Hans_Petter

Great article Chris! FU III (with SanFran added) is still on my hard drive. As you know, the X-Plane world is where I spend most of my sim time these days. The water reflections are prettier but the ground handling (lateral friction) still suffers. Hans Petter

Hello friends! I just passed by and noticed some familiar names. As some of you know I'm primarily into X-Plane now. FU III is still on my hard drive but my main problem is the aspect ratio. That is, while I've got two monitors these days they're both widescreen. That's the new standard. FU III, on the other hand, has a native resolution of 800 x 600. For a while I tried various ways to get a windowed mode but it didn't work well. After all these years there's still one aspect that FU III does better than the rest, namely the ground handling. I can get prettier water in X-Plane and 64 bit support. However, I can not get aircraft with proper sideways friction on the runway. all the best, Hans-Petter

Several of us worked on the FU III textures. The texture resolution of FU III allows way better textures than the ones Looking Glass provided. If you extract a sample of the stock textures you'll see clusters of pixels and quite messy transitions. What saves the day is the anti-aliasing that makes it look a lot smoother than it really is. Looking Glass used quite low res black & white ortho-photos and hand painted them. They used a few colors, far less than what the somewhat limited palette allowed. Evidently, these maps were freely available (probably USGS maps) and that's why Looking Glass chose to use them.. Google and Virtual Earth provide far better maps for most regions, especially if you take time to edit them. However, if you implement those and share the result you're in trouble due to quite draconian copyrights. What can be done legally is to look for better USGS maps (public domain) and hand paint them yourself if they're black & white. A better resolution, less sloppy painting and the implementation of a wider selection of color nuances should ensure a much better result. Bottom line, FU III provides a pixel resolution that will support a far more detailed ground texture. regards, Hans.

I've been working on a Super Puma helicopter for years now. It will be uploaded eventually but I want to get the virtual cockpit finished first. Then I've made some custom buildings for a Chinese scenery (Hongqiao by Shane Montoya) and I'm about to finish some animated ships. They run a straight course at a speed of 20 knots and look good along any coastline. I've been experimenting with different approaches to making the wake look right--a large moving vessel leaves a conspicuous wake that's several times the length of the vessel itself. Semi-transparent textures help make it fade out. FU III has transparency but does not support semi-transparency. The latter is useful for fading and can be employed to eliminate jaggies along the edges of a transparent region. regards, Hans

Hi Chris, I just dropped by again. FU III is still on my hard drive but there's a problem--since I bought a new monitor several years ago (and then an even bigger one last year) the aspect ratio of FU III (800 x 600) doesn't work too well. Today all we get is wide-screen. I'd love to run yesteryear's favorite sim in windowed mode but the tweaks and apps that I tried were not good enough. Today I'm an avid X-Plane flight simmer, and to some extent a developer. Still, if I could get FU III in windowed mode on a modern wide-screen monitor I would certainly spend some sim time along the northwestern coast of the US again. I still miss the ground handling of FU III aircraft as well as the general hard-to-define atmosphere of the sim. all the best, Hans Petter

Jim, just one thing -- there shouldn't be any reason to run the modified flight3.exe anymore (DDFix) once you've "opened up" all the rects. Hans Petter

Just an additional piece of info -- the new rects seem to affect the over-the-panel-view. It is easily fixed by cranking up the head tilt factor in the flight3.cfg.I assume this is what happens, when the 3D area is limited FU III shows a "scrunched" forward view. That is, everything from the ground up is being vertically compressed to fit into the assigned window. Then, when the 3D rect is extended down to the base of the panel a larger part of the forward view is being hidden behind the 2D panel. To regain a proper view the head tilt should be adjusted to be able to see the runway. Don't overdo it since real aircraft really do provide a limited view. Besides, we've got the VFR panel option for more scenic views. A proper IFR panel view should show you (at least) the far end of the runway when you're sitting on the ground in a tricycle gear aircraft.I've been using this line lately,head_tilt 340Prior to the drastic rects editing I used,head_tilt 356Hence, if you want to see more ground you'll have to go for a lower number.Hans Petter

