bnic

Hey Jon I just wanted to ask a quick question and also say a big thank you for SBuilder-X and all the years you have helped all of us scenery builders... Lets say I have 3 photo scenery bgls in one Scenery folder... One is a large low-res image of say 5 miles around the airport... The next image is a medium-res photo bgl say 1 mile around the airport, and then the 3rd bgl would be a close up high-res image of just the terminal area of maybe 1/4 mile in area... Would I be making FSX work harder by having these 3 image bgl's in the same Scenery directory all loading one on top of another as they seem to be doing...? Normally I would assign the higher-res bgl's to a higher layer within FSX Scenery Library but I was curious how FSX handles the same airport area to be covered by low, medium, and high-res imagery...? When I pass over the airport it seems the low res bgl get painted fast and first, then the medium seems to appear, and last the high res bgl's paints nice and sharp and it all happens over a couple seconds... Actually I created the low-res scenery a year ago, then 6 months ago I came back and did a higher res bgl of the smaller center area nearer the airport... Now this week I did a really close up high-res bgl of the terminal area, jetways, and aprons which look great, but I just threw them all together in the same Scenery directory to see how they would load... On a similar thought could the lower-res image bgls be re-created from their respective bmp's and tiff's with say the center airport area cut out like we do with a lake or blends so their lower-res airport area will not be generated and only the high-res image bgl would be painted...? Sorry if these seem to be such crazy questions but I've wanted to just ask how FSX would handle it and if it could be putting a hit on fps... Thanks, bnick

Sorry about my post looking so bad with all the formatting characters my cutting and pasting from Windows Live mail wasn't the way to go, ha... Live and learn... This FS Earth Tiles is sweet for sure...bnick

<div><font size="2">JS Korna or Any one out there...</font></div><div> </div><div><font size="2">Hi... I have a quick question on FS Earth Tiles... I've been making scenery for years and did it for a while commercially but that was back in 2004... I got pretty heavy back into FSX Scenery design a year ago but just as a hobbyist now and have been creating Photo Scenery's for my local area which is Portland, Oregon... I recently spent several months completing Sat Scenery for the NW corner of Oregon roughly 130 miles East to West and 160 miles North to South... This package I built from SBuilderX and Photoshop CS4, as well as all the other associated design tools we have all used... I ended up with 6.5gb of scenery files as well as many 3D models for several of our large and small airport sceneries I built and fly to all the time... Just wanted to share a bit of background here... Also this last large Sat Scenery package I just mentioned has all water masks, blend masks, and night tiffs which were hand built and then compiled in SBuilderX... I had never worked with water and blend masks and they make for some very long compiling times and my SBuilder\Tools\Work directory now has over 66.5gb of bmp's and tiffs I had to create for this 1/4 state project...