Larry_R

Dear BstolleOh my. I'm so sorry, I was afraid that my first posts here would end up me causing offense. And I was trying to qualify my statements so they did not. My only personal reference is that of a one time frequent passenger often in the right seat and I know that does not count. My thought was that I had made other changes which were adative to those suggested, plus I am using a different controller. Maybe this was not the right place for me to seek help in increasing the realism; the main purpose I had in mind.Sorry again, I'm in over my head. Larry

Thanks for the pics Glenn, most interesting. I've started to think about other 'tests' that could done that would isolate the controller from the test, so that apples could be compared with apples. Then when the RW Beaver pilot tells us "x", we could set things up to match that. :-) I tried the stability settings you gave, without changing my other tweaks, and found the result not that realistic, to a non-pilot at least. It's the combination of things of course. So I went back to one point zeros (default) and started up from there in 0.1 increments. I'm still at it. I looked into getting the EPS app that will re-load the aircraft.cfg file while the sim is running. It looks like I can get access to it through MSDN for just $500 USD! What a deal. Steve, with my setup, I'm playing with the pitch scalar (in the [Flaps] section) of 0.6 or 0.7. E.g. pitch_scalar= 0.7I'm trying to keep the changes as small as possible and yet achieve a desireable result --- thinking that most likely the issue is my skill, not the aircraft cfg file. :-) Larry

Thanks Glenn, yes, that helps! I'll take your word for it regarding the stability settings! I'll see what happens using these settings along with my control surface settings which also have decreased the twitchiness. Interestingly enough, I finally settled on an elevator_effectiveness of .75 I suppose the controller is the unknown variable here. As another example I found that the trim switches on the Saitek yoke seemed to not allow fine enough adjustment, so I lowered the aileron and elevator trim effectiveness values a modest amount. After my previous note about decents I thought I should be a bit more careful, rather than just relying on my vague impressions. I've just compared a steady state vertical descent rate, flaps set to #2 position, engine on idle, with speed held at 80 mph. both with and without my parasitic drag change. In both cases, the value was essentially the same; -1200 feet per minute (if I got the units right). So much for that idea; reverted to the original settings.There is another issue I've wondered about, that also may be controller related. With my Saitek yoke, when the flaps are lowered there is a significant pitch-up with each increment unless the speed is quite low, and it's hard to quickly compensate for this with the somewhat sticky action of the yoke. The result is that my reaction seems to be late and then excessive. I suppose there are a number of tweaks that one could use, but I found that reducing the flaps pitch_scalar somewhat largely fixed this - for my setup. That's the only other change I've kept other than in the flight tuning section.Thanks so much for posting your values; numbers are aways nice to have.Larry

Hi Glenn, Thanks so much for your detailed reply. Yes, I've backed up my original file, and I've been making only the slightest tweaks, one at a time, with // delineated notes of what I've done. Sort of a tinker at heart, I have managed to fix the sensitivity problem in the Saitek yoke, at least to a fair extent. I put trim pots on either side of the elevator pot (forget how many ohms) and adjusted to my taste. I've even toyed with the idea of putting in an exponential pot. I also replaced the springs that resist the fore/aft motion of the shaft so that it slides more easily, and I modified the bearings. My test was to see what was the smallest increment of shaft travel I could accomplish in use. As delivered, it's quite a bit, which results in sort of incremental control. I've now got it down to say 1/32 inch of travel, with much less sense of sticking, then jumping free.I recently flew back from Victoria to Seattle on Kenmore Air, and noticed that we were at 1000 feet about even with Arrowhead Point approaching Kenmore, and yet landed with ease (of course!) with plenty of room to spare. As I remember, the speed stayed around 80 plus knots. This isn't what happens when I've tried it in the sim. :-) Brain failure on my part trying to adjust this by changing the flap drag scalar. It worked going down, but then the climb rate up was better with no flaps. :-) I went back to playing with a more global solution; increasing the parasitic drag very slightly, and then increasing the engine power output to restore the original crusing speed and climb rate. I suppose I could remotely justify this by assuming that all the mooring lines hanging off the wing, the paddle on the floats, etc. were not considered in the sim model. OK, that's stretching it. I guess it's just harmless fun, as I can easily revert to the default. Or try something else. I'm using the documentation on this page as a guidehttp://msdn.microsof...y/cc526949.aspx which appears to be the same as in the SDK. But so far I have not found a way to make the plane 'mush in' and decelerate more quickly on landing. It seems to decelerate much too slowly -- or it's my imagination. The ESP SDK mentions an app that will force reloading of the plane while the sim is running. It does not appear to be included in the FSX SDK, but I wonder if it's available - - free that is - - and would work. That would make tweaking a lot more productive. It's really great to hear from a RW Beaver pilot! I'd be most interested to know of the adjustments you made.Larry

