24 minutes ago, captain420 said:

What about bush league's xcubs?

https://www.bushleaguelegends.com/addons/msfs/msfs-mods

1 hour ago, captain420 said:

lighting, not lightning.

Lighting AND lightning are problematic.

1 hour ago, captain420 said:

And I really hope they fix that dog awful color adaptation where when you look down at the cockpit, the top half where the sky shows is so overexposed that I can barely make out any detail. This really bothers me. It's like if we focus on the cockpit panels, then we lose out detail in the skies.

I hope they leave that exactly as it is because it's one of the most realistic effects in any sim, modeling how our eyes change from (relatively) dark to bright environments. You can turn it off in the user.cfg if you don't like it.

2 hours ago, bonchie said:

How have you toned down the overblown lighting in SU5?

Lighting?  Or lightening?

I find all lighting problems, color problems, contrast, brightness, difficulty seeing in shadows can be easily fixed by pressing the Alt F3 key (if you have Geforce experience). You can save 4 settings

If you like small Cessna's I think the JPLogistics 152 mod is great.

57 minutes ago, scotchegg said:

I hope they leave that exactly as it is because it's one of the most realistic effects in any sim, modeling how our eyes change from (relatively) dark to bright environments. You can turn it off in the user.cfg if you don't like it.

I have tried turning coloradaptation both on and off, and the results are still overexposed skies. Yes I believe the effect is realistic but it needs to be toned down. It's overly done for me at least that's how I see it on my end. Your results may vary depending on your display and particular setup.

9 hours ago, bonchie said:

 

So my question for you is what now? I'm about to finish my CFI in real life and enjoy GA opts in small planes so I'd like to stay in that lane for a while. Are there free realism mods for the Cessnas and Bonanza? How have you toned down the overblown lighting in SU5? Any other must have freeware addons I should install immediately? Performance tweets I should know about?

The best GA planes are unfortunately not free.

Longterm these two are worth a look - though not freeware -

 

 

 

Thanks for all the tips. Honestly, the freeware improvement mods have been enough to get me going. The rest of the sim is already there except for AI traffic issues. It's nice to not have to run 50 add-ons at start up to get a decent experience.

Just used the TBM 930 w/ improvement mod to go from KHKS to KDTS (Destin, FL) just to see how the sim would render the outer bands of the now tropical storm passing through. It did it perfectly. Flew the RNAV, broke out about 1200ft. Plane felt great on the approach and in the landing phase. My ancient GTX 970 had zero issues despite the heavy IMC and the FPS were smooth except a couple of time when I tried to pan too fast. It was shocking at times.

Maybe I'm just honeymooning right now, and the flaws will slap me in the face soon, but there seems to be a lot done right compared to my experience in the Alpha and with the early release over a year ago. I can't imagine going back to P3D after this.

Edited August 30, 20214 yr by bonchie

6 hours ago, bonchie said:

Maybe I'm just honeymooning right now, and the flaws will slap me in the face soon, but there seems to be a lot done right compared to my experience in the Alpha and with the early release over a year ago. I can't imagine going back to P3D after this.

Happy you've got it working!  🙂