FS9 an entire new experience for me

[Camsdad13 64]

Good Morning All,

I had a failure of my hard drive a couple weeks ago. I had backups but when moving that drive disappeared. It may have been a godsend. My backup of fs9 was loaded with 13 years worth of tweaks, textures and programs. I thought I had the best I could get out of it.

I had bought an I6700K, Corsair 16mb ram, Z170 MB, two Samsung 850 SDD's and Nvidia GTX1070 Video card in September 2016. I added a Samsung 55" 4 k led tv as display.

Since my backups were gone, I upgraded to a clean install of Windows 10. I reinstalled FS9 from scratch with add-ons over the last 2 weeks. I converted ORBX textures to work in FS9. I like it better than GE Pro. I used an Autogen tweak. I have Autogen that rivals FSX. Rex Over drive and ASE. UT USA, Canada Alaska and Europe. Custom AI traffic I spent some time on. FS Global Mesh.Then reinstalled all my sceneries and Textures.

I think my old install had a corrupt Terrain CFG along with a lot of other things. The blurries were horrible even after tweaking till the cows came home. The Autogen wasn't great and not much of it even though the settings ere turned up. Frames were good but had periods of stutters like something was taking long to load.

The new install is awesome. Everything runs smooth as butter. Virtually zero blurries. I think that was a fs9 limitation. Everything loads incredibly fast. The Autogen is something else. Its like a whole new sim.

Point to this is if you have an old install like I had and tweaked so much you forgot what you did. If you added textures that were  great 12 years ago and forgot even what you added, it may be time to rebuild from scratch. I had a Windows 7 Pro that too was tweaked and tweaked again.  I'm very happy with my outcome. I have frames 60 with no drops anywhere in full screen (60hz limitation) in windowed I'm in the 200 FPS with zero stutters.

I know we have FSX and P3D. Even with my system, I could never get where I wanted with either game. Mostly because of panels I love in FS9 that wont work in FSX or P3D. Right now, I'm very happy with my FS9 install with Windows 10.

 

 

 

 

[kiwiflyer45 123]

I have been struggling with this issue. As you described, I have years and years of tweaks in FS9. At the same time I know I also have corrupt files in various places, inside and outside FS and they are causing more and more problems. I know the best thing I can do is format my hard drives and start all over again. But the thought of trying to do that with FS9 has been too much to even consider. I mainly use FSX-SE and that's not such a big deal as the tweaks are all recent and both Steam and Orbyx make re-installation pretty painless.But FS9? The thought freaks me out as I know how many thousands of hours I've put into it. (You think thousands of hours is an exaggeration? One of the features of Steam is it logs how many hours you've spent "playing the game." You would be surprised how quickly it hits the thousand and then two thousand mark. I am rapidly closing in on logging as many hours in FSX-SE as I have logged in my RW log books. And that's not counting nearly 15 years of FS9!!!!!

So maybe, just maybe, I will bite the bullet and go for it. My system is becoming more and more unstable and the frustrations are mounting. You may have just inspired me to finally fix things with a completely fresh start

Thanks for sharing your experience

Ian

[Johan_Dees 84]

Recently I bit the bullet and reinstalled FSX again.
Disabled for the heck of it, the nvidia threaded optimisation, and all of a sudden FSX runs great!

It runs do smooth that I installed different ground textures, and some 3thrd party planes and I am a happy simmer now.
So happy I finally deleted FS9, (yes with all those thousands of hours in it).

I will not install airports in FSX, since I discovered I didnt see them on landing because of the focus of a good landing.
Dont miss any of them now.

So, goodbye FS9 for me now.. finally after a lot of reluctance. FSX looks now so much better.

[Camsdad13 64]

Ian and Johan,

 

Both of you have been around for a long time.

Johan, You had a website that had some great files I had used.

Ian, I understand what your saying. I've probably devoted over 40 hours reinstalling fs9. I know I don't have nearly as many add-ons as you have.