</font></div><div> </div><div><font size="2">Anyway I had never used Tile Proxy or FS Earth Tiles before and tried them out the last few days and I was very impressed with both of them really... I ended up uninstalling the Tile Proxy program because it just took too long to download and update the scenery and I'm using a 50mb download Comcast cable service so it's fast but still things were blurry too often for me even with my quad core server so I dumped Tile Proxy... Now I really have enjoyed FS Earth Tiles and created some great scenery the last couple days even though I haven't compiled water masks using the Google KML Coast and Deepwater files I made... I'm not sure they can provide all the tiny creeks and streams I had built on my earlier hand built scenery project...</font></div><div> </div><div><font size="2">Ok so finally here is my question... Using FS Earth Tiles I created a nice coverage area of the general Portland, Oregon area maybe 45 miles square which created 30 bgl's which had a #1 resolution setting in the FS Earth Tile program... When finished they looked good in FSX and matched the resolution I had compiled my own earlier project at in SBuilderX in which I used an 80% compression to help with file sizes... Ok so I wanted to also create 3 additional areas ‘within’ this new 45x45 mile Portland area which would have the much higher #0 resolution setting and this was for our main KPDX airport maybe 2x2 miles area, as well as my own neighborhood which was maybe 1x1 mile, and another small airport near home KTTD which I compiled in FS Earth Tile's at around 1x1 miles in size... I let FS Earth Tile's just put the additional hi res bgl's in the same Scenery directory I had used for my first large 45x45 mile FS Earth Tile's Portland project which had used the #1 lower res files... The new high res bgls of the 3 smaller areas looked super sharp in FSX and they are seemingly taking priority over the lower res FS Earth Tile bgls beneath them, even though they are all in the same Scenery folder... My question is this... Is this efficient and correct to have these small area hi-res bgls sitting in the same Scenery directory as the low res bgls which cover the larger area beneath them...? Do they conflict or use more ram or cause lower FPS being of the same FSX land area at the same time...? I'm seeing great FPS with both the low and hi res bgls mixed together, and the hi res shows in ever case above the low res bgls which is great... So I'm wondering am I doing it like others are doing it, or am I making big mistakes here mixing low and hi res bgls that exist in the same geo locations...? With my own hand built Scenery I was able to Alpha mask ever waterway from tiny creeks to large rivers as well as have a beautiful 1 mile blend from my land sat imagery to the default FSX scenery where once again Autogen begins to grow... I was amazed with how cool the blend masks can be not only for the oceans but also for land where it all meets default FSX scenery... The transition lines from my Sat Scenery cannot even be seen but wow the work and hours it took...</font></div><div> </div><div><font size="2">Sorry this was so long but I wanted to ask about mixing these lo res\hi res bgls and whether I'm putting a big load on FSX doing it this way...</font></div><div> </div><div><font size="2">Thanks...</font></div><div><font size="2">bnick</font></div><div> </div><div><font color="#a5a5a5" size="1">AMD Opteron Quad Cores, EVGA Nvidia 570GTX, 4.5tb WD Hard Drives, 27” Samsung 1920x1080, FSX,SP1, SP2</font></div>

