For those in the fence, considering AEROWINX PSX...

[jcomm 5,890]

This thread at the Aerowinx Hangar 7 Forum might help you take the plunge :-)

 

PSX is the 2nd most perfect Boeing 747-400 simulation ever made available for a PC, the first having been PS1 ...

[~Craig~ 10]

Very interesting.    I love the sound of PSX.    The debate about external scenery generation is interesting.  I'd like to be able to think that I could enjoy PSX for what it is (and the simplicity of set up), but I'm not sure if I could do without a detailed (eg. FSX/P3D) representation of the ground.

[jcomm 5,890]

Craig,

 

you can always use either FSX/ P3D or XP10 for that, although I prefer to use it standalone, and at most export some of the visuals of the cockpit to a 2nd networked PC ( laptop ) because I only have one monitor in my desktop.

 

I have tested VisualPSX and XView, the first with FSX and P3Dv1.4, the second with X-Plane 10.30. I believe XView offers the best performance, plus X-Plane with slopped runways active matches even better the experience you can get with PSX because it also uses slope rw data, and the alignment is more precise with X-Plane 10 runways, without you sometimes noticing a "last moment" adjustment of the FSX view...but both applications are still being developed so, more refinements can be expected. My only problem with using X-Plane is the fact that it's default World is too naked for my liking :-(. Yes there are alternatives, most of them freeware, but..., I'd be satisfied with FSX / P3D if only I could get less stuttering...

 

Flight Gear 3.0 is promising, and  I am looking forward for a "bridge" to Flight Gear too.

[~Craig~ 10]

Good points, thanks.

 

Can you tell me, J, ....... on the few videos that I've looked at on YouTube, the external view with PSX has always been fogged out / low visibility.     Is this the only view it renders, or is there the possibility to have greater visibility, and to be able to see some sort of representation of the ground?

 

Thanks in advance.

[jcomm 5,890]

Yes, you can even get CAVOK :-), and at cruise altitudes you have blue/purple/dark skies ahead depending on Time of Day, but there is no other representation of ground features than the rw and some taxiway lighting, as well as Terminal building areas. Rws have a generic representation according to type, but if sloped, the slope will be represented, although visually not very evident - you'll feel it in the cockpit though :-)

 

I believe that in the future both XView and PSXView will get updated to perform even better. Using two computers connected through a highspeed net, preferably your local segment, also made FSX and X-Plane perform better when running on the 2nd PC, but that might be because my rig is an "old" i5 2500k @ 3,3 GHz with a GTX650Ti 1GB graphics card...

 

As I also pointed out, in my case a bridge to Flight Gear would be great, specially for those who do not use FSX or X-Plane and would have to install it just for the purpose of running PSX with external visuals created by one of those sims. FG would probably be softer if run in it's "External FDM" mode.

 

Ideally, if someone ever took the task of build a Earth Visuals simulator just to use with PSX, it would be great :-)

 

I would also like to call your attention to another aspect of using PSX with FSX / P3D. 

 

I used to use ASN ( as a matter of fact I am a beta tester for HiFiTech ) with FSX and P3D. This is a superb weather injector for this simulation platforms. It has, furthermore, a total integration with PFPX, and PFPX can import the weather from ASN for it's flight and PROG calculations.

 

Now, PSX uses it's own, proprietary World Weather Model. This weather model is probably one of the most sophisticated ever designed for a PC sim, and I prefer not to dig into details here because it would take a lot of lines to describe. While PFPX can build flightplans for PSX, there is yet no way to feed it with the weather data internally generated by PSX, so, if you choose to download weather data from PFPX's own sources, or from ASN, it can very well be unmatched by what you're going to fly through in PSX.

 

Honestly, I prefer to use PSX's Weather model, make my flightplans, and then use the ACARS functionality in PSX to fetch the weather forecasts from PSX's virtual weather services. 

[~Craig~ 10]

Sounds great, thanks for all the helpful information.

 

Time to start saving the pennies.  :smile: