Hi,

All's well now but I didn't recall that the other downloads were required to install the Alaska Wilderness Pack.  I'm posting this in case someone makes the same mistake.  I tried to give the post a title that a search would easily find.  When I only downloaded the pack and tried to select Alaska nothing was said about missing files; only got a message saying downloading and the only option was to Cancel.  My CPU was at about 10% when it's normally about 2 or 3 % s0 something seemed to be happening.  Probably looking for the missing files. I'll check things out for awhile and then install Flight Toolkit. 

Jim F.

It might be easier to simply install flight toolkit and then use the Flight Addon Manager to install the Alaska Wilderness Pack. This also provides a good overview over what is installed for Flight. Oh, and if you own FSX or FSX-SE, it's well worth converting the global scenery using the toolkit.

Hi Andreas,

Alaska is installed and seems to be working properly so I think I'm okay on that front.  As I almost fly exclusively from the cockpit, scenery conversion will likely be my first objective.  In fact, reading references to scenery conversion was probably my main reason for returning to Flight.  I fully expected that Flight's far superior graphics  rendering of the natural world be continued by some company other than MS.  This doesn't seem to be the case.

Jim F.

Hi Jim,

 

while the global graphics of the converted files are a vast improvement in quality compared to the stock fsx graphics, don't expect it to be as good as in Alaska or Hawaii. But it's certainly worth converting. Then try getting the Maule off the ground in stormy weather in the highlands of Bolivia ;-)

 

I use the following lines in a batch file to run the conversion. If you but it in a batch file (text file with the ending .bat) the advantage is that you can rerun it if required or if there is a new version of the converter:

 

MkDir FSX-SE_Base
"Flight Toolkit\ContentConverter" FSX /l:fsx_se_conversion.log /i:"d:\Program\Steam\steamapps\common\FSX" /o:"FSX-SE_Base"
Pause

 

Here are two examples how the converted files look like - Lisbon and London:

https://youtu.be/tCmYCn03tXQ

https://youtu.be/ZlOcB2yZlIE

Hi Andreas,

It seems that it's well worth the effort!  After reading posts here and at FS Developer it seems that an unmodified version of the FSX files is needed.  I'm just about sure that I'm going to remove the Steam version of FSX, that I have now, and go back to a completely clean version of Gold.

There are just so many things to check out that it's hard to know where to start.  When I'm not checking out posts in the various forums I've been in Flight trying to get a feel for it before I change anything.  I'm not 100% sure that by installing Toolkit there won't be some code running concurrently with Flight.  I don't want to blame some anomaly on the Toolkit when it's already there in Flight.

I currently run a program to minimize the number of other Windows' tasks running while I'm in Flight.  I don't need Java updating while I'm trying to evaluate Flight.

I appreciate the bat file and will use it.  I understand I'll have to edit it for my installation.  And any other programs or suggestions you provide will be equally appreciated.

Thanks, Jim

the steam version of FSX is fine to convert, what they mean by 'unmodified' is that you don't have addon scenery, like Orbx, that probably wont convert properly installed. But of course, as you already stated you will have to point the bat file to the correct install location.

The steam version of FSX supposedly has a lot of bug fixes so I wouldn't go back to gold if you have both...

Also, Alaska requires several other DLC packs (around 5 or so),  It was split into multiple packs because we planned on having other DLC areas eventually and that would hopefully reduce the amount of stuff you needed to download (so content could be shared between multiple DLC)