Looks like an Internet version of FS might be in the far future but FS as we know it sounds done... Aces was completely closed... http://www.computerworld.com/action/articl...rc=news_ts_headbnick

I cannot believe there are no threads tonight about Microsoft shutting down the entire Aces department and the ending of Flight Simulator after it's 28 year life... They say there may be an internet version in the future but from the sounds of it FS11 is history and Flight Simulator is done... You may like to read one of the many news articles going round... http://www.computerworld.com/action/articl...rc=news_ts_headI cannot imaging how many 3rd party FS software companies will be impacted by this dramatic ending to MSFS as well as all the employees who lost their jobs today...bnick

This topic has been moved by the moderator of this forum. It can be found at:http://forums.avsim.net/dcboard.php?az=sho...2&topic_id=2089

Hi people it has been a while since I've posted but I still read and enjoy this forum everyday...I hope my topic is not written in the wrong area and I trust it will be properly moved if I'm in error writing it here... I just wanted to share something pretty cool that I happened on to...I have always loved FS going way back like many of us have, and I still very much enjoy FSX going all the way back to it's release, along with all the joys and problems we all experienced with it, SP1, SP2, Blurries, etc...I've also created commercial Scenery software in the past with friends and several thousand copies were sold and downloaded for several airports before we made our software freeware so I have a good background in FS...I just wanted to share a few low-res screen-grabs I took in a new program I just got... The pics were captured right within the program with a dedicated hotkey command provided within the FS itself... I wish I could set a higher screen capture res but I'm not sure one can so please bear with the low quality... You will still get the point I hope...For a long time I have heard such great things about X-Plane and yes with both it's strengths and weaknesses, and just for the fun of it I grabbed a copy at Bestb-y a couple days ago for $39 and I simply wanted to say that am I very impressed... FSX is still my favorite but I have to say the guys that created X-Plane really have a fine package they have created and one with great potential as many see it... It has it's obvious strengths and weaknesses...It's weather blows FSX out of the water... The snow and rain look incredibly real in the way it falls and blows as well as in the amount that it is falling whether very light or heavy... It's weather is downloaded in real-time every one minute as I have it set for... The weather transitions are totally transparent without notice and heavy weather makes no FPS impact like it does in FSX as far as I can see... The other night while flying to Seattle's KSEA, I was in and out of snow and rain within clouds sometimes 1/4 mile from each other and the rain turned to snow and back depending on what was being downloaded... I'm really impressed with it... I know there are great weather programs that will hopefully soon be released for FSX but these guys have it as well as atmosphere haze and great fog effects... They make it clear that this software is very often used for training pilots as the flight models are very realistic to real flight as are the cockpits and instruments... It lacks a nice graphical GPS like FSX has but it's GPS is programmable...First thing I noticed with X-Plane that I didn't care for was that all airports were just runways with no buildings and that was a major turn off but only initially because great FS scenery can be imported as I just proved in the pics I'm attaching... Their Mesh terrain was a bit lower res than FSX's as others have written in Avsim forum... Rivers and lakes were sometimes jagged and didn't have the realism and smoothness of custom FSX scenery packages but on the whole the view is very impressive... Flocks of birds can crash through the windshield or knock out an engine without warning...In reading the various X-Plane forums people have long been posting free scenery and high quality aircraft that are as nice I think as many FSX's add-on sceneries and planes... Their cockpits are super realistic and I guess this is where X-Plane exceeds from what I'm reading... Their ATC sucks and sounds like those old first generation text readers we used to hear when they first came out but their ATC options are much more extensive...Now the cool part... I read about a small free shareware program called, FS2XPLANE.exe that converts Microsoft Flight Sim scenery to X-Plane and I tried it the night I installed X-Plane... I pointed to my beloved KPDX Portland scenery directory and this crazy little scenery converter compiled a perfect replica of KPDX and my eyes about popped when I saw it... Now I have my fabulous Portland scenery in X-Plane and I'm telling you the FPS are fantastic compared to FSX no matter how heavy the weather is... I then converted my other local airport sceneries I've created, Oregon's, Salem KSLE, Troutdale KTTD, and Seattle KSEA, and they look perfect in X-Plane... The little utility has never made an error yet...I have to say flying in X-Planes very real weather right now in the stormy rainy snowy windy Northwest with this new scenery loaded is a huge leap up from FSX realism... We all know that realism in any image helps trick our eyes into believing something is real or close to real... Lack of detail immediately blows an images cover as a fake but with this level of weather realism combined with excellent airport scenery packages this little $39 package becomes a world heavyweight FS contender...Now realistically one would unfortunately have to convert scenery packages for all the cities they want to fly to to make X-Plane in any way similar to FSX but if one thinks about the default Airports that shipped with FSX does any of our local Airports even come close to what they looked like...?Anyhow I just wanted to share this ability to use FS scenery in X-Plane with you guys... My KPDX now looks every bit as good as it did in FSX with none of the FSX problems... Peace to allbnick