I may have to take both of your advice and make the jump to FSX or p3d. The panel thing is the only thing really holding me back. I have three panels, one for the DC-8 71/73, one for the 727 which have custom gauges and the RFP 747 classic that I've added on too. These panels I cant migrate to FSX or P3D. Maybe I startrt playing with them to get them to work.

 

Jeff

 

 

[sascha 314]

Congratulations Jeff, what autogen tweak did you use please?

[Camsdad13 64]

Hi Sascha, I'll look for it. I travel every week for business so not on my sim computer at the moment. It was a combination of things in the autogen file, terrain.cfg and FS.cfg file. I'll be home Thursday and send them to you. 

 

Thanks for EVO

 

[gaputz 60]

Great post.  I would be interested in knowing your tweaks as well.

I had a similar experience.  I installed a fresh copy of FS9 on a new computer a few years ago and it took me a few months to finally get everything I wanted back in place.  But it was worth it.  The fresh install, on a 64-bit system and a more powerful computer made FS9 a super performer.  So I agree totally.  I had in fact bought a new computer specifically for P3D, which I installed and played around with after buying a number of addon airports and aircraft for that platform.  I underwhelmed by the performance I got when I tried to duplicate the level of immersion I had going with FS9.   Compared to the great performance I was now getting from FS9 at very detailed airports, with complex virtual cockpits and with a vast array of AI traffic caused me to abandon my plan to migrate to P3D - at least for the time being.  I decided to stick with FS9.  Now that was a few years ago and I have to say I am really tempted every time I see the latest addon scenery release but I am still really happy with FS9 and have no plan to move on.  I am going to try to hold out until we see a 64-bit version of P3D or something better.  I probably would have taken that step if it weren't for the vast improvement I experienced when I did a fresh install.  So, despite the huge effort for those of you, like me, who have accumulated hundreds of airports and AI traffic plans, it is well worth it.

Greg 

[sascha 314]

16 hours ago, Camsdad13 said:

Hi Sascha, I'll look for it. I travel every week for business so not on my sim computer at the moment. It was a combination of things in the autogen file, terrain.cfg and FS.cfg file. I'll be home Thursday and send them to you. 

 

Thank you Jeff! Can't have enough tweaks ;)

Sascha

[Camsdad13 64]

In the FS9.cfg file I changed this setting.

TERRAIN_AUTOGEN_DENSITY=10

I have to dig thru my Terrain.cfg and Autogen to see what I changed there.

 

I

[sascha 314]

Jeff, I tried setting that line to higher values (currently at 166) but have not really seen obvious changes compared to 8. So it's probably the terrain.cfg and/or autogen.cfg  which makes the difference.

[AlaskanFlyboy 7]

While I have FSX, I still stay mainly in FS9 for the reasons you describe. I've spent a lot of time and money on FS9 that only an infinitesimal amount would port over to FSX. And it's all running beautifully on my 6-year-old laptop. Perhaps one day when I have enough money to get the computer and comparative FSX versions of all my payware I'll switch over to a newer sim. However, FSX just doesn't have enough new features for me to justify such expenses right now.

Also, I would be very interested in your autogen tweaks, Jeff.

 

[Johan_Dees 84]

2 hours ago, sascha said:

Jeff, I tried setting that line to higher values (currently at 166) but have not really seen obvious changes compared to 8. So it's probably the terrain.cfg and/or autogen.cfg  which makes the difference.

Doesnt matter, there is a hard limit in FS9 what can autogen display. You should know.. lol.

You can up it to 1000 if you like, there will be x ammount autogen per cell.. google it for the x.

 

[Camsdad13 64]

Johan, maybe its a placebo like back in the day when a new version of FSUIPC was released. As soon as a new version was out the forums had posts of increased frame rates :)

Maybe because my fs9 was so corrupted over the years that it looks way better. Who knows. I did fire up fsx and my fs9 looks like it has more autogen. MY FSX has zero addons or tweaks. everything is maxed in settings. I took screenshots but for some reason I cannot upload them here.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/153551788@N08/shares/559123

https://www.flickr.com/photos/153551788@N08/shares/w36556