Just bought an addon called PrecipitFX which is supposed to improve the rain and snow effects as well as adding some other effects such as water spray from the tires, contrails etc.

 

Looking at the various settings in the DX10 SF I found one setting in particular that caught my interest. It's called 'Exclude Particle Effects' and reading the DX10SF documentation I guess it would be a good idea to uncheck this option for this particular addon (PrecipitFX).

 

Is there anyone in here who already tried these two products together that could share their experience what settings work best?

Just bought an addon called PrecipitFX which is supposed to improve the rain and snow effects as well as adding some other effects such as water spray from the tires, contrails etc.

 

Looking at the various settings in the DX10 SF I found one setting in particular that caught my interest. It's called 'Exclude Particle Effects' and reading the DX10SF documentation I guess it would be a good idea to uncheck this option for this particular addon (PrecipitFX).

 

Is there anyone in here who already tried these two products together that could share their experience what settings work best?

 

This is from their site. I don't have the utility though.

 

Works for you

PrecipitFX is compatible with all popular texture enhancement add-ons and weather engines available for Microsoft Flight Simulator X and Lockheed Martin Prepar3D.

If you fly with DirectX 10 enabled in FSX, you must convert newly installed PrecipitFX effects using SteveFX's DX10 Scenery Fixer.

Yes, that is the procedure with all similar addons adding effects that you need to allow the SF to convert them. However in this case I was more wondering about the specific setting mentioned in my previous post.

 

At this time I chose to uncheck the option since I think that would be the best thing to do in this case if I understood the SF documentation correctly.

Yes, that is the procedure with all similar addons adding effects that you need to allow the SF to convert them. However in this case I was more wondering about the specific setting mentioned in my previous post.

 

At this time I chose to uncheck the option since I think that would be the best thing to do in this case if I understood the SF documentation correctly.

 

Let us know how it works out. I may be interested in it. Thanks.

 

Edit: Maybe Steve can chime in here.

Hey,

 

i am a PrecipitFX user, too. Very nice effects, but be careful The contrails may be very frame rate impacting. The documentation of the fixer says, that converting particle effects may alter performance. You must convert the effects, otherwise you will miss them in many viewing angles or will see flickering. But the contrails, especially when converted, are really heavy on frames. On my PC, i didn't notice at the beginning, but then i was flying in busy areas with lots of AI around, all using the new contrails, and my frame rate decreased significantly!

All in all, i like PrecipitFX, but i installed it without contrails. They are too heavy for my system :(

 

Matthias

Thanks a lot Matthias, just the kind of input I was hoping for!

 

Will keep what you said about the FPS hit using the contrails effect in mind should I see the same thing.

Well for me too, huge fps hit when using contrails and my system is pretty good and very well optimized.

Yes,

 

people using P3D don't have the problems, perhaps P3D is better in rendering such volumetric effets, there is no real volumetric effect in FSX. And it seems to me, that it's not the graphic card being the problem, it must be something else.

Second, frame rate will only decrease, if there is more than your own contrail in view (AI traffic), or if you increase the time period showing the contrail effect. Using the contrails "out of the box" doesn't show a significant change in frames. So it's not PrecipitFX to blame but me, who wants a blue winter sky with lots of contrails around (standard FSX contrail effect is displayed 4 min now on my system  ).

 

Matthias

How/where do you change the time the contrails are showed before they vanish?

I use a little program called "FlusiFix".

It is from 2010 and in german. It helps in editing the .cfgs and is very helpful in adding some FSX tweaks. Somehow a FSX LeatherMan

I guess, there is no english version available, so i don't know if it will be helpful to you. So perhaps you should search the internet. I know, that each FSX effect has a certain lifetime defined via its fx.file in the FSX EFFECT folder. For me, it's the file: fx_contrail_l.fx. Open this file and modify the [particle 0] section, change the entry Lifetime = 240.00, 240.00, that's the particle lifetime in seconds.

 

But please, please be careful, make a backup of the original file. Editing files in FSX can completely cash your istallation!

 

Matthias

Thanks, will do some experimenting but guess I'll start with the default settings and see what it looks like and how my system perform.

 

And thanks for the warning editing cfg files but I'm quite comfortable with that ;-)

Yes,

 

people using P3D don't have the problems, perhaps P3D is better in rendering such volumetric effets, there is no real volumetric effect in FSX. And it seems to me, that it's not the graphic card being the problem, it must be something else.

Second, frame rate will only decrease, if there is more than your own contrail in view (AI traffic), or if you increase the time period showing the contrail effect. Using the contrails "out of the box" doesn't show a significant change in frames. So it's not PrecipitFX to blame but me, who wants a blue winter sky with lots of contrails around (standard FSX contrail effect is displayed 4 min now on my system  ).

 

Matthias

Well, yes I was referring when I had one or more AI with it's contrails in sight. It gives me a huge fps impact indeed.

To be more precise, I'm locked at 30 fps and it can decrease to minimum of 20, 21.

I'm on FSX DX10 with Steve's fixer.

With no PrecipitFx contrails but the default one i get cero fps impact.

I'm not saying it is not  great app, it is really great but with the contrail effect un checked, at least in FSX.

This info may help someone that is experiencing the same fps loss I was and didn't now where it was coming from.