quantumleap

Phil Taylor of ACES blogged on this very topic of high detailed airports recently.Here'e the link:http://blogs.msdn.com/ptaylor/archive/2008...-then-some.aspxJeff

>There is still a bogus hotel sitting on the edge of the water,>which doesn't exist in the real Hana, to the right of the>hill, - I want to remove it.If you just wait a short time (as it is currently in final stages of testing), the next update to your Ultimate Terrain X USA will address this and the other buildings as well.Jeff

I would hazard a guess that when you say "with default scenery" in your case it is default scenery with Acceleration installed. Is that true?If it is you should download and install the small update for Ultimate Terrain when it is used in conjunction with FSX + Acceleration.All the information you need is available on the Ultimate Terrain area on SimForums.A direct link to the appropriate post ishttp://www.simforums.com/forums/forum_posts.asp?TID=23111Jeff

>i just installed FSX onto the computer so there are no>updates. FSX DeluxeWhen you say you just installed FSX, have you started it up at least once? The first time FSX runs it creates a number of configuration files in various locations and maybe this is what your Acceleration install is complaining about.If not, it sounds like a problem DVD or a hardware issue.Jeff

>It's irritating to have the same thermal in the same path>every single time. They should have made them randomly>generate at each start. The reason that you find thermals in roughly the same area is because aside from mission specific ones, each type of FSX landclass has an associated description for its thermal properties.So just like in the real world where certain types of land coverage such as rock, roads, vegetation, marsh, etc., provided different types and levels of thermal behaviour, so it does in FSX. As the type of land does not change randomly when you start FSX, neither do locations of the associated thermal properties. They do however change in properties such as the radius of the thermal between defined max and min values, the height of the thermal, the rate of lift or sink in the core, turbulence level, etc..Jeff

Yes, FSX weather can model thermals.For example, the sailplane missions obviously use them or else they'd be pretty difficult to do :-)There is also an option on the FSX Weather Settings dialog to enable you to turn on different types of thermal visualization options to better 'see' them.Jeff

>I would have thought that post 9/11 such trips into the cabin>area by flight crew enroute would have been forbidden? Here's is something which I could find from a Transport Canada Aviation Policy Letter which likely has similar parallels to the regulations and practises for other aviation authorities and air carriers. (Full copy of the policy letter can be found here: http://www.tc.gc.ca/CivilAviation/commerce/policy/PL149.htm )"The flight deck door may be unlocked and opened when crew members and other authorized persons are required to exit or enter the flight deck in the performance of their duties, for physiological needs or for overriding concerns related to the safety of flight. Persons entering or leaving the flight deck must follow procedures established in the company operations manual."So based on this there are stated reasons for when a flight crew member could leave the flight deck and it is not something which is therefore strange or worrying if the policies set in place were followed for the air carrier and air regulations applicable to the flight.Jeff

>considering 4 16 year olds plowed>into my flying partners house in a car going 100 mph at 10:30>pm doing considerable damage to his houseThis statement reminded me of some digging I did when this topic was initially raised regarding age and car accidents. I found a number of research reports which highlighted that the 16-24 year old age group had a disproportinate number of accidents compared to other groups (seem to remember it was something just over 10% more than other age groups used).The research went on to indicate that the main reason seemed to be that this age group was willing to accept and take more risks when related to how fast they drove and how close they drove to the vehicles in front than those over that age.Does this 'risk judgement' also translate across into aviation? Has this any relevance to why as mentioned earlier that the minimum age for an ATP rating is 23?Jeff

>Yes, 10SM is the METAR maximum.That may apply for International format METARs, but is not necessarily true for US format METARs (also used in Canada).For example in Canada, many of the human observed METARs will go up to 15 SM prevailing visibility while some automated ones will have a maximum of 9 SM.I have also seen prevailing visibilities for some US airfields such as KEDW which have been 30 SM or more.A blanket statement that 10 SM is the METAR maximum is therefore not correct.Jeff

One point about X-Plane and performance which has not been noted so far in this thread is that if you try to push X-Plane's graphics/scenery settings beyond a level which it determines would degrade framerate performance on your system, it starts automatically injecting fog in the distance to reduce overall visibility and the number of objects and scenery it has to display in order to try and maintain the minimum performance.So blurries or fog are both just a factor of system/application configuration versus underlying performance capability of the system on which you run either of the products.Jeff