I tried Nhancer a few months ago and it locked me up in Vista Ultimate 64 on which my Quad ProcessorSLI4GB Server runs...After reading all of this thread top to bottom I decided to give her another try so I installed the latest Nhancer 2.4.1 and made most of these latest changes recommended above:(TBM80PR1Multicore)as well as most of the unchanged recommendations that came off the link...FSX(Scenery = Large10076m1m2.xLDTSO Ext DenseAD very densemedium)FSX(Graphics = FR unlimitedNo AAAF AnisoGT Very Highadv anim)FSX(Weather = Cloud Draw 60 Det Clouds Med)FSX(Traffic = AT30GA10AVD LowRV12SF50LB50) I just have to say this has made a very big difference in fps, but as many have said before it's the perfect smoothness both in the air and on the ground that has made me so happy now...The deep enhanced color was a real surprise and ground detail even way out is really amazingly sharp... This was no little improvement, this was the single biggest fpssmoothnesscolorand detail change I have seen and has simply dwarfed the improvements SP1 and SP2 provided...As a ServerPC repair business owner who has worked on Mainframes to mom and pop pc's for the last 22 years I'm comfortable with FS's long history of improvement tweaks going way back but really I have to say again these Nhancer settings made this system sing..Before I go I also have to add there is nothing that kicks FSX in gear more than Quad Processors running in harmony with Dual XFX 8800GT AlphaDog Graphics Boards which are running in SLI Mode... These factory OC'd Hotrods with 512mb DDR3, Clock Rate of 670MHz, Mem Clock 1.95GHz, Oops sorry no hardware here but my point is there is some great Graphics gear out there that on a nice new quality Mobo with the fast PCI-E2.0 bus, simply makes FSX everything it was intended to be, and add that to the wonderful GEXUTX USA LandclassGIS Based RoadwayRailway packages, that to me were worth far more than they cost, and a person can really enjoy flying again...Lastly I have to say no matter how great the hardware, all machines are different as Nick has said, and we still balance our Graphics settings in FSX... For this Server I still have, Heavy, RainyCloudy, real-time downloaded weather, still puts a big hit on even this system dropping me from a consistent unlimited fps that swings almost too fast to read from 55 to 100 fps all the way down to 18 to 24 while descending in Spot View into KSEA SeaTac in Seattle Washington... I've tried locking FPS at various numbers but on this system for whatever reason it seems to restrain it and it just seems to breath better in unlimited... This system like most others jerked, like the guys explained above, even at high fps rates, until last night when I followed all of your recommendations and added Nhancer... Those guys compiled some cool code with Nhancer...Thanks you guys...

My 737 Auto Pilot did the same thing not allowing me to set anything, right after a clean FSX install and SP1...I did recognize a few other problem areas in which once again, as is so often the case, made me immediately suspicious of my latest Nvidia driver 158.18... I uninstalled all Nvidia graphics drivers as we are told to do, then after reboot reinstalled Nvidia's 101.41 which was proven solid in all my business programs, AutoCad Architectural Desktop, Adobe Photoshop CS3, etc...After reboot my entire Workstation ran noticeably smoother, although a touch slower, and everything in FSX ran rock solid and smooth as silk, including my 737 Auto Pilot with all it's features...For me it was once again the latest Nvidia drivers which happens so often... The next Nvidia driver, I for one am waiting to see, very well may correct the problems our current latest 158.18 has, plus turn on the much waited for Nvidia Series 7 SLI functions that all 4gb users of Vista Ultimate 64 are experiencing with their SLI not working yet... Just wanted to share what worked for me...bnickServer Workstation Vista Ultimate 64 Tyan Thunder S2895 Mobo 4: AMD Dual-Core 270 Opteron processors 2: Asus 7800 GTX 512mb SLI Mode Graphics 4gb SDRAM 42001: Western Digital 500gb SATA-2 drive (Vista 64) 3: Western Digital 250gb SATA-2 drives (Win XP Pro 32)24" Dell 1920X1200x32Creative Audigy 7.1 Surround Sound

I just had to follow up and share that for me rolling back from the latest Nvidia 158.18 to 101.41 totally corrected all SP1 problems I was starting to notice... My FPS have increased by at least another 25% from where I was with 158.18... I remembered 101.41 really running fast and stable for all my app's and games and sure enough once again rolling back a driver is not a bad thing...My real weather with detailed clouds now are set at max, as well as Air traffic set to 40% other traffic set from 15% to 24% and then all graphics sliders maxed are pulling fps increase now as stated above at least 25% higher again than with the latest Nvidia 158.18 I had installed yesterday...For me though with Autogen maxed I was getting a slight jerkiness like others were also seeing, even though fps were high, but bringing Autogen down even one notch totally removed any jerkiness... I also came back from unlimited to locked 30fps and the entire flight from Portland KPDX to Seattle KSEA was as fluid as anything I have ever seen...I just have to say even though I have been flying FSX since it came out, I was given tonight a whole new awareness after rolling back this driver, of what their intent was to begin with in creating this FS version, in that until you fly this sim with everything maxed at 30fps you just are not aware of how good it is... My landings were the most pleasurable I've ever experienced and rock solid 30fps with all graphics maxed is smooth as silk... Autogen is the only one that I now have set to one notch this side of max...I'm also not seeing any problems others are seeing with first processor running at 100% and the other 3 processors running between 40% and 70%... In my case everything went perfect by removing 158.18... 8 series Nvidia boards may run fine with it but my 7 series board doesn't, maybe the next version will correct it as well as turn on SLI by fixing the well documented 4gb Vista 64, 7 series Nvidia problem...bnick

