JimmiG

You're probably wondering how I got into this situation. I'm actually not quite sure. For some reason the engine in the C152 cuts out and refuses to restart the moment I pull out the carb heat. Happened twice now, conveniently the first time it happened on final. The second time was...less convenient.

I believe this is the prototype version. It does have the advantage that you can use the hat switch and thumbstick at the same time, but to be honest the ergonomics look worse overall, the production version looks more refined and ergonomic.

I received my Echo controller a few days ago. The thumb stick is similar to a standard Xbox controller, which means it's very sensitive at the default settings. You will have to tweak it until you find a balance between sensitivity and non-linearity that feels good to you. Same with the rudder "pedals". It doesn't compare to a proper yoke or flight stick of course, but it's definitely usable with some practice. The layout of the levers, switches etc. feels surprisingly intuitive, but the placement of the hat switch is indeed not ideal. If you want to look around without letting go of the stick, you either have to contort your left index finger, or awkwardly reach over with your right thumb. I assigned the two shoulder buttons on either side to look left and right, which works when you just want to glance left or right in the pattern for example. You could also just grab the mouse while holding the controller with your left hand I guess, or use VR/TrackIR. Other than that, it would have been nice with analog triggers for your toe brakes, especially with tail draggers which are prone to tipping over. Personally I would also have preferred just 3 throttle levers with a bit more spacing. It's easy to move the wrong lever if you aren't looking due to how closely spaced they are. However those are minor issues which you mostly get used to after a few hours. I think they did a good job given the price and size of this thing.

I too have a full setup with rudder pedals, throttle quadrant and yoke, but since I also use my computer for work and productivity, I have to clear the peripherals from the desk after each flight and then set everything up again the next time. This gets tedious when you only have time for a short flight since the preparations plus cleanup can take almost as long as the flight itself. I've been experimenting with using an Xbox One controller, but obviously the lack of axes is a big problem. How is the sensitivity of the thumb stick on the Echo in use? How well do the rudder "pedals" work? Also, does it get annoying that the hat switch and thumb stick are on the same side? This seems like a design flaw to me, since it means you have to let go of the stick when you need to look around the cockpit. The Yawman doesn't seem to have this problem, but the Echo certainly looks more attractive and feature rich.

Ok so I did some more experiments to confirm. I wanted to determine whether an Xbox account that has previously been used with MSFS2020 gets "tainted" with non-applicable MSFS2020 World Updates as part of Microsoft's "Let's dump every single FS2020 addon you've ever even looked at funny into FS2024 whether it's compatible or not" policy. What I did was set up a brand new Xbox account with a brand new email address on a completely different computer (laptop) that has never had any version FS installed on it before (or any other Microsoft game for that matter). I then started a 14-day Xbox Game Pass Trial and installed FS2024 fresh. What I found was that it will still enable all World Updates and City Updates by default on a brand new installation with a brand new account on a brand new computer. It even enabled those parts that have the MSFS2020 logo. This can also be confirmed in the game, for example the cliffs of Dover have a weird hand-crafted 3D model superimposed on the actual terrain when the UK WU is enabled. So it seems the default and Microsoft-recommended way is to have all WU's and CU's enabled since this is the default on a brand new install even before you manually go into your Library. So this is what a new player would experience if they don't touch any settings after installing the sim.

Well, I just uninstalled FS2024, deleted all the profile folders, and then re-installed it. It seems all the World and City updates are enabled by default. Even those that were originally released for FS2020. WU1, 2, 3 etc. are all enabled and set to "Streaming". So in order to get the best experience, I need to manually look up which World Updates were released before FS2024 came out, and disable those? For example, Nordics is enabled ****even though it's a clean install and I didn't touch anything in My Library**** So if it's enabled, I get FS2020 WU5-style scenery in the Nordics, not the new FS2024 scenery which is supposed to be more detailed?

