nbz

AKAIK there can't be any tearing because you actually can not turn off VSync as long as you have Window's "Aero" active. P3D does not use a "true" fullscreen, it is "just" a regular window, and Aero is bound to VSync.

After having done several flights with v2.3, count me firmly into the "absolutely incredible" camp. My computer isn't exactly the fastest (Q6600 @ 3.0 GHz, 4GB Ram, GTX570) so I can't expect to just slam all the sliders to the right, but with a bit of care (and restraint) for the settings, I am blown away at what sort of visual quality LM manage to unleash on this old box. My system does not like complexity, both in scenery and in aircraft, and it would probably be near impossible to fly complex jets around large airports near detailed cities, with lots of AI around. If I want that, I have the choice of installing FSX again (errrrmm... nope!) or investing in a new rig with a proper GPU (will happen sometime). But I am having an absolute blast flying the default Mooney Acclaim (which I highly recommend - this is NOT the old Microsoft Mooney!), usually avoiding very large cities. Doing so enables me to use full cloud density (with max. 3 layers), cloud shadow distance actually maxed (but "low" quality), a decent amount of autogen that's receiving shadows, 30% AI traffic, 10% road traffic, HDR, volumetric fog, water on one-notch-below-max, and and and. I use the "usual" assortment of fine addons (ASN, ORBX global & vector & openLC where available, FG Global 2010 mesh, REX textures) and these taken together with the above mentioned settings result in fantastic visuals, the sort of which I never expected to see on my old machine. All of this staying mostly above 20fps, often around 30, but with the much less fluctuating framerate of v2.3, even below 20fps remains flyable just fine. Something tells me that a GTX570 with only 1.2 GB of RAM should not be able to do all of this. Oh yes, right, the 50-jets-at-JFK scenario is telling me that. So what? I'm off exploring Alaska. I now have only 2 complaints left: the rotating clouds, and the broken terrain shadows. So the upcoming patch will reduce the number of my complaints by 50%!

I have the same issue, but had the same exact issue also with V2.2, so this isn't something new to me. I was sort of assuming that the cause was using too high settings for my mediocre graphics card (GTX570). I may be completely wrong though. Since the framerate does not improve when the shadows disappear, I guess that this is not a deliberate optimization.

I also find the export/import too broken to be usable. It is my impression that when importing controller settings, your current settings are not replaced by the import, but somehow merged together, so I always end up with multiple axis assignments etc. At the moment I don't need switching between controllers (always flying the same aircraft), but when I start flying something else again, I will go back to using my own .bat files for switching controllers like I did with FSX.

I have not systematically tested this, but it is my feeling that every word of the bold red part of the top post is true and deserves to be written in exactly that font style. I believe there is some config line that forces a complete shader recompile whenever the settings are changed. Maybe this could work around the issue? Sorry for not having tested that, but I actually manage to spend my P3D time flying instead of tweaking - something I could not always say about FSX.

Also, it helps to limit the number of cloud layers. Active Sky has a setting for this, I don't know about other weather add-ons. As for the requirement for a powerful graphics card: This depends on what you fly, and where you fly, and what compromises you can live with. I run P3Dv2.2 on a Q6600 @ 3GHz with a measly GTX570, and couldn't go back to FSX because I'm using cloud shadows, terrain shadows, volumetric fog, HDR lighting, all sorts of water reflections... the whole deal. No magic, just careful slider settings, accepting that supersampling AA is out of the question on my hardware (Luckily, I find that vegetation shimmers a lot less in P3D over FSX, which looks outright ugly without some supersampling) and an affinity mask of 15 for my 4 cores. Oh, and a max. of 3 cloud layers. Autogen shadow casting totally murders my system, but receiving works with only little loss of FPS. I can accept this as I have hated looking at brightly lit houses shining deep in shadowed valleys for years now. Vehicle shadows are completely off, a tradeoff that enables an astonishing density of road traffic - an amount that would have killed my system in FSX. My machine gets overwhelmed by, and can't deal with, scenery complexity (this phenomenon is discussed elsewhere). When this happens, turning off all the shader goodies won't help a lot. Flying complex heavy kit into large cities won't happen with v2.2 on my machine, at least not anywhere near even 15fps. FSX is a whole lot better for this on my rig. However, flying the default Mooney Acclaim (which I can't seem to get tired of) anywhere away from large cities in P3D is absolutely, by far, the best thing that ever appeared on my monitor. It is faster than FSX while looking SO much more real, and I am amazed at the detail and performance LM manage to unleash on my rusty old rig. Other than shadows? You mean, other than a feature that makes literally everything in the sim world (the ground, buildings, vegetation, cockpit, plane) look much more realistic? In my opinion, the two biggest visual shortcomings of FSX - when compared to reality - are the lighting, and the fog layers engaging in z-buffer fights with the ground. The lighting now is vastly improved (on could say that it now exists at all, and didn't before), and the fog layers are now fantastic. When the weather is nasty, you still have this happy-sunshine lighting on the ground in FSX. P3D now does not try to look spectacular or beautiful, it tries to look real, and that means that if weather conditions are grey and ugly, it actually looks grey and ugly as it should. And those terrain shadows.... the first time I descended into Aspen about half an hour before sunset, and suddenly saw a short flicker in the cockpit as I flew through the shadow of the jagged top of a ridge, immediately followed by the darkness of staying in that shadow.... I knew that my FSX days were over. Eventually, I'll get a new rig, and get to those cities, and get to fly my esteemed AirbusX. But I'll be just fine with what I have for a while. And for me, any doomsday scenario about the future of simming that came up after the closure of ACES, is now history.