Good points... I have been reading some folks are having problems using the Real Weather now so I will be turning it off for a bit... You are using and 8800 and I'm using a 7800 both GTX's and as I read depending on the make there should be at least 15% and some have tested 30% increase that would be to your advantage...I'm also thinking I might drop back 2 versions on my Nvidia display drivers, I'm presently using the latest 158.18 and I've seen these cause problems at times that go away with a rollback or two...Lots of testing right...? The start up time with SP1 is still incredible though...bnick

I really should note one other interesting byproduct of SP1 that being Ram usage...If you note my Task Manager in the image above you can see that SP1 now has me using 2.45gb of my 4gb ram presently loaded...Prior to SP1 on a fairly clear day like this and from this location I would have been using 1.6 to 1.9gb max ram usage...bnick

Sorry... You guys made good points I should have clarified more... I guess I shouldn't have said maxed because they all all except Autogen which I had left at dense not that higher settings caused problems or anything, I just hadn't had the free time yet to start testing fps hits using the 2 higher settings above dense...Also normally I would have put before and after comparisons as far the new fps rates I'm seeing after SP1 versus before...I was getting prior to SP1 on the ground all around KPDX anywhere from 12 to 17 fps depending on Real Weather complexity that was downloaded on any given day... In the air around Portland prior to SP1 I was pulling pretty much what others reported getting and that seemed to vary from 16 to 23 fps and this was for sure only accessing one of the four processors and only one of the two Asus EN7800GTX graphics boards...So yes I'd safely say I'm seeing a minimum of 50% increase in both FPS, as well as FSX Loading time, and that really surprised me, but simply looking at Task Manager now shows me that from the moment I start FSX Processors 2,3, & 4 are working anywhere from 45% on up to 75% while Processor 1 is maxed at 100% as it was prior to SP1...There are a couple buggy things popping up though that I'm watching, one being after about 5 minutes into any flight I loose my keyboards keystrokes, F-keys fail, and if I go into Display options I loose the ability to change any settings as both my mouse and keyboard are ineffective... I can shut down FSX via Task Manager but we know that's not right... I remember experiencing and reading of others who had strange events happen when their Graphics settings were too high so that's where I'm testing right now and I really shouldn't be reporting problems in this thread because you guys are more concerned with Quad Processor operation... More testing for sure... It is interesting though that it's just about 30 seconds from the time I start FSX to when I'm ready to fly... That is a big change in itself...bnick

My Dual-Dual Cores are working perfectly now in SP-1... All 4 processors are always running from 45% to 65%... Load times have been cut in half I'd say... I did a fresh install of FSX with no mods so far then added SP-1...I'm really happy to have all 4 processors finally working... I have all Graphics sliders maxed, Real Weather, Autogen Dense, Air Traffic 50%, all other traffic 15% to 25%...Flying around KPDX Portland 25 to 70 fps... On the ground at KPDX 18 to 25 fps... This is easily a 50% improvement from what I was getting before SP-1... FSX is truly fluid now and I'm very impressed with what I'm seeing with all Graphics maxed... Water however is at 1x...Thank's Phil and thanks ACES for great work...bnickServer Workstation Vista Ultimate 64 Tyan Thunder S2895 Mobo 4: AMD Dual-Core 270 Opteron processors 2: Asus 7800 GTX 512mb SLI Mode Graphics 4gb SDRAM 42001: Western Digital 500gb SATA-2 drive (Vista 64) 3: Western Digital 250gb SATA-2 drives (Win XP Pro 32)24" Dell 1920X1200x32Creative Audigy 7.1 Surround Sound