No tweak - no fun.

Spirit

I have an idea for a completely new program:

Tweak Simulator 2014!

 

Instead of a tiny number in the upper left corner, it will have a H U G E fluorescent green number in the center of the screen! You won't go blind trying to see success!

 

With 242 separate configuration files scattered around your hard drive in cryptically named folders, and around 32,510 separate settable parameters (some of which actually do something), you can spend hours, nay YEARS tweaking to your heart's content, all while chasing that impossible goal of maximizing the magic number on your screen!

 

Adding to the excitement, the program will be coded to randomly scramble configuration files by rearranging and sometimes swapping parameters between files. As a further challenge, some of the configuration files will require the tobj editor, a cryptic tool already being used successfully by SCS in their European Truck Simulator 2 program to provide endless hours of frustration enjoyment for their customers.

 

I'm soliciting ideas now for further improvements and suggestions for obfuscation, so feel free to add to the madness! Once all of the ideas have been finalized, I can write the prospectus for a Kickstarter Campaign! :LMAO:

Does it have fake variables? I mean variables that are officially present but change absolutely nothing? I reckon those are cool.

 

Also, do we get some hidden variables as well? Unofficial tokens that nobody heard about but will actually change the game?

 

Last but not least, the excitement coming from the combination of the two? Hidden AND fake is the ultimate imho.

 

"I'm curious - if P3D v2 is tweak free..."

 

Remember, you're talkin' ta simmers here.  Nothing is tweak free!  :lol: .

 

Does it have fake variables? I mean variables that are officially present but change absolutely nothing? I reckon those are cool.

Well yes, that was the general idea conveyed by this clause:

"with 32,510 separate settable parameters (some of which actually do something)..." What is implied is that you won't know which (if any) of those 32,510 parameters "actually do something" or not, especially since there is zero documentation provided to the customers! :lol:

With the release of Prepar3D v2.0 coming out Monday and assuming (a terribly naive assumption, I know) that it's configurable via menu-options alone, how many of you would miss the hours of tweaking and prodding your systems and FSX itself for hours on end? 

 

I ask this because over the years, many of you have written with great pride and enthusiasm on the constant efforts to get FSX to run as efficiently as possible. The sheer amount of knowledge in computers (memory, CPU, GPU over-clocking, BIOS, modifying config files etc) an FSX simmer amassed with FSX was pretty remarkable. Surely, it had become a part of FSX flight-simming whether one wanted it or not.

 

So, would any of you miss this aspect of our humble little hobby? And, again, I stress, IF Prepar3D 2 is an out-of-the-box simmer.

 

 

Why tweak, any problems we discover LM has committed to resolved them outright as soon as possible.  LM will do the tweaking form now on...

 

What this will do with the next generation of simmers is make them less techie and more aviation oriented.  The bottom line is if LM is leveraging this to full blown Level-D trainers and flight schools,  it has to run without issue on first install to be taken seriously.  LM has to be committed to a no-tweak simulation if this thing is going to be a success for their broader business/market...

I didn't mind tweaking at first but it became tedious and time consuming when all you should be doing is preparing a flight and flying.

 

Remember tweaking does not end. There will always be a need to tweak it to run better and more efficiently. The difference is LM cares about it unlike MS and will be baking new proved tweaks into patch updates. Plus the options within is a tweaker area but user friendly with sliders and radio buttons and checkmarks.

Forgive me but does P3D v2 use all 4 cores without adding a mask?

 

FSX (since SP1) does this already.. so that would not be anything new.

 

Maybe the question should be whether P3D makes better use of additional cores

than FSX does.

Will we still need to add highmemfix=1 lol. I did read that they said that affinty mask tweak was still relevent if you had more than 4 cores.

Remember, no matter what they call it or what they've done, the core is STILL FSX. It may  not need as many tweaks because they built in some of them but I would be greatly surprised if it did not need ANY tweaks. I am excited and looking forward to trying 2.0 but I fear some folks are setting themselves up for disappointment.

 

Vic

Will we still need to add highmemfix=1 lol. I did read that they said that affinty mask tweak was still relevent if you had more than 4 cores.

 

That tweak was actually hardcoded in v1.4 and removed from the .cfg. 

So no, you won't need it anymore.

At first, FSX tweaking was fun for me.  Some worked great, some not so great and some produced no observable benefit.

 

Some tweaks wouldn't kill the sim outright... it took time.  It was no fun going back to figure out if it was a tweak or some recently added plane or scenery that was killing it.

 

Long story short... I long for a sim that doesn't need major tweaking!

I won't miss it one bit either. I bought FSX when it first came out and spent years tweaking and much help from tweak professionals( thanks NNick) adding this and that, changing this and that. However, I did enjoy flying with FSX but enjoyed FS9 on windows XP, more I think. I think I'll enjoy P3D from all I have read about it. Time will tell.

I read that the affinity mask will be needed to access hyper-threaded cores. So that is one.  

Will we still need to add highmemfix=1 lol.

 

 

I assume that you added "LOL", because you are aware of the thread on AVSim regarding P3d 1.4 and the highmemfix setting. There were people here that swore up and down that you needed to add that line to the prepar3d.cfg file. That is, until someone from LM posted on their official forum that the entry did nothing, as highmemfix=1 was the default setting in P3d (just like it should have been in FSX).

I read that the affinity mask will be needed to access hyper-threaded cores. So that is one.  

What LM said was that if you wanted to use an AM, you could continue to do so, as the setting is not disabled in P3d2. They made no comment as to whether it was worth using an AM or not. The only other thing that they have said in this regard is that P3d2 will take advantage of a large number of cores, either physical or logical. If you wanted to stop P3d2 from using certain cores, you could assign an AM.

With all these comments the past couple of days, I'm hoping that LM will transform all these posts into "how to fly" instead of "how to fix".