kjb

I had some initial OOM problems with FSX:SE on Win10 32 bit. I need 32 bit to run some legacy hardware (an early edition TRC472 panel). After tweaking the OS and FSX:SE settings, it's running flawlessly with excellent frame rates. I had to give up a little on my preferred settings, but found a happy medium where it looks good and runs great on a system that was high end about five years ago.

I'm trying to figure out the differences. I have a new computer running Win10 64 bit that runs FSX flawlessly at max settings including scenery LOD at 9.5 and high frame rates. I run it with a UHD TV for a monitor and FSX set to match. It looks great. This is my work computer. My old work computer is now my primary FSX system, running Win10 32 bit, which I need to run my TRC472 panel. Both have relatively cutting edge processors and comparable memory. The system running the 32 bit OS is plagued with OOM (out of memory) problems. If I run very low settings, it seems to be okay, but turning the settings up to something in the medium-high range means it will crash in under 20 minutes. I can torture test the 64 bit system all I want, for hours, and it's fine. The 32 bit system can't seem to handle much at all, which makes no sense to me. FSX is 32 bit, so the 64 bit OS shouldn't matter, but it does. I installed P3d v1.4 on the 32 bit system and it crashes even sooner than FSX. If I slew or fly at 160 kts or less with reduced settings, it crashes in a minute or so with the OOM error. I had the TRC472 panel hooked up to an old Windows Vista system, which was serviceable, but slow. It didn't seem to crash at all. I didn't expect these problems with the more recent computer. I've tried eliminating the background apps in Win10, increasing the page file, etc and I'm only making a little progress. FSX will run a bit longer, but it's going to crash before I can complete a two hour flight. Any ideas?

This is how I do them. Be advised, it isn't very fast. In Paint Shop Pro, I start with the original image, then create a duplicate and use Illumination with no lights and 96% darkness. Then I lower the visibility of it so I can see the original image. On top of that I create a Brightness/Contrast layer that doesn't do anything, except let me select an area that I can drag around. In this case, I used 100 x 100 pixels. I have a hotkey setup in PSP (ctrl - space) and a saved setting for my light. To place the lights, I generally start with intersections. Drag the floating selection to a location, press ctrl - space and hit the enter key. Then, keep dragging and using the hotkey. The lights come out at a consistent size and with a more realistic spacing. When it butts up against an FSX default area it looks sort of underwhelming since FSX lights up everything like downtown Las Vegas. But, I think it looks more realistic. In most areas I've seen, actual street lights are roughly 200' apart, with few in residential areas.

Also, in your example, I would leave out the grey area and just blur the edge of the black. You might even hold the black some so the boat and pier are not in the blended area. They don't look bad if they're in the full white area of the blend mask.

This is how mine looks for the screen shot I posted earlier. Note that I've shown it as an overlay on the photo image with the blend mask set to about 80% visible so you can see where it's drawn in relation to the actual shoreline. I just draw it little back from the shore, then use a gaussian blur to fade it from black to white. The actual blend mask fades from black to white. The corresponding water mask does run to the edge of the water. In this case, it's a small photo scenery, so I've done something similar around the edge to blend it into the surrounding default scenery.

It is easy to work with and has some very handy features like the ability to cut windows and doors into a wall. The wall can use a basic texture, then windows and doors can but put in by simply drawing them. There are some weaknesses, but many of them can be addressed in ModelConverterX. For instance, IOS doesn't have the ability to do LODs or volume shadows. They can be added in MCX. Attached is an IOS model I did recently. It uses a single texture sheet based on a relatively close up photo.

It's already there and I haven't installed it in 1.4. I knew they were including the Mooney he did for them. I didn't expect to see the Dynamic installed too. Maybe the installer found it on my hard drive, or maybe I didn't delete everything I was supposed to and it showed up from the 1.3 installation. I was just surprised to see it there and working.

It looks like Lionheart's Aerospool Dynamic (fixed and retractable) may have been included too. I bought them, but haven't reinstalled, so I'm assuming they were included by Lockheed-Martin.

Check out the new Mooney Acclaims included with 1.4, they're by Lionheart Creations and there's a new Iris Texan. Both are included with the update for free :)

Here are a couple of screen shots. The first one shows the photo with water where a river enters the lake. The second shot shows the photo scenery blending into the default scenery.

To do what I think you're looking for, I created a water mask (manually). That's normally sufficient, but the one I'm doing now is just a few square miles so the photo scenery below the FSX water was causing the water to look very different from the default water beyond the photo scenery. I tweaked the water in the photo and got it to match. Then I loaded the scenery in P3D and it looked awful. Their water base color is different. To solve that, I used a blend mask to take out most of the photo scenery water, leaving it to the default. But, around the shoreline, I left the photo scenery with its water mask and blended it into the default with the blend mask. The advantage to that is that the water keeps the nice variations near the shore, then fades into default water. I'll post a screen shot a little later. I'm downloading the 1.4 update to P3D now.

