in SimSavvy?

I only load the states I will be flying over to cut down on the initial FSX load time. As far as size, the 50 states are 1.8 TB. I am seriously considering installing a 2TB drive and load the entire 50 states. I would still only load the states I need for the flight. I would hate to have the USB drive go bad and not have a backup as this scenery is no longer available. The USB drive then would be placed in storage for that "just in case" moment!

I am using DX10 and SweetFX and Sim-Savvy has never looked so sharp!

Lyn

Thanks for the helpful replies, and yes Ray, I will find the AVSIM review- always a graet way to learn about something.

 

having read the replies I really like the idea of installing a 2TB internal drive and moving all of the files to that, and keeping the external HD as a backup, since it is no longer available and to also reduce loading times due to the SATA connection.

 

I have an i7 CPU with 8GB of DDR3 RAM, running Win7 / 64 bit.

 

Thanks again, Bruce.

:rolleyes: I have a new (Jetline) system with a i7 3770k cpu running overclocked at 4.3 GHz off of a Western Digital 3TB external HD containing the 50-state high-resolution SimSavvy scenery. (I usually only check a couple states at a time in the scenery library for quicker loading). The external HD is connected through a USB 3.0 cable. It's all running very smoothly, even when I look around quickly with TrackIR, with a framerate of about 150 fps.

Just for info. I added a new 3TB storage drive a few days ago. I picked it up at Amazon on the Black Friday weekend sale for $89 delivered. I can always use another TB or three. My Sim-Savvy was scattered around 3 or 4 smaller drives. I will start consolidating the states that I actually fly in when I have the time.

 

Don't worry too much about Sim-Savvy no longer being available. The new Megasceneryearth V2.0 is Sim-Savvy scenery on a state-by-state basis and you may find some later source imagery for some of your favorites. Some are using the 2012 50 cm source imagery. The color matching looks better between states and the watermasking is greatly improved on the few that I have seen. Go to the MCE website and you can see some screenshots for the states that have been released in the last few weeks.

 

You can use the instant download or for a few dollars more have the scenery delivered on DVDs.

 

Ray