Chris fixed the Nvidia line across the panel. In retrospect the "Nvidia line" was the beginning of the problem -- Nvidia driver development was moving in a direction that made FU III rects ("rectangles" I assume) incompatible. First we got the line and that was fixed by ensuring an overlap between 2D and 3D rects. Later a lot of us experienced totally broken cockpits as we bought new Nvidia graphics cards / updated the drivers. The one-pixel-overlap that fixed the line across the panel was no longer enough. Basically, what we need to do now is to abandon rects altogether. We need to get rid of any delimited areas of the cockpit bitmaps since recent Nvidia cards fail to interpret these definitions as intended. The rects were meant to speed up the processing. This was a good idea in 1998 but cockpit views are hardly a bottleneck anymore. While rects were a good idea in the age of Pentium IIs and IIIs they are not needed today.Anyone experiencing this problem will be using a recent Nvidia card, which also means he/she has a fairly new computer. So, Chris fixed the precursor of the full-fledged problem. If your display anomaly is limited to a line across the panel this will do. However, for a totally mangled cockpit we need to "open up" the rects and in effect disable them altogether.

All right, that means that carefully made 3D cutouts is the only way to limit 2D jaggies. In practice this means to avoid 2 step pixel transitions.I suggest that the rects issue will be posted as a pinned topic on top of this forum. We have lost quite a few users during the last year due to broken cockpits. Thus, the editing of the rects to make them compatible with modern Nvidia cards is as important today as as it was to apply the patch a long time ago.Here's a suggestion for a pinned message,----------------------BROKEN COCKPIT FIXModern Nvidia cards / drivers are incompatible with the original cockpit definitions of FU III. Looking Glass used "rects" to define limited areas in which the 3D terrain was allowed to show. This saved some processing power but it's no longer required for modern computers. Further, since later Nvidia cards misinterpret the "rects" we end up with broken cockpits -- 3D terrain shows through the 2D bitmap where it's not supposed to show. The solution is quite simple. We need to redefine all "rects" to 0, 0, 799, 599. Each and every cockpit view should have no more than two "rects" definitions -- one for 3D and one for 2D and they should both be as large as the cockpit image. Delete all redundant "rects". You will need Cockpit Designer (http://library.avsim.net/download.php?DLID=7587) to edit the "rects" and it will take no more than a few minutes to make each of your aircraft Nvidia compatible.------------------PS Currently the Cockpit Designer isn't available from the Avsim library link but it may be back. Another download link may be better.

All right, but 800 and 600 work too. Actually I found one that was way above the image size as I converted aircraft in my plnpile. So, it seems FU III will accept rects that are larger than the image.Regarding larger images, ResViewer will not import anything larger than 800 x 600. That's to be expected. However, it just might be an imposed ResViewer limit rather than an FU III limit even though I doubt it.

I've tried 0,0,799,599 as well as 0,0,800,600 and it seems to make no difference. What is the reason for keeping it one pixel width inside the edge of the image?Regarding the size of the image, would ResViewer accept a larger one? Unless the size is hard-coded or limited we could make some or all cockpit images twice as large, smooth the edges and replace the original ones.Hans Pettter

