>>Then this disaster hits ! These folks can't be expected to go>out and buy machines that are "spec'd" to the hilt by what>they would call "experts" who know about, RAID 0, PCIe, Core>2, Dual Core, 64 Bit, Vista, DX-10, 2 gigabytes of special>high speed ram, special and specific model number high end>video cards with abundant memory and special drivers. Their>extreme edges of knowledge are "Pentium", "VGA" and for sure>"Dell", maybe. Now if they did go out and manage to actually>buy a decent machine, does anyone in their right mind they are>going to suddenly become tweaking experts, ".CFG" file>editors, and folder-file sorters & eliminators, just to get>the dXXXed thing even remotely reasonable to view without>being nothing more than a "slide show". >I did buy the new machine, but certainly not the top end. As it sit's now, I haven't tweaked anything regarding files. Only changes in the "settings" menu, which are higher than default, except for water "off".At this point, fps ar much higher than a slide show. I set the limiter at 29, and get close much of the time. Might drag down to 14 once and a while. Looking at all these many postings/replies, it appears that owners who are having rather good success, are more ignored than not. I just can't go along with the slide-show comment. Too many are getting much better with just a few slider settings.L.Adamson-- Athlon64 3800/Geforce 7600GS 256MB/1 gig ram/1600*1200*32

I dont know guys, i am still running the fileplanet beta and i have settings between 50-75% PLUS unlike most of you i play with the matrox triplehead at 3840x1024 which REALLY taxes a system and i see a constant ~20fps as long as im not in a major city or on the ground. Even flying over KSEA i get 20fps. On the ground can be kinda gnarly for my framerates depending on where i am but for the most part the beta runs decent. I was going to buy the final game as soon as i saw it but i think im going to hold off and keep playing the beta since it appears that the final game runs slower than the beta. Where i am now with 20fps is the bare minimum that i can play with or i get headaches after 15 mins. I dont want to take a step back in performance by going to retail, at least for now.Vista will also cut the framerate by 20% so forget about that. Ive been pondering the idea of installing vista rc2 here and then installing the fsx beta on it to compare the framerates between xp and vista but i dont have the time for now...Even with the problems that the game has with shortsightedness in supporting current/future cpu design trends, i still am very happy that we have such a product available to us. It has gotten me so interested in aviation that i am starting flying lessons. Id say that even with all the negative chatter about this game that the fact that they managed to get someone like me interested enough in aviation by using their product that they decided to become a pilot is a kudos to their overall work.Dave

There has been much disappointment about FSX underutilizing the second core. I look at the second core as an "addon savings account". All an addon must do to use the savings account is to run outside the FS process and use SimConnect. (I recognize this is not true for for gauge addons that run inside FS).

How would you feel if you went and bought a brand new car, and then found out it wouldn't go over 35 miles per hour. Then when you reported that, you were told that if you "tweak" around with the ignition, and then buy a complete new fuel injection system coming out next year that MIGHT help some. You are also told, "your problem" is that "we actually built this car for uninvented new systems that are expected to be completed within the next one to three years".Caveat Emptor. Look, I empathize. I bought FSX Deluxe last week and have been flying it for almost a week. I was one of the first on the board to complain about the fps. But this is a product which needs lower expectations (i.e., in terms of performance and features which are usuable), I think far lower than previous versions. Once you begin with that, then you can adapt the FSX settings to suite your system. The end result may surprise you as it has me.

Hey Bob...no offense intended. Just a little tongue-in-cheek! I don't expect you to compromise any core values over a game.

