Planeblogger

Nice shots!

with adjustments for smaller airports

This. How can I do this? I am afraid of reducing traffic in UT2 because of exactly this - flying to smaller airports which are then deserted..

29Palms SKiathos it was indeed. Fabulous addon, great airport to fly to for practicing your radio navigation and manual landing skills.

Thanks all, will see if I can upload some more tomorrow.

Hi guys,

I recently came back to flight simulation after a pause of almost three years. Bought myself a Lenovo Y500 with a fabulous full-HD screen and a SLI videocard setup, which comes to its full potential using the DX10 fixer.

If you have any questions with regards to addons used or settings, just let me know.

Herewith just some shots I took over the last week while flying or testing. Enjoy!

Kind regards,

Erik

All,

I use Ultimate Traffic 2, with some additional repaints installed.

I only add FSX-native models to the UT2-line, e.g. the UTT 787, 748, FAIB A32S and 737 series.

I found that all the native FSX AI textures were 1024x1024, 4MB in size and in DDS format.

In UT2, a mix of DXT3 (non mipped) and DXT1 (with mipmaps) are used.

My question is - what is the ideal texture format for AI-traffic. Should I convert all textures to a standard format? If so, which one? Is mdl able to handle any texture, regardless of format or compression?

Basically I am asking if there are some FPS to be gained by having all my AI textures converted to a certain format. I could not find a conclusive answer anywhere else.

Hope to hear from you,

Erik Brouwer

Right, so after owning the PMDG 777 and NGX for a while I have noticed something. 

 

Is it normal with their products to now claim to be able to fly the 777 and 737 in real life?

 

Can I please now go and tell people that I can fly these birds?

Yes, you can. I passed a fictional checkride on a 737NG sim (real sim, real examiner, real MCC) without problems, all memory items checked, with 'only' about 2800hrs logged on the PMDG 737 for FS9 and the NGX and about two yours on the moving 737 simulator before doing the checkride-stuff. I must admit it wasn't easy at first. Especially the speed at which everything happens and the pressure this puts on you is much higher than it occurs to you while sitting behind your desktop. But I, and many airline pilots with me, consider it doable. 

That said, William is right it doesn't help you much while doing PPL. The perspective at first is completely different, and the most important difference for me was that in flightsim, one flies by the numbers. Your instructor on the real world C172/Pa28 will teach you to fly with nose pitch and so forth, something you don't learn in the sim and that might actually make it harder to learn proper VFR flying, at first. Furthermore, the hours spent on the Carenado SR22 helped me nothing the moment I actually flew the aircraft for the first time. So I guess it doesn't work for all airplanes. But for the 737, while not having a rating on it, I am fully confident I will land a 737 NG safely in real life, especially since I know how to set-up for autoland ;-).

EDIT: I want to add that the difficult part is the landing of course. Remember the 9/11 hijackers who flew the airliners to their targets with only cardboard mockup training. The landing is the most tricky part. Flying a Cirrus or a 737 isn't  difficult. Doing a difficult approach with turns short before final and touching (not bouncing!) on the numbers is what makes your armpits wet.

Ah, nice, we're getting personal after the first post already. Must mean my post made some sense.

Hmm...clearly you haven't been educated on the limitations of free speech, even in the "free world."  I suggest you have a gander at the limitations on the matter.  Essentially, there's a limit on free speech that could be considered harmful

Ey, ey, easy on the guy who has a bachelor in journalism. (yep, that's me)

This is not about free speech. It is about the free market. You get what you deserve. Offer meets demand. You know, the basic stuff. It goes for cars, airplanes, but also for newspapers and other media.

That release date could make those who have read it very angry at PMDG if, after November, we still don't have a 744.  They could then get really upset about it not being out and generate a lot of negative publicity about it, which could harm PMDG's reputation.  Of course, this would be really difficult to prove in court, but let's be honest here:
There's a lot in the world that's legal, even though it's not quite right.

In which case PMDG could say: We never published any delivery date on said project, and refrain from further comment. That is how you deal with trashy tabloids. You don't actually call them that. Because they have customers who might be offended, and that might be your customers as well.

Clearly facts aren't your strong point.  Since when is Ryan "Mr. PMDG?"

Since he is in the DEV-team as said by his signature? I just wanted to make clear that as a part of the PMDG company, anything he says in public (especially with the signature attached) is seen as official PMDG messaging. 

I find this whole section funny because you're calling people unfriendly, and then you spout some pretty unfriendly remarks about all of them.

Yeah, because they are not my customers. I, however, am one of theirs and expect to be treated as such.

