Starting over is painful.

[bjohnsonmn 0]

We've (mostly) all been there.  You purchase new hardware.   Your add-ons get away from you.  You make a bad tweak and hork up the entire system.  Time for an FSX rebuild!  As much as we've been told by folks like Froogle, and others, we are as bad at documenting our tweaks as developers are at commenting their code.  Selfishly, I am posting this topic in hopes to take a stab at creating a tweak guide, that is based on trial and error, documented, and includes a checklist. (All aviators, real life or virtual love checklists).

 

I offer up my rig as the guineapig.  I'm looking for experienced tweakers, and tweak authors who are willing to work on the tweak guide to end all tweak guides.  In my case, the system is dedicated to FSX and VRC, and that's it.  Also, the goal is that this guide allows for optimization without processor overclocking, or hardware mods. (Proper cooling, installation, and power are all assumed to be required)

 

If you are interested, experienced, and know what you are doing, please respond to the thread, and I'll add you to the list of folks who want to be a part of this project.  Again, I am looking for those who have successful experience, and are willing to work on this project long term, not those looking for instant gratification.  If there's one thing I've learned, it is that instant gratification is unrealistic for FSX users.

 

Thanks,

Brad

[cmpbellsjc 2,960]

No need to go through all the hassle of creating a tweak guide when this has already been done before. Or in other words, no need to reinvent the wheel.

 

Avsim has its own tweak guide that is compiled from best practices gathered from multiple sources over the years.

 

Seconds, Word Not Allowed has a tweak guide that you can find by googling Word Not Allowed FSX.

 

Lastly, in my opinion if you want the most comprehensive tweak guide that exists and also covers getting Windows setup properly for FSX, try NickN's "Bible" setup guide that can be found over at simforums dot com. It's a VERY long read and guide but imho the best one out there as I tried the other two that I listed but they didn't go to the depths that Nicks did and didn't yield the same results for me.

[Blaze 102]

Brad, 

 

Why would/do you want to recreate the wheel there are a lot of configuration guides already?  Nick Needham (Nick N) has one of the best that he's updated over the years.

 

 

Edit: Jim beat me to it!

Edited November 4, 2014 by Blaze

[arnobg 0]

There's tons of threads on this forum alone if you do a Google search that are "trial and error tweak guides"

[bjohnsonmn 0]

The responses thus far are illustrating the issue that I am facing.  For example, I've completed Nick's guide, and my sim is still acting very strange.  I've tried the long list of tweak guides that have been listed above, or parts of each.

 

My goal: take the best from what is out there, formulate it into a wiki like format, and provide a checklist that one could use to document which tweaks were done, and what the changes were that were made to various config files and settings.

 

And before someone offers a LMGTFY, I've done that... My hope is to provide results and screenshots for each tweak.  Further, I'd love to have what I'm going to call "Optional" sub tweak lists.  This would include the tweak guide for FSUIPC, PMDG, ORBX, ASN, etc...  Perhaps even references to YouTube videos that show what others have done in that regard.

 

B

[W2DR 1,859]

 

Magic is unreliable and hope is not a valid method. You're wasting your time. This subject has been beaten to death. +1 on the advice above.

 

Doug

[WfordJr 1]

There is no one "magic bullet"

[JSkorna 137]

It's all been done before.

[Nurmblitz 59]

Its part of the hobby. With my new hardware I gained some fps, but got the OOM's. It must be fun.

[fluffyflops 1,845]

I just reinstalled every thing from scratch about 6 weeks , took near on 5 days to reinstall it all, make sure you defrag that hdd is my advice after you put it all back on. 

 

On another note I recently split up with an ex girlfriend three weeks ago Saturday, to make sure I got out of the house and didnt  get myself down,  I made a rule of no flight simmming or ps3 until I got a "date" took me 2 1/2 weeks and got a date from a girl I met speed dating last week and im going on Friday night for a drink with her. (i would of rather of been flying the new 319 than talking rubbish to 17 new girls every 3 mins) 

 

I now cant wait to fly that 319 on saturday afternoon... just shows what a bit of perseverance gets you. 

[bjohnsonmn 0]

I should have known better than to try to rally folks on a message board.  There are many ways to skin the FSX tuning cat, and my hope was to build a tool to feed all of these various techniques into a single starting point.

 

Instead, I get a number of anit-social LMGTFY, it's impossible, or nice try responses.

 

If anyone is interested in providing meaningful assistance, guidance, or productive thought, let me know.  Replying, just to get your name on a thread is not helping.  Offering a list of sources that have worked for you to be complied into a list, is helpful.  Offering to help take screen shots is helpful.  Offering to proofread is helpful.

 

Best,

Brad

Toot...

 

Funny!  Sometimes we need that little mental trick to get us out of a pattern and get something done.

 

One caveat, if someone is using SSD's (Like I do), then you wouldn't want to defrag.  But, there are SSD conditioning and configuration tools that are worthy of running through, though I haven't used ons.  If asked to produce it, could you list every single tweak, change, and mod you performed over 5 days to get it done?  I'd love to see the tool I have in mind turn into that mechanism that is used to do just that!

 

Best,

Brad

I just reinstalled every thing from scratch about 6 weeks , took near on 5 days to reinstall it all, make sure you defrag that hdd is my advice after you put it all back on. 

 

On another note I recently split up with an ex girlfriend three weeks ago Saturday, to make sure I got out of the house and didnt  get myself down,  I made a rule of no flight simmming or ps3 until I got a "date" took me 2 1/2 weeks and got a date from a girl I met speed dating last week and im going on Friday night for a drink with her. (i would of rather of been flying the new 319 than talking rubbish to 17 new girls every 3 mins) 

 

I now cant wait to fly that 319 on saturday afternoon... just shows what a bit of perseverance gets you. 

[JSkorna 137]

And to think that one place and tool already exists!

[bjohnsonmn 0]

Where?  And before you say this Forum, I should tell you I am not a moron, nor do I like to ask for help without trying things on my own first.  At this point, I've done a rebuild a number of times over the last few years, and this time, I will make it more than just one more lap around the forums.

 

And to think that one place and tool already exists!

[fluffyflops 1,845]

the only tweak i use is the bojote tweak website, DX10 fixer and disablepreload ,  textures at 2048

 

I think what Jim is saying is there is a wealth of information about tweaks on the website.

 

And yes it was tricky but it got me out of the house, although when the 17 girls at speed dating asked me what my hobbies were, I declined to tell them the RNAV onto rwy 27 at KSAN, I just said dogs and power kites

[cmpbellsjc 2,960]

The problem is Brad, there are no new tweaks or combinations of tweaks that can be guaranteed to work for all setups.

 

All anyone can do is use the Avsim, Word Not Allowed, or NNicN guide and then tune/tweak from there if it's still needed.

 

There are just too many combinations of hardware/driver/OS to say this "new" guide will be guaranteed to make FSX sing for everyone.

 

Even Nicks guide which worked best for me still had me making a few adjustments that weren't in line with his recommendations.

 

While it's valiant that you want to start a new guide, there's just not anything new that can be added that hasn't already been documented in any of the three existing guides. There's no magic tweaks left to be found and each user will still need to experiment a little to see what works best on their setup.