It looks like you may have several things running in the background, eating up resources. If so, shut them down and see how it does.

That would be a very time consuming task, at least the way I do it. It takes me a long time to do both water and night for comparatively small areas.

I'm not having any luck finding a server for India.

Global Mapper doesn't have the data, instead it's setup to link to servers and download free or commercial data. For instance, I use the USGS server to grab aerial images for the US. If I had the time and disk space, I could download all of the NAIP images for the whole country at no charge. There are several ways to set it up to do a large download. One way is to just give it the coordinates. Another way is to give it one location, then set it to download an area from there, say 30 miles. That would result in a 60 mile x 60 mile square. There are also options for exporting the image. It can divide the image into columns and rows if the file size is too large. As it saves the images, it can be set to export with the correct projection as a geotiff file. It can also save a small .TFW file that contains the information for each tile. Once you have the geotiff file(s), it's a simple matter of writing an .INF file (a text file) then dragging and dropping the .INF file on resample. If you want to go beyond the image as downloaded, it can create a file that will let edited images be resaved as a geotiff. So, if you decided to do water, night and some color correction to the original geotiff, the files can be worked on in another program (Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, etc) and saved. They'll lose the geotiff information, but if you have Global Mapper export a .TFW file, it can reload those edited images and then export them as a new geotiff so the .INF file will work. It does make working on large photo sceneries a lot easier.

Now that introductions are out of the way - how would adding sceneries IMPROVE performance? I've been thinking of upgrading scenery, but I thought "other than default" would add to the computing burden, not ease it... Photo sceneries typically have less "fluff" than default ground textures. There's less for the CPU to work on, so frame rates can improve. Some people prefer ground textures with a lot of things and some prefer a photo based scenery that can better represent an area. Another area where more recent scenery add-ons can help is with LODs (level of detail built into the models). FSX SP2 generally improves performance, but it broke LODs. What should happen is that models get simpler and vanish as the visual range increases. Older models and default FSX models don't do that under SP2 so the CPU is trying to draw objects 30 miles away when you may not even be able to see them yet. Seattle is a good example.

There are several commercial sources. One is http://www.digitalglobe.com/. They are not cheap. If you're going to use USGS NAIP, one solution is called Global Mapper. It runs about $400, but it can download large areas simply by entering the coordinates. You can also look at the coordinates for an airport and tell Global Mapper to download an area centered on those coordinates. Once you have Global Mapper, the NAIP imagery can be downloaded with no charge. Also, Global Mapper can convert to the correct projection for FS.

I think the future you're looking for is ongoing with Lockheed-Martin and Prepar3D. At this point, it's essentially FSX with some bug fixes, but they're actually developing it and more add-on developers are getting on board. Some people with lower spec computers are saying that it's usable when they couldn't run FSX. I know one who's ecstatic that he can finally wave goodbye to FS9 and experience what so many of us have.

It has its own service packs. It shouldn't be a problem if they're installed on different drives. The Annotator is easy to use, but a bit quirky. Make sure you read the tutorial linked above.

It's included with the FSX Deluxe, Gold or Acceleration versions. I think that's what they're called. If you have one of those versions, take a look at the DVDs and you'll see where the SDK installer is. There are also two service packs you can download.

The Annotator and TMFViewer are included with the SDK. I do a lot of autogen with my scenery and it does take a loooooooooooooooooong time if you try to be reasonably accurate. You can copy and paste autogen, so that helps. When I'm doing a row of houses, I'll try to start by drawing some of the typical sizes. Then I'll copy them and paste the copy at all of the similar houses. That same applies to vegetation. Draw one, copy and paste it as required. It still takes forever to do an area of any size. My Tucson/Pima County scenery took at least a year. There are probably at least 100,000 buildings and who knows how many trees.

The beauty of FSX (vs Flight) is you pay a little for the program and can add thousands of freeware planes and sceneries for nothing. If you don't like them, just delete them and try another.

Did Instant Scenery fail to install or just not work correctly when installed? It sounds like it installed from your description, so the next question is if it's a registered version or the trial? The trial version is limited to the Seattle area. If you haven't registered it and you're trying to add to an airport outside the Seattle area, then it might do what you describe.

After you click "OK" and it enters the folder, right click in the window showing the folders. This applies to Win7 only. It's a "feature" :)

I bought it the day after I read about the $49 version. It looks like they're on the right track. Several of the little annoyances with FSX have been fixed and there's the potential of future development. I think the sim is in good hands to become so much more than FSX. That's pretty exciting, especially considering how glum the future of development looked.