>FSX is like a rose; to appreciate it's full beauty, one should>watch the delicate bud slowly unfold to eventually reveal it's>full, glorious majesty... :-abduct Oh Bill,Did you stumble onto some of those old substances from your college daze?:-lol

Interesting point this: "Blur integration". I assume you are talking about the fact that standard TV video/film at 24/25 frames per second has within it a certain motion blur which aids the viewer to interpolate it as much more than that speed. Add to that the rock solid and unwavering fixed frame rate and you have a recipe for smooth viewing without a particularly impressive rate.Unfortunately, simulations present one fixed frame with no motion blur and therefore for the illusion of smooth motion we need a bit more than video/film standard 24/25 to satisfy us that things really are smooth, plus a little more still for the odd stutter management and general overhead.We recommend, ideally, a frame rate of at least thirty for our aircraft because they really do perform better at this speed, and the flight model control is so much more satisfying at this frame rate. This matters less for aircraft which emphasise the procedural over raw flying.Personally I have been able to get 45 frames + per second in FSX with a bit of tweaking, on a system which is not exactly cutting edge, but there is a price to pay. Apart from the obvious Autogen tweaks (ie: no autogen or cutting down the autogen file sizes as other threads have already explained ad infinitum), I have discovered that setting my video (Nvidia) card to "performance" rather than "quality" or "high quality" has an enormous impact on frame rates. With the "performance" setting there is a little shimmer in the scenery but the plus side is that I can run pretty well full res textures and still get a fluid movement, and textures load in focus and much quicker.This is not ideal but is better than waiting for textures to come into focus and other irritations. Even more ideal the new generation processors and video cards would help. (I was due for an upgrade anyway!)Of course the default AI does drag things down a bit, but as has been pointed out, it is also quite difficult to run FS2004 with everything maxed. I think we will see very soon all sorts of wierd and wonderful tweaks and third party contributions which will improve performance a long way, similar to (as I recall) almost exactly the same complaints and resulting solutions when FS9 first appeared. It's early days yet (not even released in half the world), so I think things will improve in time.Regards to all,Rob Young - RealAir Simulations

My reply wasn't aimed at one particular person, but in a multitude of people. There ARE people out there complaining about no backwards compatability, and there ARE people out there complaining about not being able to run it at full settings, and there ARE people out there complaining about the sim before they've even purchased it, and saying "It's the end of the franchise!!!"If that isn't DDDDDDDOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMM!!!!!!!!!!!!111111111!!!!!!!!!!!!OMMMMMGGGG!!!!!I don't know what is...

>Wow Pete, that's some really insightful commentary.>>You know what else always appears right behind the 'whiners'? >Jacka$$es like yourself who for no apparent reason decide to>jump on folks who have a legit problem and decide to air it>out on a flight sim forum. Last I checked, thats a big reason>why these forums exist in the first place (certainly not the>only reason mind you).>>As for including money in the case---if they stuff $4000 in>there, I for one would be a happy camper. Perhaps if put into>my shoes, you would feel differently. Perhaps when you make a>$219 loan payment on the 15th of every month for a machine>that was supposedly going to give me a next gen experience>with FSX, then you can talk about 'whining'? >Pike, you amaze me!Why should I care if you run out and buy a computer, and then find out that a program doesn't meet your expectations? If you are having financial problems, than it is a personal problem, not something that can be resolved by whining about a "game" which is not necessary for survival, by any stretch of imagination! We all make decisions in life, some smart some not so smart, and we all have to live with them knowing that they were our decisions at the onset!>Come on here and blast 'whiners' when you've ponied up that>kind of commitment to a product. Or when you have made your>living making addons and just found out that FSX will likely>destroy your business. Or stolen your work outright. After>all that, come on back and get at us 'whiners'. We'll be here>with a whole basket of tomatoes for ya.>LOL. This last statement borders on paranoia! BTW... my initial response was not directed at you or anyone in particular, just the naysayers and whiners in general! You chose to take it personally and reply with an insult!If you read the forums there are plenty of people who are actually quite satisfied with FSX, we can always want more, but reality is just that.....REALITY.Pete S.

