John in Brisbane

Oh here's hoping! The cut scenes on their site aren't making me hopeful though - I've watched them on several computers of varying power and the scene always looks grabby :-(. I've been playing with x-plane on my android phone and ok, so there's no auto gen but they've clearly started with "Smooth flight" as a design hard-point and worked backwards from there. Result - the terrain is simpler and more cartoon-like but by eliminating grabbiness it appears more realistic. Contrast that with my 4.8ghz watercooled core i5 with some good cfg tweaks and it still gets grabby and the FPS drops when the complexity rises... tragic! Given the power of my computer, there is something wrong when a sim still can't run smoothly. MS hasn't changed - they still don't understand how us humans work, compared to the apple people. In some ways they're still like the Russians copying the west with the Concorde, space shuttle etc... looks similar but since they're copying instead of developing their own, something is lost in the process. I have a great android phone with more of everything than the iphone 4s yet side by side mine gets grabby when scrolling while the apply doesn't - apple know how to convey quality! There has got to be a better way to depict a landscape in a way that appears more realistic yet doesn't use as much computing power. Maybe the real world needs to be scanned with LIDARs and algorithms developed to smoothly depict the resulting info?Anyway, I'll shut up and go back to sittin, wishin...

Hi there avsim -people! First post. Considering how much I use FSX it was high time."For me, suspension of disbelief is essential" ... Yep. A big part of that is smoothness - something I've only just started to get on top of with a new intel cpu, overclocked a fair bit. The frustration of building a computer for the first time specifically for FSX and then having it run so poorly was immense.I keep thinking that sims are being done the wrong way. That there has got to be a better way to get something approximating real life. I urge people to google LIDAR images of the WTC etc - while not the full answer, surely there is a way forward involving the 3d scanning and photographing of the real world and then modelling it in a sim? Sims seem to come from the PoV of drawing things where they are supposed to be, the right size and colour, with the right proportions. Fine. But our eyes are not easily fooled by that - a forest of autogen trees looks pretty impressive on my new rig but I bet I could be fooled much better by a different, less CPU-intensive approach that had either zero autogen or uses it in different ways. Maybe a 3d model of the real shape of the forest canopy with some autogen of leaves and branches to give it density and texture? I am having trouble putting this into words but when flying around in light aircraft, in between remembering check lists and radio boundaries, I keep thinking that the real world is actually simpler than the fsx world, if the right approach was used. Anyway, this is my very first post so I guess I'll get to know the site and what other people have been saying - I bet I'm duplicating other posts!