spotlope

That was an interesting episode of the Amazing Race, wasn't it? From the way Marcus was landing the Lear, it was clear that a certain amount of crash tolerance was really dialed-up in his simulator. He kept slamming the jet into the runway at a terrifying, gear-collapsing rate of speed, and all it did was keep rolling. I'm pretty sure in real life they'd have been hosing bits of him and his plane off the tarmac.I had the chance to fly a Level-D 737-400 sim a few years back, and even though I wasn't as familiar with 737 systems then as I am now, I was reasonably comfortable in the cockpit. With some verbal help from the instructor pilot, I was able to land at KSFO without much bouncing. The passengers might not have been happy with me, but they all walked away with no injuries. Naturally, there's more to flying than that, of course.

Bless you, Pete. I've enjoyed FSUIPC for many years, and it just keeps getting better. You're a rock star, sir.

If Pete fixed it, then it's time to celebrate! Drinks are on me.

What do you want us to acknowledge, Ryan? That some users experience g3d.dll crashes? Absolutely! We know that, along with everyone else who has ever read an FSX forum. As I said, we've devoted a great deal of time trying to figure out if our sceneries played a role in the crashes. We've picked our stuff apart, examined crash logs, looked at FSX output, and nothing we've found has given us any evidence of a specific problem with our sceneries. We found some missing library objects and released an Orbxlib update that addressed that, hoping it might ease the problem. Other than that, I'm not sure what else we can do until something more actionable surfaces. Just because we're not lying prostrate on the floor muttering "mea culpa" doesn't mean we're not concerned about fixing the problem, but you can't fix that which refuses to be diagnosed!By the way, it looks as if Pete Dowson might be hot on the trail of a solution. Fingers crossed!

If you knew how many hours we've spent trying to get to the bottom of the crashes, I doubt you'd say that. A number of Orbx devs, myself included, have spent many hours flying, testing, experimenting, and comparing notes, all in the service of trying to fix the problem. Threads get locked for many reasons, but us sticking our heads in the sand is not one of them.

Looks kinda like Steve Jobs.

Mine was the DreamFleet 737. Was that FS2000 or 2002? It's been so long now, I forget. What a fantastic plane that was at the time!

I use the 0.2 version with no NGX problems as well.

Bowerman is designed to work with the freeware Olympic Peninsula demo area too. The PNW package is great, but it's not required for this field.

I flew on an Alaska Airlines 737 just last January, KPDX-PHNL - which is a bit farther than KSFO-PHOG, I believe.

This might be one of those cases where having the "HIGHMEMFIX=1" switch in the GRAPHICS section of your fsx.cfg would come in handy. I've had that parts-missing problem before, and this fixed it.

I'd be interested to know the answer to this one as well. When I asked a while back, the consensus was that ENB only supported single-monitor systems. If that's changed, I'd love to know about it.

A better option would be to use a disk imaging program. My favorite at the moment is Macrium Reflect (freeware). I used it a while back when I upgraded my FSX drive from a 120GB SSD to 240GB. I made a Reflect image of the FS drive, put in the new drive, and expanded the image onto it. It was fast and accurate and every little setting was exactly as it had been before. Bear in mind though that if you're backing things up, it's best to also have a backup of your system drive. A lot of addons (and FSX itself) make registry entries that you'll need in order to run the sim from a restored backup.

I'm pretty sure we're not supposed to get political, even in the confines of an analogy.

We'll have to wait until X-Plane 10 ships to have any real idea of how it'll do. However, I take exception to this artificial distinction between the "flight experience" and "eye candy". Having a realistic world to look at all around you is a HUGE part of the flight experience. I guarantee you that if you had the most realistic flight dynamics imaginable and used them in a wireframe world, you would not believe for one second that you were flying. Skies are important. The ground beneath you matters. Rivets... well, they count. Every tiny way we can make our simulated world look more like the one outside our windows helps close the gap between computer-generated and reality. Candy tastes good but it rots your teeth. What we've got in our sims is eye broccoli. And yes, I do love me some broccoli.

I've found that it helps reduce blurries - sometimes dramatically - on my rig. That leads me to believe that storage access times are a bottleneck on some rigs, mine included. Having said that, they're still bloody expensive for the storage space you get.

Bernt pointed out that the on switch for the autopilot is on the lower pedestal by the turn right/left and pitch up/down controls. It seems the AP can only be activated using this switch or the FSX engage autopilot key command (Z by default).

Do you mean besides the tutorial that shipped with the plane?

I looked for the "Ready to Fly" panel state in my setup too, and didn't find it. I don't know if it's a system-specific problem, or if that particular panel state was simply omitted from the installer. In any case, I was able to start the tutorial with the engines turning by resetting my default flight to the one that FSX came with (just deleting the startup situation line from the fsx.cfg) - after that, the tutorial began with the proper state for programming the FMC and flying. Give it a try if you haven't already.

I run this combo, and I've noticed flashing when the NGX loads up and goes through its 20-second configuration process. Other than that, I haven't noticed any other flashing in normal flight, including when changing EZCA views. This is just a wild guess, but is there any chance that some on-screen text message is showing when you switch views? That seems to be what causes a momentary flash on my rig.

Sounds like a fat lot of work, Emmsie. I'm glad you finally wrestled the digital beast into submission, though. This bird is worth the effort!

I've reinstalled it 3 times now with the latest from MS. No change.

I run FSX on its own 250GB SSD, and load times simply aren't an issue anymore. Scenery stays crisp (even in milk!), and the sim loads up really quickly. Going from an exterior view of the NGX back to the VC, there's basically almost no texture lag at all. SSDs are still ungodly expensive for their size, but I'm hooked.

I'm having the same problem w/the saved panel states not actually saving all the various setting/switch states. Most notably, the engines aren't running, though they were when I saved the state. Also, I saved a state once I'd gotten through completely setting up the FMC & cockpit for the tutorial flight, but when I loaded it again, a bunch of the perf int data was zeroed out again. Could this have been because my engines weren't running? Ideally, I'd be able to load a panel state and get back to an exact snapshot of where I was when I last saved it. This would be really helpful when time is short and I need to work on my flying skills. Maybe it's just my rig, but right now it doesn't work this way.