Yes I replied with an insult! What in the world do you call your little diatribe? A freindly critique? Are you totally daft?You came on the forum and basically spewed insults at folks who are simply frustrated with a product. Yeah its just a 'game', a 'game' that as a flight instructor I happen to use in my business of training pilots. If it means so little to you, why are you here? And why act surprised that spit and vinegar would be replied to in kind? Paranoia? Hardly. Just sick of individuals like yourself who seem to think its better to complain (and insult) people who don't share your wonderous views about a product. Especially when you aren't in the same shoes as those people.As for my financial health---obviously I'm doing pretty well if I can afford a $4000 computer.Lastly, why should you care if people are upset over the way things look to be turning out? Is it really necessary to jump on here and start calling people 'whiners'? It would be like me making my first post in the thread about how stupid you are for drinking the MS Kool Aid. Can you at least understand that?

<>Well, Pete's been working on a version of FSUIPC for FSX for the last 5 or 6 months now. His new version of FSUIPC actually uses SimConnect underneath to access FSX internals. Any pre-exising addon that uses FSUIPC is still gonna need one of those for FSX, and Pete is still providing one. He still has his value added features also (the ones that require the license key to activate).But, I know he was happy that we finally added something like SimConnect to Flight Sim because he was beating on me back during FS98 development (when he took over the interface started by Adam's FS6IPC) that MS ought to be providing a documented interface for this sort of thing - it only took us 6 or 7 years to finally agree with him :-> Well, I supported it back then :->, we just didn't have the manpower, management support, or corporate culture to pull it off back then. He was also getting tired of figuring out where we had moved stuff every version, and the info was getting buried deeper and deeper in the code (from the access standpoint that Pete's code is looking at anyway). This time around, his only problems getting access to certain variables is when there was a bug in either SimConnect or the documentation for same, or we just hadn't added access to that type of data yet.I've never quite understood this particular phenomenon, people claim we should add features x, y, and z just like addon such and such has, and then if we add those features to a new version, people claim we are stealing the work of others - we can't win for losin' :->Tim

This thread is now turning into War and Peace ... please lock it :)

If your post wasn't aimed at one particular person, why did it include references to one particular person's post? You just didn't like the fact that I threw the whole thing back in your lap. I've not seen anyone crying about backwards compatibility in this thread. Or anywhere else. Maybe I've missed those posts, though I doubt it. 99.9% of complaints have been about performance and concerns over 3rd party development (for future products, not FS9 stuff). Rarely have I seen ANY Chicken Little type posts. I agree that some people will always complain for the sheer joy(?) of it. And for every one of those, there are people who love to pounce on them and call them 'whiners', 'crybabies','whingers', and accuse them of yelling DDDDOOOOOOOMMMMM blah blah blah----and never once confront the issue brought up in the first place. Personally, I don't see the difference between the two.And not once have I seen a post that said 'Hey--you like FSX? You're an idiot!!! You're enjoying FSX? You're a a really excited user!!! How much is MS paying ya?!!!!' The insults only start once some tough guy decides to go after someone with VALID concerns.

I've just seen an article that is a bit worrying, something about messages coming up to do with gauges that say they aren't registered. And apparently it's going to cost the developers $500 a year to register themselves to stop these messages, in other words killing off freeware and smaller developers who can't afford it. Not to mention it will drive up the price of add-ons even further.If it's true, then it's not good at all. And I have to say that now I'm beginning to doubt the wisdom of pre-ordering FSX...

My sliders go to Eleven!!! Come on, this is ridiculous. By your logic, MS would have been doing us a favor by "dumbing down" the slider settings to half of what they are now. Gee, then they could get rave reviews in a year or two by releasing a "patch" to reset the sliders to where they are today. You ought to think your argument through a bit more, because it's really quite laughable. Honestly, WHO CARES where the freaking sliders are set, as long as you're getting GOOD PERFORMANCE?! I ran FSX on a mid-level P4 at the Avsim Conference, with beautiful results using midrange sliders. Try actually using it at these settings before you start to complain with such nonsensical gibberish. Or do you even own a copy of FSX?