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Guest Eagle

Ken and others, thanks for all your help - but -

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Guest

Thanks for your help, but unfortunately I cannot respond to the original posts, as the thread has been locked!?!It seems that one cannot mention a different sim here in a post, as it will get locked, very undemocratic. I mean is it not healthy to compare different strengths and weaknesses? Is it not the competition between different products that makes the next version better? How boring it all would be if everything was the same! So at the risk of being locked or erased, I think I want to make another point:I have spent some more time with Fly!2 and yes, there is a fidelity there that os not present in FS2002, but the requirement to have to fiddle around with settings and ini files etc is just horrible. My original point was that out the box, with all sliders set to max, FS2002 runs extremely smooth. If I do the same in Fly!2, I do not get the same result. When I buy a product I do not expect to have to fiddle around to get it to run on a fast machine, regardless if the end result is a smooth performance. And now that I have fiddled around, and again thanks to all of your help, I was overwhelmed with the great replies, I find that it is still not that smooth, especially on landings there is a lot of stuttering on the final approach moments into any builtup airport. To me that's when smoothness counts and just doesn't work well in Fly!2.And lastly, after all the mega-sized patches that I downloaded and installed, I still have a feeling deep inside that TRI could have done a lot more to optimize their code for speed. Brendan the producer should have spent more time with the product than getting free helicopter rides and a free rating at Bell Helicopter in Fort Worth, Texas. Deep down it feels that I bought this product and helped pay for Brendan's helicopter rating, which would be okay if he had invested more time in getting a higher quality product out the door. Too bad!AlexPS to all those thinking of giving me a rating, if you are going to give me a negative rating, at least comment on why. I got rated neagitvely by Nikster and he didn't even have the courtesy to say why.

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Guest Josve

I think there has to be something wrong somewhere since I haven't fiddled with anything to get the sim running....I have now had Fly2 installed on two different machines,and not having any problems at all.I haven't tweaked anything exept the runway lightning in the fly.ini file.So I guess I have some unike systems....But after reading the fs2002 forums at avsim and the other site,there seems to me that there is a huge amount of people having problems running fs2002 also......Johnny"I'LL BE BACK"[div align=center]http://www.avsim.com/hangar/fly/josve/fly2/vas.gif][/div

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Alex,I also have had no problems as long as I kept the settings in an appropriate place for the system I was using. I have now run Fly!II on everything from a PII-300/192/Blaster to a P41.7/512/GeF3. I will agree that there is more tweaking involved and that the sim isn't for the person who isn't willing to learn the optimization ropes - regardless, she ran with no stutters out of the box in all cases when I didn't overdo the settings.Yes, since the sim was forced into publication before it was finished, large downloads are required for some items.The biggest deal: Improperly designed scenery. The main problem I've run into (it appears you have too) is wonderful new airport sceneries that have been overcooked. New airports have been proliferating at a high and very welcome pace, but more and more I'm seeing them loaded with too many buildings, too many models, too many trees, basically WAY TOO MANY POLYGONS.I don't know which airports and city areas you've downloaded and are flying into, but try diferent sceneries from different authors. For a comparison, download all of Allen Kriesman's TM airport sceneries and fly into them - then try some from other authors - see the difference? Allen knows that you have to keep polygon counts in proper balance and he doesn't overdo his sceneries. His airports have enough detail to make flying into them a great experience - but he doesn't try to represent everything - voila! - great frame rates and good scenery at the same time. In many cases, performance problems have far more to do with over-zealous scenery design than with Fly!II. Add to that Terrascene and a complex aircraft and you can bring a powerful computer to its knees.


Randall Rocke

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Allen knows that you have to keep polygon counts in proper balance and he doesn't overdo his sceneries.Thanks Randall. Nice to know that somebody is noticing this. Personally, I try to keep all my airports under 20,000 polygons max. I also doublecheck to make sure that the polygon count does not exceed 20,000 when two or more airports are close together. This is usually not a problem, because TM objects have low/high polygon versions for each object.Biber has also gone through lots of trouble to make sure his models are frame-rate friendly (with low/high poly versions). He should really be commended for that.I would love to populate an airport with tons of static aircraft and ground objects, but it would just kill frame rates.You may have inspired me to finish my Oklahoma airport package. At last count I had over 20+ airports modeled, including OKC. I will try and finish this package for uploading.And, if Fly III every becomes a reality.......Allen

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Guest

interesting discussion,I think polygon budget is very important but we should also pay much attention with texture sizes.In terramodels, Allen has provided textures in two sets ; 128x128 and 256x256, whereas all my models have 256x256 textures.If a scenery is to much congested with 256x256 textures it is a frame killer as well, even though the polygon count is low.It is very easy though for a developer to cut down the size of a texture by half using a paint program.I used a balanced combination of 128x128 and 256x256 textures in my LTBA scenery and frame rates have been quite acceptable.I would suggest every fly scenery developer to read the manual of terramodels, it contains very valuable and guiding information on polygon and texture matters.Allen, your Oklahoma for fly! was terrific, it will be a joy for us to have a fly2 version as well...all the best,Biber

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Biber,Good point about the texture sizes. I had forgot about that !Allen

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Guest nycflyer

I have personally been trying to keep poly counts low, but in NYC, the airports are BIG and close to each other. The combined poly count of say JFK, LGA, or EWR and NYC reach into the 70000's. Adjusting the med detail radius also affects the visible buildings radius, so once you set that to be over say 10 miles, the scenery becomes very demanding. Perhaps a future version of FlyII can separate the building drawing distance from the med detail texture radius, so we can have better control over it exclusively with distance hiding. It would be great if the distance hiding was related to the height of the object so that prominent buildings stay in sight while smaller, less visible ones were hidden from a distance.-----------------------Scott CannizzaroPPSEL-KTEBAMD xp2000+ - GF4 Ti4400G4/400 - Radeon32

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Guest Eagle

To McGuinness - I would not give you a negative rating, in fact I don't give anyone a rating. Who am I to rate someone? You are certainly entitled to your opinion. I have tried that other sim and found the scenery to be good at some airports and others not so good. I don't know how many times I have installed and uninstalled that program. Just two days ago I reinstalled - tried it for two days and will now uninstall it. Why I put myself through this torture I don't know. Must be something wrong with me. Actually I have a very difficult time trying to fly the planes. I must have downloaded 30 planes and still can't get them to perform as well as the ones in FLY.But that is me. If you enjoy that sim - great - I like FLY.Yes some of the airport sceneries make my computer and me cry. So much there. I will certainly try Mr. Kriesman's scenery. It got so bad that I started designing the airports using the FLY editor. I didn't put a lot there, but I do enjoy FLYing into an airport with something there.All of you out there keep up the good work. I certainly enjoy this forum and I especially enjoy FLY.Keep FLYing

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Biber and Allen,I am now running into some new airports that seem to be out of control in the 256x256 texture area. I am handling it in some cases with drastic changes in my Render.ini - others, well I'm giving up and deleting them from my drive. It's too bad, because it's obvious that these persons put a lot of effort...even love into their creations. The end result being that only someone with a GF4/128 and some major tweaking can use them.I am getting so concerned that I was thinking of posting in the General forum to see if we could somehow get all scenery designers somewhat on the same page...but I also thought some may take this the wrong way and get hurt feelings.The only way I thought this could be done positively was to list those that I have found to hit the mark in balance of ambience and performance - kind of laying out the ideal sceneries to emulate?


Randall Rocke

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