The majority of enhancements provided by UTX will have minimal FPS performance impact on FSX. The two features which have most impact are night lighting and road traffic.In the case of the night lighting it will depend on the area in which you fly in that large cities with increased amount of major roads will therefore have more night lighting and this can lead to up to a halving of framerates. This is at night only and there is no impact during the day by having them enabled.For road traffic, UTX adds more cases over default FSX where roads will have moving traffic. As such, the performance impact you see is related to the density of these additional cases and the level you have set for your FSX road traffic. Again cities will see the most impact, but in many cases if you have the FSX road traffic set between 10% and 15%, the impact is small.Remember that UTX is highly configurable, and the UTX Setup Tool provides a visual key as to the potential performance impact of the features you enable in its feature tree.Finally, after installing and UTX product (and actually any add-on to FSX) I would highly recommend a good defragmentation of your hard-drive on which it was installed.Jeff

>This is really weird. I have checked all 3 Scenery.cfg>files. Two, the one in the main FSX folder and the one for>"Owner" have 115 files -- all base. The one under Documents &>SettingsOwnerApplication DataMicrosoftFSX has 127 areas. This sounds as it should be. There is no need to, and you should not, be making manual changes to the two Scenery.cfg files which contain the base information. The one in the main FSX folder is effectively a template for the base FSX installation and is not loaded or read by FSX except when it is copied in to the Application Data area for the use the first time it is needed. It is then that one which entries are added to by FSX (and properly constructed scenery installers) via the Scenery Library. If you are having to manually copy entries around into multiple versions of the file then something is not right with your FSX installation and operation.The Scenery Library is the best place to add, and determine the ordering, of scenery layers.Jeff

You should look into the good work which Pete Dowson of FSUIPC4 fame has been doing in this area.His support forum is over at SimFlight ( http://forums.simflight.com/viewforum.php?f=54 )Jeff

>UTX requires PATCHES for Acceleration and SP2. MAKE SURE you>visit the UTX support center and get those patches or it will>mess up the terrain.An often repeated misconception...When you install Acceleration or SP2 (and SP1 did as well), the upgraders for them will overwrite the terrain.cfg file with a default version. If you have any product which relies on customised entries having been added to the terrain.cfg (e.g. UTX, Vancouver+X, etc.) this will then cause issues until the customised entries are re-added. The most common issue you could see are cases where water is replaced by land.Every time the UTX Setup tool is run, it checks for its required entries in the terrain.cfg file and if they are not there, it adds them back in (Vancouver+X has a similar repair option). Therefore for UTX, it is the simple step of re-running its Setup Tool which corrects the missing terrain.cfg entries and the visible issues you might see, and not a separately applied patch.There is a UTX USA mini-patch for those users with both UTX and Acceleration but all this does is address a number of cases of additions/modifications/removal of scenery objects which are different between the normal FSX versions (original, SP1 or SP2) and the "Accelerated" one e.g. launchpads 39A/39B at Kennedy Space Center. This mini-patch does not make the changes to the terrain.cfg, only re-running the UTX Setup Tool does that.Hope that clarifies things.Jeff

One case FSX does credit you with instrument time in your pilot log is when you fly in clouds.Jeff

>Which would be the closest airport to one?There is not one very close by, but you can start from Kulusuk (BGKK).From there you can either head:- 31 km east-ish to N65 36.98, W36 28.51or- 40 km southwest-ish to N65 19.98, W37 46.57Then whichever one you start are, there is a line of them roughly in a northeast-southwest direction, paralleling the coastline. They are spaced quite a bit apart, so you'll still need to search for them. Fly at about 3500-4000 ft to give yourself a better chance.Hope this helps all you iceberg spotters without giving too much away and so spoiling the hunt!Jeff

>icebergs may be more widespread than we think. ??Yes they are! There are just under 100 placed (not autogen) icebergs around Greenland.Jeff

>"People might want to go back and reread Phil Taylor's>June 2007 blog on the subject of TEXTURE_BANDWIDTH_MULT.">>Yes, Jeff, good advice and I am familiar with the content, but>if we always accept what we are told without question then>that pioneering spirit would soon die ;)I agree that you should not always accept what you are told (I rarely do), but I personally follow my own rule that you should "Assign the value you give to information or opinions based on the quality of the source". ;-)As I have met and spent quite a bit of time talking with Rafael Cintron (the ACES engineer which Phil quotes in his posting), and found him to be a very knowledgable and helpful person, I accepted the information as being of the highest quality.Jeff

People might want to go back and reread Phil Taylor's June 2007 blog on the subject of TEXTURE_BANDWIDTH_MULT.http://blogs.msdn.com/ptaylor/archive/2007...-week-or-2.aspxFrom this you can see that the old value of 400 which people used to use for FS9 is not a sensible choice in FSX.Jeff

