Arista

The radio chatter audio files are in Resources/sounds/radio chatter. Replace or add to these files as you see fit (I think). The trains are controlled by whichever network definition file is used by the DSF in question. The default road.net file is in Resources/default scenery/900 roads. If you just want to replace the train models, it's probably best to copy the library.txt file into a custom scenery package (in the Custom Scenery folder), delete all the car and road.net stuff, and map the default library paths to your new models as needed. Also, be sure to check scenery.x-plane.com and wiki.x-plane.com for all the details.Judith

Or put another way, looking straight down from 1000 ft AGL, at 1920x1200 and a 55

Most reasonable developers distribute their add-ons as zip files you simply need to extract into the Aircraft (or a subfolder thereof) or Custom Scenery folders in your X-Plane folder. Yes, .acf files are X-Planes equivalent of .air files. However, like an FS aircraft that consists of only a .cfg and .air file, an .acf file alone won't make an aircraft with much (visual) detail.Judith

The stock 172's flight model is garbage. To change the airframe drag, you'd need to dig deep into PlaneMaker. There are some modified versions of that plane out there, however - though I don't know if they're any better. Not directly, but there are fast versions of all the pan controls you can assign to your hat switch. Look at the advanced button setup in the joystick options.Judith

Worldwide 7 cm photo scenery? I don't want to shatter your dreams, but let's do a little math. The earth's land area is 148,940,000 km2. Which is 1.5 x 1018 cm2. At 7 cm/px, each pixel covers 7 x 7 = 49 cm2. So this works out to 1.5 x 1018 cm2 / 49 cm2/px = 3 x 1016 pixel. Each pixel has 32 bit, or 4 bytes, but let's assume we manage to compress the textures at a 1:10 ratio (which is quite good). This yields 3 x 1016 * 4 / 10 = 12 x 1015 byte = 12 petabyte, or about 12000 terabyte. Now assuming hard disk capacity continues to increase tenfold every five years, you'd need 1200 10 TB disks to hold all that data. Better start looking for a warehouse to store them... ;) Now you might only be interested in the US, whose land area is 9162392 km2. That works out to "just" 750 TB, or 75 hard disks. OK, let's take only California, then. Land area is 404043 km2, which yields 33 TB. Maybe just the Bay Area after all? Its 22681 km2 would take just under 2 TB, thus almost completely filling the largest hard disk available today. I guess one reason why the franchise was axed might be that Microsoft finally realized exactly that, but also realized that would take piles and piles of resources (read money)... ;) Just out of curiosity, have you tried Morten's Piper Archer by any chance?Judith

RealScenery, I guess? They have about 5 m resolution, though the exact specs are nowhere to be found - go figure. But you can create much higher resolution photo sceneries, for example with g2xpl, using images from some well-known mapping services, without dragging performance down. I'm not sure what the limit is, or if there is any at all, beside the amount of video RAM you have. On the other hand, I don't dare to even think about what FSX would do with large-scale 7 cm scenery. I think these texture artifacts are actually a bug Ben wanted to fix some versions ago. Ben? What the heck? How many AI planes do you have active? That difference should be way lower. Geofa, by how much does your frame rate rise when X-Plane is paused? I'd say garbage in, garbage out mostly. There are indeed many really bad aircraft out there, but that's hardly the sim's fault. But then again, all of that can be said about FSX, too. Besides, the service ceiling doesn't necessarily have to do anything with performance (it usually does, though) - maybe the pressurization system is the limit in this case? And are you sure the real 777 wouldn't show similar performance if you'd abuse the engines? I have no idea, but I seem to remember that a 757 could do an aileron roll in about 4 seconds - which many would find completely unrealistic I guess.Judith

FSX starts artificially lowering texture (and probably mesh) resolution very quickly, much more and much more quickly then the graphics card would do. For example, with LOD radius set to 'High', FSX switches from LOD 15 (~1 m/px) to LOD 14 at 0.6 nm out, while at 'Low' LOD radius, the switch occurs at only 0.3 nm out. At 25 miles out, you get LOD 10 with the 'High' setting vs. LOD 9 with 'Low' LOD radius. And for the record, I see a difference in texture sharpness up to a LOD radius of about 10 or so - while the maximum you can set in the UI (i.e. 'High') is 4.5. The LOD 15/14 switch is at about 1.5 nm out then. So, even at the UI's highest setting, FSX artificially lowers terrain resolution significantly, while X-Plane doesn't. Which means for a fair comparison, you'd actually need to increase the LOD radius above 'High' by hacking the config file. Well, assuming FSX is smart enough to clip the scenery at the visibility limit, that is. Are you running X-Plane at something other than the highest texture resolution setting by any chance? Because photo scenery in particular looks so much better in X-Plane on my machine (given the same resolution, created from the same source images). I have never bothered to do a real comparison, simply because the point is somewhat moot on my machine: While I can easily get FSX to run at triple-digit frame rates by turning settings way down, I can't manage to get rid of the frequent momentary drops to single digits. Which is completely and utterly useless, of course. Even when limiting the frame rate to lowish double-digit numbers, I get constant micro-stuttering. X-Plane, on the other hand, maintains triple-digit frame rates absolutely smoothly when turning settings way down. I agree, assuming your graphics card is half-decent. That might indeed be a driver issue - which X-Plane seems to have the annoying habit of provoking time and again, especially under Windows. With my old ATI card, X-Plane would run at less the half the frame rate under Windows than under Mac OS X (on the same machine, running Windows natively via Boot Camp). Clearly a driver thing - Windows should run slightly faster than Mac OS X (due to better optimized drivers I guess). Turns out frame rate would return to normal (i.e. more than double) by switching to window mode and decreasing the window size slightly. That's not really a solution, of course, if Windows is your main (or only) platform. I agree: FSX's multi-core utilization is about on par with X-Plane's. Both use additional cores only for loading and pre-processing scenery in the background, more or less. But X-Plane's graphics guy is well aware of the problem, and is actively working an gradually improving it.Judith