Flying out of Aspen with the Acclaim one of these days, my departure path was filled up with oncoming road traffic driving high through the air. An absolutely astonishing sight, and I found it aeronautically challenging even though my opponents showed great discipline in sticking to their "airways", but for a simulator it looks slightly game-like. (I have Orbx Vector, and am NOT speculating whether this bug is caused by P3D or Vector.) At Alicante (Spain, default airport), Ryanair (MyTraffic 3D) pulled off one of their typical PR stunts. They had parked their aircraft 20 ft in the air, unlike the boring rest of the airlines who "still" use the ground for parking. Also at Alicante, runway lights floating high above their intended position remained there even after a reload. Houses and trees float everywhere, anyway. My computer is oooold, I may have one or two sliders too far right (new to P3D, still experimenting), and I am guessing that these phenomena occur mostly when / while a machine is overloaded.

Thanks! What worked not at all before now works perfectly.

I do not yet have P3D, but in FSX, the default scenery for all of Japan was done very well. This may also be the case with P3D.

True. Also, they can be very hard to spot.

In the FSX weather settings, the setting "natural" for thermal visualization means that thermals are indicated by circling birds. This happens outside of missions.

Thank you for this info, Scott. I was already not using the weather radar, but might look into RXP gauges now.

I own none of the above mentioned planes (except for the general Carenado recommendation by B747-400F) so my post is not meant to say that my own suggestion is any better than the ones above. I used to have a wish-list for features very closely resembling your list. What I had in mind was something that could be used on short runways in the middle of nowhere, but would fly a longish distance rapidly, while looking and flying superb. I did not place much emphasis on system depth. I bought Carenado's JetProp and it does it all, and is a whole lot of fun. You did not mention your preferences for system depth. I don't know if this is because this is not very important to you, or because you take it for granted to want the maximum in this department. (Both of these stances are, of course, perfectly fine.) I seem to remember comments from those who prefer the best systems modeling and who found the JetProp lacking in this department, I believe mostly because of the GPS units and/or the large glass gauges. The only downside for me is a noticeable hit on FPS, the avionics master switch is a frame rate toggle switch that adds/subtracts 10 to 15 FPS (3.0GHz Q6600, so not exactly brand new hardware). But I have no idea how this compares to the recommendations above. Should you buy this one, get the "Optional Patch".

The A380-800 (current model) is certified to carry 853 passengers, plus a crew of 20. The evacuation test required for certification mandates the full evacuation to take place in under 90 seconds. Airbus pulled it off in 78.04 seconds.

My thanks goes to: 4) ORBX for both of the New Zealand sceneries. I have flown from the most northern to the most southern airport with Carenado's Piper Arrow, in a long series of small hops. Lots of great sights, had a really good time. 3) Carenado for the PA46T Malibu JetProp. All-around great aircraft, zero issues, having a blast flying it. 2) Chabrier as the starter of this awesome thread, and Johan Dees, Pete Dowson, Bob Scott and others who responded with great work resulting in improving the ground friction properties of FSX. You people utterly rock. 1) In my opinion, the 2012 Man Of The Year of the FSX world is SteveJP, for being on what seems to be a mission to eradicate the word "Preview" from the "DX10 Preview" mode, and single-handedly fixing almost everything that MS left unfinished or broken in this mode. Steve, your work is mindblowingly outstanding. I think I am not the only one for whom this had a profound positive impact on the simming hobby. I also thank everyone who was helpful in testing, spreading the word and writing tutorials, such as Paul J and firehawk44, but also many others.

Quraisy, if you "give up", you are missing out on a very rewarding aspect of flight-simming. I know that the default Bell 206 is not very realistic, but I have trained flying it to the point where I can land in unknown weather, and end up with the nose pointing to within 10° of where the wind is coming from, just by having aquired the "feel" of it. Some people may find helicopters ugly or otherwise wrong, but the main reason for their existence is that they can do something that fixed-wing aircraft, who all have a minimum airspeed, can not: land almost anywhere, or at least hover over it. And this is no different in the world of FSX; the helicopter can get you to interesting places that are out of reach for everything with wings. It opens up all the scenery you may own not only to exploration, but as a vast area of possible landing sites. The lawn in front of inner-city buildings, a remote village up in the mountains, the shore of basically every lake and every river, and (now the music gets dramatic) mountain peaks. I have only two tips for you. 1) Learn to hover. 2) To learn this, and everything else, head over to Hovercontrol, which is an entire community built around simulated helicopter flight, with vast resources for training, including reading material and - if you choose to become a member - the awesome feature of getting actual training lessons via FSX multiplayer and Teamspeak, from people who have experience in training people this way.

