P3DV4 More of the Citation 550 and P3DV4

[John_Cillis 2,406]

I am so pleased Carenado updated the 550 to P3DV4 compatibility.  I like it even over the 525, mainly for its autopilot, which works wonderfully.  I slaved the Garmin 530 to the jet in a 2-D popup, so it is handy when I want to fly via the GPS.  It's my favorite Garmin.  Still loving the MSE scenery, it is a wonderful add-on, especially the lower resource intensive v2.

MSE did a great job and it brings the sim up to commercial level sim realism for me.  My neighbors who have dropped by to see it are so stunned by what they see, they can't believe a desktop computer can do all this.

When I look back on the progression from FS2 all the way to now I am still amazed at how rapidly sims developed over the past thirty years.  It is a hard concept to grasp, that some of us have been simming that long.   For weather I have things manually configured so I always fly with a bit of light chop, it makes the flight more realistic and less "flying on rails" that the sim can sometimes feel like in calm air.  I live in Arizona, where the winds are never calm except in the still of the morning.

My favorite DOS based sim was "Flight Assignment, ATP".  I hacked the .exe for that sim so I could change the city textures to light gray from their default yellow.  How did I do it?  I searched for the hex based equivalent of the yellow color value in debug mode, and when I found the most likely candidate I changed the value to that of gray.  Fired up the sim and voila, the cities were changed.  I also had an old program called Colorix, it was a great DOS based paint program that offered for the first time a 360x480, high color resolution.  But on Packard Bell monitors, the mode was scrambled.  I knew it was a sync rate issue, so I debugged the executable and found the string for the sync rate.  I modified it to a lower value and once again voila, the program worked.  I sent the patched executable back to Colorix and they thanked me profusely for what I had done, since it allowed their program to work on a large part of the market back then.  Doing all this was before I started in IT, but it gave me references I was able to use to land my first IT gig.

John

[Tony P 160]

Great shots John!

[rightseat 277]

Good ole' Citation. I too am an MSE fan. I need to see if there's an update for my areas.

[HLJames 2,568]

California packed with adventure...lot to see...love to fly the Long Valley to Bishop....great shots!

HLJAMES

[scottb613 1,188]

1 minute ago, HLJames said:

California packed with adventure...lot to see...love to fly the Long Valley to Bishop....great shots!

HLJAMES

When I used to live in San Diego - we'd make the - looooong - drive up to Bishop for hiking - hiked up over Bishop Pass into Evolution Valley - completely amazing scenery...

Regards,
Scott