Stuart mentioned that some of his aircraft looked all right. That would be the ones with "lazily" defined rects where the 3D area isn't being contained and limited to defined parts of the image. Those are the ones we want for all aircraft now and I have started to convert my entire plnpile. Do we need rects at all? I have made everything into 800 x 600 so far but it would be even faster to delete all rects.I mentioned the jaggies along the transparent sections. I tried to fix these through a PhysX transparency AA setting but it probably won't work unless nHancer can be set up to handle this. Maybe future versions of nHancer will. If anyone doesn't understand what I mean, the transparency cut-out leaves some jaggies along the edges since we're working with pixels -- any slanting line will be jagged and the cockpit 2D areas will have slanting lines along the cut out sections. Most of it can look quite good if the designer is careful to avoid any two pixel transitions but it would look even better if AA could be implemented along the perimeter of the 3D area. Modern 3D applications can implement transparency AA but FU III won't smooth the edges of 2D areas unless nHancer tells it to do so.In any event, ddfix is certainly not needed for this job anymore. The standard flight3.exe makes it all look prettier as long as we avoid the Nvidia anomalies by dropping the rects definitions. In retrospect, the need for a one pixel overlap was really the same kind of problem. When Nvidia drivers "see" rects they will tend to process the defined limits as the transition between 2D and 3D, in effect letting the outside 3D terrain show where we should have had a solid 2D section of the cockpit view bitmap. The Nvidia line was really a one pixel line of 3D region running across the panel.Hans Petter

For the last couple of weeks we've been discussing how to make FU III work under Vista / with an Nvidia card. I noticed that the anomalies coincided with recs and put Cockpit Designer to work an hour ago. This was the first time I'd used this app under Vista. It wouldn't run since it was missing msvcp50.dll. OK Vista, here we go again! The "check for a solution online" told me that the application was incompatible. However, a quick web search got me to a site that said that I'd simply have to download msvcp50.dll and put it inside the folder of each program that required it. I did and Cockpit Designer worked as a charm.Now to the point, all we have to do is to forget all we used to know about elaborate recs. Make the 3D window 0, 0, 800, 600 and make Rec1 identical. Delete all other recs. When every defined area is as big as the image there are no anomalies.Here's a couple of screenshots (the old fashioned way, cntrl - alt - P) of todays climb in a Beechjet. I see some jaggies along the windows / along the wing that I may be able to smooth through Nvidia PhysX or nHancer.So, all of you with broken cockpits -- Change the recs of every view to 800 by 600 and Nvidia won't break it anymore :( Hans Petter

There's several issues all at once here. With a properly set up ddfix it is working. I noticed that the start-up screen was of poorer quality. It seems that the ddfix shortcut fails to smooth the fonts and the image of the Beechjet. Well, I can live with a less pretty start-up screen. Then I noticed a different color of the text messages. However, as the embedded image shows ddfix hasn't fixed anything. By the way, it's a print screen screenshot and it was named "screenshot1.bmp" rather than the usual "flt300x.bmp". Further, there's no error message when the sim is closed anymore.So, ddfix is activated and modifies the rendering of the sim but it does not address the broken cockpit issue in my case. There may be things to change in the ddfix.ini that will change this. If I can't fix this there are two option,1) Set up a dual boot and run FU III under XP2) Buy another video card, probably an ATI. It has to be PCI to fit my mobo. It must be possible to get state-of-the-art performance in terms of fps without breaking older sims/games.Does anyone on this forum run FU III under Vista without any display anomalies?Has anyone got ddfix working under Vista?

Win 95/98 compatibility mode results in "DirectX 6.0 or higher must be installed to run FU III" Win 2000/XP compatibility mode runs with no lack of Direct X warning but it looks just as the standard Vista.However, I just confirmed thar ddfix is not launching. Print Screen effects nothing while cntl-alt-P gives me a screenshot. Thus my Flight4.exe may be corrupt. Evidently, it's not an unmodified Flight3.exe since I do get ddfix related error message. So, I may have failed to create the correct file, Vista may have prevented me from making the correct file or Vista may not read it as intended.How about this, you send me your Flight4.exe, your ddfix ini and the dll. Then I really know that we're using identical files.Added: I just got to think of my flight3.cfg. It was modified a long a time ago to implement Laura Doering's rendering option + some other tweaks that have worked fine previously. Is it possible that any of these clash with Nvidia standards? Hans Petter