I've been trying to figure this out for hours now but I still don't understand the behavior of World Updates in FS2024. According to some forum posts, they are included by default and don't need to be enabled anywhere. Others say they can still be enabled (Steaming) or disabled, and this makes a difference. The idea is that you can disable a WU if it interferes with a third party addon. It's also very unclear whether a WU comes from FS2020 originally or if it shows up for everyone. I can't tell what's "supposed" to show up in a clean FS20204 installation, since I also own FS2020 and some entries seem to have carried over. Makes me wish I had set up another account for my FS2024 purchase to simplify things. For example, what about WU II USA? It doesn't have the "MSFS2020" icon, which seems to suggest that it's actually the FS2024 version. Or did they just forget to put the MSFS2020 logo on it? The only sub-entry that has the MSFS2020 logo is the "Points of Interest" at the bottom. Does this mean everything from this WU except POI should be Enabled in FS2024? Or should I disable the entire World Update? If the WU is actually for FS2020, why do the Airport entries not have the MSFS2020 logo on them? Here's another example with what appears to be a mixture of FS2020 and FS2024 components. Are the "MSFS2020" entries carryovers from my FS2020 license or is the entire WU only meant for FS2020 even though some of the sub-entries *don't* have the MSFS2020 logo?

Seems to work fine for me after some initial testing, but I need to use it for longer to make sure it doesn't crash on longer flights. Getting 80 FPS over major cities now instead of ~40 and it looks a lot smoother too. Since I have a 170 hz monitor with VRR, it's easy to perceive the increase smoothness. It also masks the micro-stutters that can happen from time to time. Input latency is of course still the same as it was at 40 FPS, which is especially noticeable when panning, but as long as you tweak settings so your base frame rate is well above 30, it's fine, especially in a flight sim which isn't twitchy like a first person shooter for example. It's not a magic fix that will make your 10-15 FPS feel like 30+, it's more for just increasing smoothness when you already have a decent frame rate.

Yeah, I play almost all of those games. I'm a huge fan of ETS2. The feeling can be quite similar to flight sims, with beautiful scenery passing by, exploring new areas etc. It's very relaxing. You need a decent steering wheel (€150 and up), so it's not super cheap. I really like that it's more structured than something like P3D or X-Plane, with jobs boards, leveling up, earning money etc. ATS is also good, but I would wait until they've finished the rescale project and made it the same scale as ETS2. Cities Skylines is obviously a totally different game, where you build and manage cities. A lot of it comes down to creativity and how much you enjoy that. Anyone can create a functioning city, the hard part is making it look nice and designing efficient interchanges and traffic systems. Check Youtube for some amazing cities people have built. Farming Simulator I played for a while, but it gets extremely repetitive and frustrating in the long run. Ploughing fields just isn't that exciting :smile: You can hire AI helpers, but the AI is so bad you'll constantly babysit them. Elite Dangerous I just couldn't get into. Played for ~15 hours and realized it would take me hundreds of hours to get a decent ship. Ships are 70 million and up, and missions pay 50 - 100k, a good trade route will give you a few thousand per ton in profits etc. They've made it such a grind in order to make people stick with the game and buy all the expansions, but for me it had the opposite effect. It's not a space sim so much as a "being poor and not finding a decent job"-simulator.

I think the big difference between FSX/P3D addons and X-Plane is "polish", which applies to many of your points above. FSX design teams generally consist of more people, with higher development budgets and more testers. Many X-Plane developers are still one-man shops or very small teams. For me, that's part of the charm of X-Plane addons. It's not unusual to just get a direct download link to a .zip file that you extract and dump into your X-Plane folder, where as FSX addons have installation wizzards, professionally produced PDF manuals, control panels, automatic updates etc. It also means that some of the smaller X-Plane dev studios don't have the resources to perfectly color-match and edit ortho photos or produce that photo-realistic 3D interior. As long as the price reflects this, I'm generally OK with it. However, "Quality" or "polish" is something reviewers should take into account still. When you pay money for a "product", you expect the overall experience to feel professional.

If I just download via the browser, FSS downloads are super-slow. I use Free Download Manager with 30 simultaneous connections, which speeds it up considerably. I have the same problem with FTX Central - trying to download new libraries from there takes forever. Downloading from Google Drive takes a minute or two.

Well, everyone did their best to deny this bug, but guess what.. It's actually fixed in XP 10.50 RC1! It just goes to show that the development of this sim would progress much faster if people didn't deny bugs and errors.