Clearly you've also never worked a help desk.  In helping people, you develop quite a skeptical side as the vast majority of issues out there are caused by the end user.

I know, but that doesn't mean you should lose basic skills when it comes to customer treatment. They are still your customer. Whatever kind of moron they may be. If you offend them, you may offend many others as well. Especially when you are so stupid to do it on a public forum.

So you're making a decision based on a thread about a separate aircraft, after getting upset about something that's entirely unrelated...

It has been building up over the last weeks. AirDailyX played a big part in getting updated on the latest flightsim developments in the last few weeks, as I tried to catch up with what happened the last three years.  Just getting back into all the flight-sim-stuff and I am amazed every day by what happens in the forums. It stops me from buying. Important reason of spending money on flightsimulator addons was contributing something to the community. Coming back to that community, I more and more ask myself if a. I want to be part of it and b. if I want to spend money keeping it alive. 

Erik

Ryan had a dig at AirDailyX by saying they spout unverified rubbish (I paraphrase). So your response, as a contributor to AirDailyX, is to go and prove his point?

 

Bravo. *Slow clap*

I am not a contributor to AirDailyX, where did you get that from?

As said site posted something rather irresponsible (a release date - estimated or not - for a product they have no insight on), I'm not too surprised by his response.  Sure, it could've been more diplomatic, but it is what it is...

I am sorry, but how is estimating a release date on a flightsim product irresponsible in your view? Does it bring the world to an end? Get back to reality, please!

If we would be talking about a tabloid putting a story on the front page that the POTUS has been shot, or that HSBC or Citibank is on verge of collapse, that would be irresponsible. We are talking about a flightsim addon for ***** sake. 

One major rule about media in the free world: Every nation and every community gets the media it deserves.

So if the one of the most accurate and informative blogs about flightsim on the web is  a trashy tabloid as said by mr. PMDG, that actually tells a lot about mr. PMDG and his customers.

I have been involved with Flightsim in the past, and have just come back after three years where I had no time for flightsim because I was bizzy doing real flying.

Coming back, I am amazed by the total lack of customer friendliness of most developers. At ORBX, they are arrogant pricks as they showed in the whole FTXG-DX10 debacle. Every bug report at FSDreamteams' is always approached with the greatest scepticism and mr. Virtuali is never at fault. And now this from PMDG, it all amazes me.

I have spent thousands of euro's on flight simulator software during the last ten years. I have bought sceneries I only visited once, just to try. I have bought planes that only left my virtual hangar once. I used to buy addons from certain developers, just to support future development.

I would be willing to spend the 90USD on the 777, however I would most likely never fly it. But for now, I have given up. Screw this.

Erik

EDIT: Come to think of it: I am going to announce the imminent release of the 747 v2 on my Facebook and G+ streams. Lets see if the world comes to an end. It just feels so good to act irresponsible now and then. It's just like drunk driving. Oh, wait..

Out of my head:

Boeing 737-300/400/500/700/800/900

Boeing 747-400

Boeing 757-200/300

Boeing 767-300

Airbus A319

Airbus A320

Airbus A321

Airbus A330-200/300

Airbus A340-300/600

McDonnelDouglas MD-11

Bombardier Dash8-Q400

Fokker 50

Fokker 70

Fokker 100

ATR72-200/500

BAe RJ85

BAe RJ100

Cessna C150/C152/C172/C182/C206/C208/C337/C421/O-2A/CJ Mustang/CJ1

Piper Pa18 Cub, Super Cub, Warrior, Archer, Meridian

Socata TBM700/850

Beechcraft KingAir E90

Generalavia F22.C

Lockheed C130J

Douglas DC-3

Douglas DC-10

PBY Catalina

Antonov An-2

Extra 300L

Pitts Special

Cirrus SR22 G3/G5

Yeah, I've run into this problem too.Solution:Create a new folder named AMSafcad, and within it create another folder named scenery. Put the AFCAD you want to use in it, and add the folder AMSafcad to your Scenery Library ABOVE the Aerosoft Amsterdam folders.Good luck!Rgds,

Really looking forward to this one!

I'm very sure Martinair still uses its MD-11s for passenger flights, and I actually thought Finnair did too.

