earthdog

...but but but.....i think it is in Beta.....

ASP4 - Weather Engine. Different options for different systems (especially for cloud/visibility opotions). REX SF - You can use this for all textures. PERSONALLY i use REX SF for everythign except: Sky Colors (from 1coder.ru), Sun Effect (Search for simple sunmod in avsim). PTA - I tried around 5-6 times to move to tomato but i stick with PTA, mostly because i like flying more than screenshoting. Dumped ENVTEX due to lack of shader customization. In your position i would start with REX SF - Choose whatever you like and then go to ASP4. Read the manual to find a sweet spot for settings or ask someone with similar flying preferences (IFR/VFR) and similar machine. Then try some PTA if you dont want to fiddle much. P.S. And try to keep the f/o KPI above 1 f/o = Flying/Optimizing.... 🙂 I am also for reality looks:

Nasty weather at Athens today....

If your machine is the one in your signature then do not bother trying tomato as it is not strong for that. find your sweet spot with the sliders and envshade and start flying. If you stick on tuning you will end up tuning more than flying. Trust me i know what i'm saying 🙂

"huge" can mean many things for someone. For example if the FPS impact on my machine prevents me from having the autogen sliders where i want them to be, then yes for me tomato would be out of the question. It is relative to what someone wants out of his sim.

First of all when i had it unlimited my GPU was at 99% constantly..No time to breath. I then decided to limit it to 30fps. I noticed that the internal FPS limiter of P3D was unstable for me and i had in some cases microstutters. Switching to NVIDIA Inspector only for FPS limiter solved everything.

As any tool , it is good if it works for you and not the other way around. Personally for me it is a must because i feel that my visuals are more close to real world environment and that gives for me immersion combined with the fact that i always "fly" online. So yes get it. The free alternative adds things that you will use if you are a bird watching planes from outside or you aim to win the global screenshot contest :))) JK

I cant seem to find a relative discussion about new PTA version that may add a couple of things. Personally i would like to see some additions to PTA aiming at making the existing approach better, meaning that i wouldn't care so much to loose performance just to have reflections on the plane...I am flying the aircraft from the cockpit and i want good VC and environment. If i get to have something more i can have it but with no performance impact... So... Dynamic specular lighting Dynamic saturation according to some params (height,epoch, time of day). We are doing that now manually using expressions but not all people like that. e.t.c What i meant to ask , is anything happening towards a "new" PTA version or not? Thanks.

Ed, the fact that you upped the parameter so much means that you should get a better "baseline" settings from P3D. For example start with a brightness >1 ~1.10 bloom around 0.25 and saturation near 1.00 When you do that then you will be able to go to individual PTA sections and adjust lighting and saturation individually... this will give you more control. When you play with P3D settings you change everything which is not what you need. For example in my case: P3D settings: [GRAPHICS] HDR_BRIGHTNESS=1.15000 HDR_BLOOM_THRESHOLD=0.180000 HDR_SATURATION=0.92000 and then in aircraft lighting and VC: If you like to test take my ini from here. My general approach to PTA visuals is that the real world is NOT beautiful. Colors are not so vivid so i try to replicate that to give a feeling of that http://www.estassinos.com/prepar3d-current-settings/

Tomato added a functionality that adds / manipulates dynamic reflections on the aircraft. If it is configured properly it can create great visuals when looking your aircraft from outside. I have tried to switch many times but did not find any solid reason to get the performance impact for a good screenshot only.... Other than that it seems to add some dynamic parameters which i would like to have on PTA. It would make the lives of a lot of people easier if they were added to PTA tool. After all i like flying more than tweaking so i dropped Tomato and used my GPU spare perf to have better VC frame frate....my 2c though.

I got the .PSD files from QualityWings and used photoshop and DXTBMP. In Photoshop i design and export to TGA and DXTBMP makes the flip of image and alpha channel and export to DDS.

I never tried it since i was going to be bored during the process 🙂 But i managed to make my first ever repaint. Its a fictional repaint for the company i work for. Not that we need a 787 for our corporate needs , but if you dream, dream big :)))

...and a good relationship it is 🙂

Flying exclusive online with VATSIM with ATC, i almost never get to use the VNAV :)) Always V/S....But it is annoying ...

mmm see this: And you click to download. It is around in the middle of the page. AS far as versions, i am using PTA 2.61 and reshade 3.0.4