This. Ever since I understood this, capturing the glideslope with the autopilot has worked for me every time. Welcome to the Forum.

Many points were already mentioned - I would add the ease of modifying / tweaking things. Want the cockpit viewpoint a bit higher? A louder fuel pump sound? Finer trim settings? Not satisfied with the turn radius of a plane, or want to exchange a gauge for another? All easily done with FSX, rather difficult to do with Flight.

Completely agree. I could not believe that this was all their content at launch. I actually was a beta tester, but I had only the basic Hawaii with 2 planes, and assumed more content behind the flying triangles that were buzzing around than the few planes they released. On the website, prior to release, they had told us that in the shop, we could not only buy planes and scenery, but also functionality. I had hoped - maybe also assumed - that they would basically take FSX' functionality, slice it into pieces (the ATC module, the Traffic module etc.) and sell these pieces individually. Then it was AVSIMs interview with Mr. Howard (a lot of good questions followed by a lot of bad answers) that did not help to convey that Mr. Howard actually had any idea of where to take this in the future. Except for dropping a DLC piece in 1-eternity-intervals. But now, the speculation and uncertainty of "where MS will take Flight" has been answered. The trashcan, it is. Regarding alainneedles back burner: how about MS selling their codebase to the same entity they sold ESP to.... and P3D v3 incorporating the Flight graphics code... (just daydreaming) Sorry for those who got laid off. Not their fault.

This update will adress what for me, are by far the two biggest shortcomings: missing axis for toebrakes, and lack of TrackIR support. These two items alone will greatly improve Flight for me. There is even more stuff that makes me look forward to the update: Added new in-cloud effects (if these were not an improvement, they would not have bothered adding them) Adjusted cloud randomization (I guess, no more clouds arranged on a grid?) Fixed issues in fog layer and cirrus cloud rendering (If this solves the issues with supersampling modes, I will be blown away... but no idea which "issues" they are talking about) Reduced choppiness in rendering other users’ planes during multiplayer (a good thing for sure) A very welcome update!

My suggestion: A new feature of the map to find the radial of a VOR on which a certain airport is located. Note: Currently, the map is scrolled by clicking, then dragging. However, when clicking on a point of interest like an airport or a VOR, the map does NOT scroll when dragging. THIS IS GREAT and a prerequisite for my idea. Implementation ideas: (1) Simple variant When clicking on a VOR and then dragging, an arrow is drawn from the VOR to the current mouse location. Next to the arrow, the radial is displayed numerically. If the mouse button is released, the arrow and numeric value disappear. (2) More complex variant Works as described above, but the arrow and numeric value remain on the map after the mouse button is released. Several arrows can be shown simultaneously, triangulating an airport's position. Every arrow may have a little "hide" button ("X" in a circle, maybe positioned at half the arrow's length). This feature suggestion was, of course, inspired by The Big VOR Topic. I believe it could add a great deal of value to the map, with relatively little development time required (?) and with no risk of confusing beginners.

I have done PC flying since FS2000, but never learned this stuff. The possibility was there, but I just did not feel like looking into the matter - flying either visually, or following a magenta line instead. But I always knew that I was missing out on something, but something I could get into anytime I wanted. Just a moment ago I finished my first two flights using VOR, thanks to the very good and compact instructions presented in this thread. The first flight was in "dense fog", using VOR to navigate to, and ILS to land on the airport. The second flight was to another island, in "inclement weather" where even at altitude the visibility was often very bad.... which didn't matter as I was confident about knowing where I was. I had a blast on both flights. BIG Thank You to the thread starter and all contributors!

I would like to thank Tom for the best interview on Flight that I have read so far.Given the very controversial nature of Joshua Howard's answers, I would also like to thank *everyone* on this loooong thread for the civilised and productive discussion.On the topic of ATC, it became clear on the beta forum that the Flight team is thinking about implementing it at some point. They explicitly did NOT say they will, or will not, do it, but it is considered. It was also made clear that MS is very well aware of the shortcomings / bugs that the FSX ATC has.

Thank you for your explanation. When you say, "you can see the field perfectly from above", do you just mean it can be seen well, or do you mean that you might have NO idea that there is fog over the field at all.In other words, do you find the following scenario realistic? Especially the last image seems to show no trace of anything over the field. (Not trying to doubt you or argue with you, just interested in how real this is.)

You are not the only one noticing this. On the beta forum, there were complaints about this, and the Flight Team have been provided a sequence of screenshots detailing how confusing this is.You can see an airfield absolutely clearly from above, only to find it submerged in dense fog when you descend down to it. It can be easier to see an airport building from a mile away than by standing 200ft away from it.The fogged-in effect looks great, but seems to be completely detached from where the visible fog layers and the visible clouds actually are.