Bill Womack

I thought so. That's a well-documented problem. See the Orbx support forums for more info.

Are you using Orbx's FTX UK?

On my rig, frames are not an issue at all. The Colt is super-smooth, and suitably grotty looking.

Yes, sorry, I should have mentioned that I've been testing it. I don't know what their release plans are, but it's looking and flying really good at this point.

My new favorite bush plane is Sibwings' An-2 Colt. What a beauty! Although I'm still having trouble believing I can say that about a Colt. ^_^

One of the first things I remember thinking about flying a real 172 was how much less comfortable the rudder pedals were than my sim setup. They're really cramped in the real deal. I'm glad Saitek didn't simulate them too well. ;-)

LOL, you made my day with that comment! Wow... Freight Dogs was so long ago now. I still like the idea of a package of smallish airports that comprise their own little world, so to speak. Times have moved on though, and users expect so much detail that it's hard to do that kind of work for that price anymore. Still, it was a fun project at the time, and I think the concept is still sound, just perhaps not the price. ;-)

I voted Android for the most selfish reason possible - my next tablet is going to run on it! Yeah, I've got an iPad 2 right now, but I'm itching to make the switch. No other high-minded reason beyond that. ;-)

Every developer has a "personality" in terms of how their products work, how they look, and where their primary focus lies. I have always associated Flight1 with deep systems simulation, as they do a significant business training real-world pilots. They tend to emphasize the functionality over looks, and are a bit obsessive about it. That's not to say that their work looks bad, but that's not their main focus. Carenado, on the other hand, tend to turn out planes that are just killer to look at, with amazing textures over very finely-tuned 3D models. This has especially been the case lately, as they've really been turning up the heat in the graphics department. Their systems simulation is a bit average, but if you're a Carenado fan then you understand that going in. Point is, if you've been around the FS world long enough, you know what to expect from your favorite developers, and what you'll need to just live with in order to enjoy the good points of their work. There are stand-outs like A2A and PMDG that knock it out of the park on both graphics and systems, but they tend to take ages to produce new products, and rightfully so given the work that goes into them. My approach is to find developers whose work I really enjoy, calibrate my expectations, and use their products in the spirit in which they were created.

Are you using the highmemfix=1 tweak in your fsx.cfg? That looks like the graphic corruption you can sometimes get with resource exhaustion, especially if you're not running the highmemfix.

I'm a big fan of the Skymaster, too. It's just funkier than the 182T, IMO.

My first thought was the RealAir Legacy, but its wings grow out of the bottom.

I tried using a 128GB SSD for FSX a while back, and it got filled up fairly quickly. Bear in mind that I don't run a ton of addons - some weather and environment packages, 20 add-on aircraft or so, and a bunch of Orbx scenery. Originally I bought a 64GB SSD for Win7 and a 128 for FSX, but I ended up getting a 256GB for FSX and using the 128 in another of my computers. You might be able to get away with 128 for FSX only (although it'd get really crowded with the OS on there too), but my guess is you'll want something bigger at some point. BTW, when it came time to reinstall FSX on the new larger drive, it was a snap. I used the free Macrium Reflect software to make an image of the old FSX drive, the removed the drive and added in the larger one, making sure it was assigned the same drive letter. From there, I just expanded the old drive image onto the new drive and within minutes it was up and running, hassle-free.

It wouldn't be hard for FSTramp to mess up your Accufeel if it somehow corrupted the dll.xml file. And corruption of XML files is frighteningly easy to do - they're very picky about formatting. I've seen a whole bunch of addon installers that bork the dll.xml or exe.xml files. I'm not saying it's the case here, but it's not unusual.

It looks like resource starvation to me. Your computer is dumping the higher-level mips of the terrain images because it can't keep up with the updates. In other words, something is overloading the system.

Yep, what Ryan said. In the absence of true multi-point lighting, developers cheat a little and add static AO in the way Jigsaw showed.

A lot of aircraft and scenery modelers are baking ambient occlusioin into their models these days anyway, so it might look a bit overdone if it did work.

I picked up the B55 last night and had a very enjoyable first flight in it. What a looker! This is the best VC work I've seen from Milviz yet; although granted, I only have a handful of their planes. This Baron will be giving me fun for a while, I predict. And yes, Tom, I supported the home team. At 15 bucks, it's hard to pass up! ^_^

Aaaagh! That picture of Graceland triggered my PTSD from growing up in Memphis. My first apartment on my own was a couple of blocks away from there, and twice a year - at Elvis's birthday and his "death week", our whole part of town was so overrun with tourists that it was practically gridlocked. We started planning vacations for those weeks, much the same as Londoners plotted to get out of town for the recent Olympics.

It's in FTX Central, at the top under Tools --> Scenery Library Configuration --> FTX Scenery Library Insertion Points.

Guys, the Orbx scenery comes with a configuration manager that lets you set where in the order of your installed sceneries the FTX stuff will reside. Once you set the insertion point, you can all all the stuff you want above or below the Orbx files and it'll stay that way.

I'm having a bad case of C-series lust. Sexy!

In the meantime, PDX itself has changed. There's a beautiful new multi-story Port of Portland admin building between the tower and the parking garage, and several runways have been extended, with their attendant changes in taxiways. Still, it looks better than default.

I highly recommend a download manager like FlashGet. If your connection is slow or dicey, it really helps to have a program that can resume downloads successfully.

Anyone who's been around long enough to have a sense of FS history knows that each of these devs have earned their reputations - for better or worse.