It's 25 (statute) miles actually. Which is still way to low anywhere near mountains, and is one of the biggest drawbacks of X-Plane's scenery system, in my opinion. The lowest LOD radius is much less then 20 miles in FSX, and X-Plane doesn't have any similar resolution-degrading mechanism. X-Plane supports arbitrarily high terrain texture resolutions. I don't have a number for the default scenery (it probably varies anyway because of the free-form terrain mesh), but I think it isn't considerably lower than FSX's, if at all. And besides, The Blurries are completely unknown to X-Plane. Which would mean off the scale to the right. Yes, at higher object density settings, X-Plane has way more autogen1 then FSX. Plus, X-Plane's 'autogen' trees have next to no impact on performance (at least on my system). X-Plane uses water shaders, too. But they somehow manage to be less of a performance hog while still looking better then FSX's most of the time.But you have a fair point nonetheless, which can also be illustrated the other way round: Set all of X-Plane's rendering options to the maximum, as so many users seem to think is absolutely necessary in FSX, and watch it crawl. But X-Plane is still usually smoother than FSX, in my humble opinion, because the latter often suffers from micro stutters and/or excessive frame rate volatility.Judith-----1 X-Plane's scenery developer likes to call it 'algogen' instead, because X-Plane actually doesn't have any autogen at all, in the sense of scenery objects the sim creates on the fly. What looks like autogen in X-Plane is just ordinary, pre-compiled static scenery.

No need to wait for Microsoft, and you can have it as soon as today: MegaSceneryEarth will actually ship their photo scenery on a mini hard disc, if you so choose - the other options being instant download or DVD. They seem to be slowly covering the US at the moment, and plan to do the whole world eventually. And yes, as the name suggests, it's brought to you by the same guys we all know and love for their MegaScenery series.

And now click on 'Search nearby', and you get something like this:Enough ads in there? Yes, you actively need to request them - remember, Google's not evil - but they're just a simple click away. As are Google's other prducts, by the way. How would you incorporate that into a flight sim?Btw, Holger, thanks for the MicroImages link - that looks very interesting indeed. Not least because it seems it can be accessed via WMS...

Well, that's because it effectively creates offline scenery. Whenever X-Plane tries to load a new scenery file (which it does in chunks of 1x1 degree), the g2xpl plugin simply pauses the simulator and calls the main (standalone) program. That in turn downloads everything needed for the 'tile' in question, does the neccessary conversions, and moves the result into X-Plane's scenery folder. When done, the plugin causes the simulator to reload the whole scenery and resume flight. The program can be tweaked to periodically download less than 1x1 degree at a time, filling in the rest of the tile with blanks (or images you already have), but there's no real on-the-fly image downloading going on. There has been some discussion about a mechanism to request the scenery engine to reload individual textures on the fly, but that's not there yet.In my opinion, photo scenery looks better in X-Plane than in FSX. Although the resolution is similar, the textures look somewhat sharper (even compared to FSX offline scenery), maybe because they don't need to be resampled. And the lighting somehow makes the overall scenery look more natural. Oh, and of course, there are no blurries whatsoever.

The joys of Unicode (well, as long as you don't have to parse it, that is) ✈ funny! There are actually characters like 'Latin small letter turned t' and the like in the Unicode character table. When you quote the message and click Preview Post you can see what the raw character codes look like - and how you can get them, too. By the way, how long did it take to type that line? ;)

>How far out from my airplane should I be able to see the tileproxy scenery?That depends on your LOD radius setting. TileProxy creates photo scenery down to LOD 8. With LOD radius = 2.5 (which corresponds to 'small'), LOD 8 is displayed up to about 50 nm out. With LOD radius = 4.5 (large), you should see TP scenery up to slightly above 90 nm out. With LOD radius = 9.5 (a ridiculously high setting not available through the UI, and rightly so), that would become 200 nm.Judith

IIRC, it's not TileProxy itself that encounters this error, but the Windows service manager. I think TileProxy tries to stop one of the hard disk caching services introduced by Vista, which would interfere with its operation. Obviously, this service doesn't exist on XP, so the service manager complains about 'service not found'.Judith

Well, as the ini file idicates, you shouldn't use water smoothing with FSX. And you probably shouldn't use water smoothing and water blending together at all - that's trying to do the same thing (well, sort of) twice. Anyway, when I did try water smoothing with FSX just for fun, it, too, took forever to load, and when it finally did, it took but a few seconds to become a blurry mess. So I'd say that either the water smoothing algorithm simply is that slow, or it doesn't work well in conjunction with FSX. But since FSX supports water blending (which looks much better anyway), that's not so much of a problem I guess.Judith