Guys,Thank you so much for your suggestions. Let me be clear, that I am not asking for 30-40-50FPS, as my AI is so extensive that especially at larger airports, the amount of data the computer has to deal with is enormous. So yes, with my rig FS9 should 'scream' and 'rock' at solid 40FPS. And so it does, flying the default C172 in a faraway country without AI on a default airport. But I do believe that an aircraft as complex as the E-jet, combined with mesh, landclass, scenery as complex as I have currently installed and 45GB of AI aircraft, still can give a modern computer a hard time. But 7-8 FPS is simply ridiculous, so that's why I came here.So today I tried various things.I rechecked my OC settings. My processor is now running at 3,6GHZ (400MHz, 9.0 multiplier) with memory overclocked from 400MHz to 533.3 MHZ (giving 1066MHz DDR2 memory). My memory-clock had a weird value before, this is now corrected it seems. All temps are stable and far below critical, since I have one beast of a cooler installed.I played FS9 in compatibility mode (WinXP SP2), I removed it. It made me having to reset my joystick assignments, since FSUIPC had lost everything for some stupid reason.I checked the version numbers of my add-ons. Especially Aerosoft is notorious for updating their software without mentioning it to their customers. Updated Munich from 1.01 to 1.03, furthermore STR (close to MUC), AYT and ORY needed updating. I have a netbook connected to my FS-pc, which runs ActiveSky and AIsmooth through WideFS.But I also had setup a shared internetconnection, which I now removed. both computers use their own wi-fi antennas now.I retried, and now I am running 15-20FPS at MUC while taxiing. I think that is acceptable, having 45GB of AI aircraft installed flying according to the most up-to-date AIG fp's?Landing in Aerosoft's BCN gave me a solid 24.9FPS (locked 25).I also installed the Process Monitor. I couldn't really find out how to use it, but I saw fs9.exe was constantly looking for texture.CFG, but failing to find it. Now, the confusing thing is, I think this 'CFG' can mean two things:- An AI-aircraft of Condor, which is missing its texture-folder- A config-file named texture.cfgThe first option is practically impossible, since my AI traffic is very, very extensive BUT very well maintained, using several programs like FlightSim manager and Aircraft Manager, I am 99,99% sure a missing texture folder is not possible.But the latter is also difficult, because as far as I know, FS2004, does not have a texture.cfg by default?!Does anybody know what is happening here, and why? Is this a problem? Rgds,Erik

Hey guys,When I fire up my sim for a flight on Feelthere's E195 for Münich-Barcelona for example, with broken cloud cover, directly after loading FS I have about 14-16 FPS.Which is reasonable, considering:-my rigCore2Duo E8400 @ 3.8GHzNvidia GTS250 512MB OC4GB OCZ RAM500GB 16MB-cache 7.200rpm HDD with Win7 Pro500GB 32MB-cache 10.000rpm HDD with FS9.1-my addonsAerosoft Münich 2010Feelthere E-jets v2 (SP2)AESUltimate Terrain EuropeFSGlobal 2010ActiveCamera 2004Real Environment Xtreme for FS2004 + OverDrive (DXT3 textures)ActiveSky Evolution (through WideFS on Asus EeePC)ALL AIG and RATS flightplans for AI installed, with shared lightmaps and all textures in DXT3 without MIPS.-my settings8xS Combined AA16x AFTrilinear filtering1680x1050x32 resolutionBUT:As time goes on, and my pax are boarding my aircraft, more and more FPS drops. After 20-30 minutes, I have only 6-8 FPS left which makes my flightsim practically useless. So by the time my aircraft is set up and pax are strapped in, flying is simply not possible any more and I have to cancel the flight due to technical problems with the aircraft. (or rather, the PC that is simulating it)When I fly an aircraft like the lately released F-86 Sabre, with extremely detailed external model and VC, no matter what weather conditions I choose and at which airport I fly, I have steady 24,9FPS (locked 25). Which makes me suspect it's something with the aircraft. I understand the E-jet is heavier due to its advanced systems, but why do the FPS decrease with time?I am 100% positive my AI is in perfect order and there are no missing or corrupt textures, effects or models whatsoever. What could be the culprit of this? I suspect that with the above written specs, my PC should be easily running FS9 close to 20FPS in this scenario, no?I hope you guys can help me!Rgds,Erik Brouwer

FSX and today's PCs will NEVER be able to simulate an Airbus.No Wilco, no Aerosoft and nobody will be able to codify Airbus fly-by-wire systems, meaning a correct computerized flight-control system that overrides the pilots decisions when flying outside the correct performance limits.No one will release a product for PCs that simulates real FBW system based on flight-envelope protection coupled with computerized fuel management controls for economy cruise mode(s). Nobody will codify the millions of lines to simulate the data transmitted to the ECAM in real time. I am sorry to say that the Aerosoft bus is a beautiful empty shell and the Wilco bus flies like a 777.With the upcoming "Pro", or "Premium" or "Advanced" or "V2.0" versions, their Airbus will look like an Airbus, will smell like an Airbus but will have the taste of a Boeing.Just my 2 cts.