You know how it goes, you have the perfect setup, layers and layers of cool add-ons, the real 'As Real As It Gets' deal.

 

And then you get the bug, the glitch the awful stutter, the texture screwup from hell that makes your simple pleasure a pain. In my perfect set up I realised that for 'sometime' I had been putting up with pauses of up to 3-4 seconds, frequently, while flying. Testing began,but I couldn't isolate it. I got more and more frustrated with the sim, in the end just not flying for several days, odd behaviour that even my wife commented on! So, I bit the bullet and decided to go scientific and methodical on it,

 

Turned out it was my UK airport package, a new upgrade caused the pauses, only reverting to the previous version stopped the problem. But, that was fine with me. I was happy to fly pause free! My only problem was my home airfield, the upgrade had been nice, and the only way I could keep it, was to set up my own folder in Add On Scenery, copy the upgrade into that and run it as an Add On. But that worked fine. Had the older airport package, but now with my new and funky home-field version.

 

My test flight, checking for the horrible 4 second pauses, was the first flight I had ever had in RL, north out of EGNY Beverley to the coast and back again, I flew in real time with AS16 and REX clouds, it was Guy Fawkes Night with a terrible 25 knot north wind and rain squalls, the sun was setting and the sky purple. I flew up out of my home field, over the wind farms to my home town, out to the lighthouse and began the return journey, the lights had gone on in Orbx England and they looked gorgeous. The sun slipped down behind the horizon and everything slipped from purple to dark blue, tinged with orange.

 

As I approached my homefield, looking for the crescent shaped resevoir that marked the start of the base leg, I realised how bloody awesome FSX was. It was giving me an exact replica of my first flight, I have a full cockpit simulator with a Pearl Throne Thumper (vibration feedback device) for added oomph. The weekend long ordeal of tracking and tracing the glitch was really worth it, my sim is fantastic, the Orbx terrain accurate, the AS16 weather 'atmospheric', and all the little things, the AI software, EditVoice Pack, UK2000 airfields, three screens on Nvidia Surround, Saitek controllers and Air Manger cockpit gauges on iPads all added to a totally awesome flight that lasted only an hour, but totally replicated my first ever RL flight.

 

I might want to kick FSX on the teeth today, but tomorrow, when that glitch is fixed .... it will be totally worth it..... until the next glitch!

I spent more time fixing FSX then I ever did flying it.

The trick to FSX is......K.I.S.S.

Great story.

 

A lot of time is spent working out the bugs, tweaking. But once setup OK then its a charm.

 

The KISS theory works as well....basically just stop adding stuff and fly....but we all get enticed into new stuff when it comes out and then the problems begin again.

 

Bryan

The trick to FSX is......K.I.S.S.

Now that is good advice!

The trick to FSX is......K.I.S.S.

BINGO!

Or have a nice selection of images to restore

The trick to FSX is......K.I.S.S.

Ding!  Ding!  Ding!  We have the winning answer!  Yes, keeping FSX simple makes it run well on modern computers.  Fill it with tons of add on stuff and 4096x4096 textures and it will slow to a crawl.

All said . K.I.S.S..  We all want to try new things. But the the best is to fly other planes, go to different parts of the world in the sim, etc. Spice it up a bit.  Addons can kill the whole thing.  Too many anyway.  One only realizes how nice simming is, when like me, you not able to fly it for a year or so... You really miss it guys.   I did.

 

      Enjoy.

JohnGoncalves

Too many complex addons will slow FSX significantly, but if you keep it relatively simple, then, with a good PC, it works well. I am often asked if my sim is FSX or something else, it goes to show that FSX works and looks good, still...

I have what I need, but run at very moderate settings on DX10, so decent fps everywhere and no OOMs. And I find its only the 'updates' that get me. I've switched all auto updates off, from windows to nvidia, ipad apps to utilities. As I've just found, the 'new' may just wreck your set up...

It depends on what you want I think. My FSX sucks badly on my cpu, and use FS9 for tube flying with all bells and whistles. All max.

For low and slow, FSX is better, but even then..

But we want more.. and thats the pittfall.

I'm going to decide today whether to go to P3D or fix FSX for the 500th time. I'm really tired of trying to restore from seemingly self destructive events in FSX. Everytime I start the program I hold my breath. Charlie is right----we probably expect too much from an old program dealing with new advances in scenery and planes. I've been with Flight Simulator since the very first one. I'm thinking its probably time to either quit or move on to something that shows ongoing improvement that will keep me from sticking my head under the hood. My frustration level is about maxed out. I have a very good computer that I simply do not want to waste.

 

Bill W

I may be tempting fate here but I can't remember when I last had a problem running FSX! I now have FSX:SE on my new build but the same was true with the boxed edition on my old system. I have quite a few add-ons including A2A, RealAir, Just Flight, REX4, ASN and some ORBX regions. I don't think that the problems people have are solely caused by FSX but are more a combination of individual systems and the background programs that are running. If it was just down to FSX we'd all be having similar problems and clearly many (most?) of us are not. I think that it's more just the luck of the draw.

FSX:SE is better than FSX but P3D is better than both.

 

I know, I have all 3.

 

And Xplane X which another story altogether.

 

In short, get P3D.

I spent more time fixing FSX then I ever did flying it.

 

Me too, but that changed when I moved to P3D. I spend so much more time flying.