I hope you will forgive a new guy's post on this topic if it's been well covered before. I'm wondering what sort of experience people have had tuning the default FSX Beaver flight characteristics via the aircraft.cfg file. Specific settings that is. With my Saitek yoke, I found the elevator sensitivity excessive to my taste, even with the setting as low as possible in the sim. After modifying the elevator_effectiveness, one thing lead to another, and I ended up tweaking a number of the control surface settings, including those for the trim tabs.I'm now experimenting with one of the drag modifiers. Have others done this? The rationale was that my impression has been that the real plane can descend more rapidly without gaining excessive speed than can the sim airplane, with the same flap setting. As a start, I'm playing with the flaps drag scalar, having also experimented with the parsitic drag scalar. Seems to work, but there are a *lot* of numbers one can play with. Besides, I get suspicious when so many entries are set at the default values. :-) I'd be most interested to hear what's been done. Larry

Hi Bojote, Just curious; have you also investigated tweaks for aircraft cfg files? If so, perhaps another thread...Thanks again!

Thanks so much Hey-sus!

Hi Hey-sus,I appolgize for asking this question, but I've not been able to find any documentation regarding the following which I find in your .cfg file, both the one linked and a later one I found:[FSDREAMTEAM] AntiPopUp=100 AltitudeCull=1 Are these entries specific to FS Dreamteam products, or do they have a function without such software installed? If they are not specific to FS Dreamteam, what do they do?Thanks so much, and thank you again for all your marvelous work,

As a new guy, I think this is a great idea. I had fiddled with my .cfg file quite some time ago, but largely forgotten what I'd done and why. After the amazing increase in performace I got using Hey-sus's tweaking tool, I started wondering if there were things I had done that need reconsidering. So as a start, and with the caveat Hey-sus mentions regarding misapplying his personal .cfg file, I've made an excel spreadsheet with each [xxx] section in a separate column, with my current equivelent side by side, and then everything sorted a to z, and adusted so similar entries are on the same line. I'm finding that it really helps me see the bigger picture. For someone eager, I think there could be a lot of potential; a macro could be made to automatically sort a copy of a .cfg file into the proper place. Cell notes could be added for people like me who forget exactly what an entry does, and cells could be hyperlinked to specific entries in this forum where more detail is given. At least you would have a better idea of where you are. And thank you again Hey-sus!

Wow Hey-Sus, this marvelous tool, expecially for someone like me with minimal understanding. A little feedback should it be of help: On first use using your 'conservative' settings, and using recommended Orbix PNW settings, general experience flying over Seattle went from jerky - almost impossible to smooth with frame rates 15 to 20. The only issue was delayed fill in various triangular areas, say every 10 seconds or so. Annoying. Next, just upgraded my ATI 4850 card to a 6850. The white flashing (if that's what it's called) was much reduced, and they filled almost instantly, but still present. Went through my new cfg file, comparing it with the old one, line by line. Found a dozen or so duplicate Display.device sections from the old video card.I assume these were non-functional, but I removed them out nonetheless.I also found a new entry, but it was repeated:Like this:SHADER_CACHE_PRIMED_10=1693458432SHADER_CACHE_PRIMED=1693458432 // this was the original entry, SHADER_CACHE_PRIMED_10=1693458432 I removed the duplicate. Maybe more importantly, although RejectThreshold=131072 was added, there was no UsePools=1 entry, which if I read one of your posts correctly, is needed for the RejectThreshold to work. Added the usepools entry, and the delayed fill problem is almost gone. A *tremendous* improvment over what I started with. Only remaining puzzle with my new 6850 card is that changing the filter settings in FSX seems not to have any significant effect (with CCC set to 'let application decide'). I'll play around more trying just using the CCC settings and the filters in FSX turned off. But even as is, jaggies which had been quite noticable with the old card are much reduced.