Bill Womack

As a developer, you can add night lighting to any photoreal scenery. As an end user, it's not possible. All it takes is having access to the aerial photos, a photo editing program, and the FSX SDK for resampling. Having said that, it's a bit of a painstaking process to learn in the first place.

One thing I've found that makes a big FPS difference on my system is using the Orbx Day/Night switcher in "Day" mode, which elminates the lighting effects in cities. They still look fine at night, but the performance is improved all around. That might help you if you're not already using it.

I just signed up. It's never a bad thing to have more FS doodads for my iPad!

There are a number of problems with running the airports this way, which is why we don't recommend it. They weren't designed as stand-alones.

I tried the mod tonight, and it went quickly and smoothly thanks to your instructions. I like the feel of the elevators now - it's much more precise without the massive detent to fall into. All in all a definite improvement! thanks, Bill

The Katana and the A2A Cub are my two favorite super-slow birds. They're winners, through and through.

This looks really intriguing. I've been dissatisfied with my Saitek yoke "feel" for a while now, so I think I'll give your mods a try. Thanks for posting!

I did Cushman because I wanted to, plain and simple. By the way, it's been my most popular scenery ever in 10 years of producing airfields, so I think I called it right.

You know what's fun? Try KCMW with the A2A Cub on floats and Accusim. You can grab a paddle and cozy that little bird right up to the fueling dock. It's as close as you can get to a canoe sim in FSX. ;-)

What is a hobby anyway, if not a place to put a whole bunch of money you didn't have in the first place. :(

Looks like the texture sheet that the wave animation effect uses is corrupted or missing on your system.

Controlling an FSX plane with the mouse is by far the hardest way to do it. Adding a joystick - or even better, a yoke and pedals - will dramatically simplify the task.

As I understand it, it doesn't matter if P3D supports TrackIR if you have EZCA. In such a setup, it's EZCA that communicates with TrackIR anyway, so problem solved.

At the bottom of the Shade GUI window, there is a set of tabs (day 1, day 2, etc.). One of those tabs is called "set and forget". By clicking there, you can back up your current default values, then click "set and forget current Shade values" to burn in the chosen shade set. From then on out, that set is active in FSX until you change it without having to open Shade again.

There's an option to make the changes permanent as well. I use Shade all the time, but I haven't launched it in months.

I agree with Dougal, and for exactly the same reasons. While I was flying it, I found the QW 757 a much more pleasant experience. The systems were deep enough for me (getting back into airliners after a break of several years), and it looks pretty good. The CS version looks great, but I could never come to terms with flying it, and I found their documentation a bit hard to get through. QualityWings does have great support, too.

Heh. I get it. Irony. :(

Yes! I'll definitely +1 any mention of a new 172. Actually, an old one would really float my boat - like the grotty old workhorses that many of us did our training in. That would bring back fond memories, for sure.

I haven't noticed that effect in SP1c, and I doubt it was intended. You can, however, emulate it using the ENBSeries plugin. It's got a DOF switch, and it actually works amazingly well. It's not without a performance impact, however, and I quickly grew tired of the effect. You can see it in this video, but it's hard to make out unless you watch in HD:

It's super easy to just export that 800 camera set and import it into the 900.

I've got that Logitech stick you're showing, and it's a surprisingly solid, dependable little thing. When I built my cockpit pod, I went in search of an ambidextrous stick I could use as a left-hand side stick, and this was one of the only ones I found. A year in, it's still working great and feeling good.

I didn't even recognize the area - so that's Fitchburg, huh? I did a photo shoot there a couple of summers ago, and it's on my scenery to-do list once the New England stuff gets underway.

There's a vector-based river with a bad altitude paramater in the bottom of that trench. It's mostly likely set to 0 AGL.

To get TIR support, you'll need to get the latest games update for your TrackIR software. I don't know if they've added Flight to the list yet, but if they have you'll still need to update the game list to use it.

Shade actually does something different from ENB. Essentially, it's playing with the darkness (or lightness) and color of the shadows and highlights on-screen, which can be combined to make the light look different at various times of day. You could use it to increase the contrast of a scene, leave the scene dark values the same but lighten the highlights, or any number of other combinations. Fortunately, it ships with a bunch of presets, do you don't have to make yourself nuts trying out all the possible combos. I haven't heard of anyone having trouble actually running it yet.