Hi there,

 

I had this bizarre issue while approaching Gatwick today at VATSIM, and landed a bit rough because of a small slow down on finals. Basically, I was flying at sunset and as it happens, PMDG likes for some reason to refresh panels at night. They basically turn off for a second and turn on again, almost looking like a refresh of the dials and such. Unfortunately, this causes a lag and it only happens at night. I'm not sure if anyone experienced this, but is there a way to avoid this from happening? It just incredibly ruins your landing

The problem with landing at Gatwick in FSX is that, by an utterly diabolical twist of fate, the scenery of nearby Heathrow is loaded into memory and rendered on-screen at the very moment when one's executing the flare manoeuvre over runway 26L. If you've got a reasonably complex piece of add-on scenery installed for EGLL (such as Aerosoft Mega Airport London-Heathrow), this can lead to a very noticeable hitch lasting up to a couple of seconds -- without fail ruining your landing if not your whole day.

 

You can see glitch in action yourself by positioning your aircraft on runway 08R/26L, switching to outside top-down view at 8x zoom, and entering slew mode. When moving along the runway centerline, you'll see the EGLL scenery pop into existence right after you cross the threshold.

 

Now you don't see me:

 

 

 

Now you do:

 

 

 

The only workaround I've found is simply to disable the Heathrow add-on scenery when flying into Gatwick. It's less than ideal, but will prevent any scenery-related hitching from occurring at a critical time. Also, who in his right mind wants to fly into Heathrow anyway?

The thing is, I have a default Heathrow scenery. I assume that can't be disabled, can it? Haha.

 

I've noticed this cockpit reload happen at other places too, just not when I was on finals at Gatwick, it happened at gate, taxi... And it lagged.

Hmph... No, not much point in doing that, is there? I guess we'll have to try a different route. Are you using FSUIPC to synchronise your FSX clock, by any chance?

As for reloads with time updates by FSUIPC and FS Real Time, reloads only happen when change is bigger than like 3 minutes. Make sure that your update frequency is fast enough that the time will be updated before a difference of more than 1-2 minutes is built. For me, update frequency of 10 minutes or so works well.

I don't think I do, because I don't even know where to check it in the first place :L Could you please give me any pointers as to how I could verify that? Cheers.

I don't think I do, because I don't even know where to check it in the first place :L Could you please give me any pointers as to how I could verify that? Cheers.

It's controlled by the "Keep FS clock sync'd" option on the FSUIPC Miscellaneous settings tab. However, going by your description, you might just be dealing with the "normal" FSX behaviour of swapping daytime textures for their dusk and night time variants. This will indeed result in brief "loading textures" interruptions, which as far as I know can only be avoided by not flying at dusk or dawn. Perhaps someone else can chip in on this one, as I haven't really been bothered by it.