>I use and like Scenery Tech Landclass NA, but it's my>understanding that it is an alternative to UTX, so you>wouldn't gain anything by running both.As the UTX landclass enhancements are primarily aimed at improvement of the urban areas, you can happily use UTX landclass in conjunction with other more generalised landclass products like Scenery Tech and FSGenesis by layering them appropriately. How to do this is covered in the UTX documentation. This allows you to get the benefit of both the accurate UTX urban coverage and the other landclass products outside the urban areas.Also, UTX adds considerably more than just urban landclass with its accurate roads, railroads, water features, night lighting and enhanced road traffic (to list a few of its other features).Jeff

To clear up the comment which has been misinterpreted - "not optimum" meant it was a simple bug they missed. Nothing for anyone to shudder over - so keep smiling :-)As for the comment regarding "they should use SDK methods". From all I have seen related to the scenery elements provided in Acceleration, absolutely everything is possible to be done via the supported and documented SDK techniques.Jeff

>I seem to remember it re-positions two bridges in>Scotland, in the Forth, and doesn't do the others, such as the>those in the Tay, around Inverness, and North Connel. Is that>right?Correct, because Microsoft do not supply custom models for these bridges i.e. they only supply Forth road and rail bridges and none other in Scotland. As I am not a 3D modeler of any real skill, and therefore was not going to create any new object models but only reposition those specific ones which Microsoft supplied, I limited what I delivered.JeffP.S. Sidney did not cover the legalities of his technique for disassembling and repackaging the models out of someone elses work. While I'm sure it is OK for your own personal use, if you then provided them as a part of a posting to other users (whether freeware or payware) it would most likely constitute copyright infringement unless the original model carried an acceptable re-use policy with it.

The difference is between FSX-SP1-SP2 and Acceleration content i.e. most of the changes in objects and scenery come from the added content just for Acceleration and differences would not be seen by users who just went FSX-SP1-SP2.So yes, it does mean that scenery developers have to be aware that they potentially need to develop for users who have Acceleration installed differently for those with FSX-SP1-SP2. This is especially true in the places where new content was added or modified for Acceleration and its missions e.g. around Edwards AFB, Reno, Cape Canaveral, Berlin, Longleat, Istanbul, etc..Another thing you need to be aware of is that in some cases, there are changes in the GUIDs for objects representing the same physical structure between the Acceleration version and the FSX-SP1-SP2 version (for example launchpads 39A and 39B at Kennedy Space Center). This means that you cannot generate just one scenery placement BGL file to work on both. You would need to create different ones for these objects between them. The ACES people I talked to agreed that this was effectively an issue which was 'not optimum'.You will also find that in some cases for Acceleration content, some of the models/textures for an object which kept the same GUID across both FSX-SP1-SP2 and Acceleration have been reworked in some way including changes to for example size (scale). This means again if they fixed up an object for use in Acceleration, it could have a different size and shape (and position) which again means you need to handle it differently between versions.Jeff

Firstly, if you are trying out my QLRP4UT shareware add-on for use with UT Europe, if it is properly installed as per the (long) instructions provided, then all the misplaced/missing bridges which happen when you turn them off in UT Europe will be repositioned for you.If you want you create your own one, to replace the one I repositioned, you will need to create a separate placement BGL file, and then install it in its own scenery layer above QLRP4UT in the FS9 scenery library.Now if you are just using EZ Scenery to try and do this, and are not sure about the real technicalities underneath, you may run into some issues (as EZ Scenery utilises and places files in the general Addon Scenery folder which may then cause problems with it being moved above/below other entries in the scenery library).As for the discussion on the bridges.bgl file supplied by FS9 as part of its SP1 update, it only contains the models for the additional bridges. It contains no placement information. The placement information comes from other scenery files in the FS9 scenery library.In QLRP4UT, to get around the fact the UT Europe disables the global bridges.bgl by renaming it to bridges.xxx (when you disable bridges in UT Europe), my semi-automatic installer moves a copy of it (the .bgl version) into the QLRP4UT scenery folder for it to use. As my code excludes all the default FS9 versions before repositioning them, you do not get duplicates. If you yourself re-enable bridges.bgl in your own scenery folder, you'll need to write exclude code for every single bridge object it contains so you then won't get duplicates when they are then placed by the default FS9 scenery files.My suggestion is of course just to use QLRP4UT :-)Jeff

The landing light size and look normally comes from a file called HALO.BMP found in the FSX->Texture folder. This file is also used for the runway lights.As Acceleration does not modify this file, it is likely that you installed something else which modified the file and thus changed the appearance.Jeff