Just updated. The water reflection mis-alignment that I reported perhaps 2-3 years ago is finally fixed. No more ships that look like they're hovering over the water, or reflections of land that are offset by half a mile etc.

I see. Well it's a long video and I kind of just scanned it quickly toward the end. Anyway I just picked one up based on this, and it's definitely smoother due to the different spring mechanism. On the regular yoke, the springs are directly attached without the gears, which is what causes the creaking and gripping. The gearing definitely smooths it out a bit. It's not perfect but then again, this is not a $1000 yoke.

Well someone must have done in the past 2-3 years... Besides I filed a bug for the mis-aligned water reflections introduced around XP 10.10 - 10.20, and that was ignored.

Obviously the first thought when you see a message about running out of "memory" is to try and figure out how to add more memory. Unfortunately, as stated before, and unlike most other simulators available now, P3D can only use 4 GB of memory (actually, 4 GB of virtual address space) PCI-Express videocards don't really run out of memory, either. If a program uses more video memory than available, it will automatically begin to use system RAM. This causes a massive performance drop, but doesn't produce any error messages.

This issue has existed for quite a while (at least since 10.30, maybe even before 10.20) and I'm wondering why it isn't getting fixed. It seems moving the shadow quality setting to the highest ("Melt your GPU") actually reduces the draw distance compared to high: High: http://imgur.com/PRlnzjz MYGPU: http://imgur.com/jWe9adT The shadows do not disappear completely at the highest setting, but the draw distance becomes significantly lower. Also, it seems to only happen from the 3D cockpit view, while they look fine from external views.

I agree. There are plenty of very, very good freeware and payware airports for X-Plane, but this one in particular is closest to the OrbX "feeling", with photo-realism, dense vegetation etc. I would love to see more X-Plane airports from this developer.

Definitely sounds like you have installed to the default "Program Files (x86)" location which is not a good idea with P3D. I wouldn't recommend disabling UAC since it's a security feature. Without it, any program you run on your system can run with full privileges which is a huge security risk these days.

Going from 4.4 to 4.7 GHz is a ~7% higher clock speed, so that's the absolute maximum increase of FPS that you can expect. So if you were getting 25 FPS at 4.4 GHz, under ideal circumstances (no other bottlenecks), 4.7 GHz would give you about 26.7 FPS.

Well no need to be sorry. All the i7 owners who are turning HT off are essentially turning their shiny i7's into i5's too

Could indicate a hardware problem, but as stated above, it can happen occasionally for no apparent reason.

Running on the DX10 API is not the same as actually taking advantage of all the tech. Compare FSX to Crysis, which was released in 2007... Visually and rendering-wise, FSX is more like a 2001 - 2002 AAA-title, at best. Preapr3D v3 looks more like a 2007 - 2008 game/sim. However it runs at about 20 FPS on a high-end system due to the rendering engine still being outdated and CPU bound. Modern systems probably run the original Crysis at about 300 FPS... I've been into computers and games/sims since the C64, and flight sims used to be the most technically and graphically advanced titles. However some time around the time of FS2002 - FS2004, they began to fall behind, probably in part due to backwards compatibility. When Aces closed down and development of FSX stopped, it's obvious that it would fall behind even more hopelessly, since no progress was made until P3D several years later. P3D is getting there, but it still has a lot of catching up to do before it can be considered a "modern" rendering engine. Aerofly FS 2 and X-Plane have sloped runways.

The loading time is reduced quite noticeably. Once the sim has loaded, there's no difference. This was true for both X-Plane and P3D on my system. Since you're already running the OS from an SSD, it's not a huge benefit. An SSD for the OS is essential these days, but for games and sims, not so much. X-Plane can probably take advantage of 32 GB RAM if you really push it. P3D is still 32-bit, so it can only ever user 4 GB RAM (actually Virtual Address Space), no matter how much you have in your system. The GTX 1080 will help when running higher levels of AA and when turning up the sliders for shadows, clouds etc. in P3D. So I'd say: 1. GTX 1080 is $679 2. 16GB Memory $70 3. 1TB SSD is about $420