JonP01

FSX - I do not use FSUIPC.

I use a Logitech F710 gamepad and it is excellent for what it is - so all control surfaces are allocated to the joysticks for instance but the remaining primary functions such as flaps, trim, throttle and prop go to the remaining buttons. I have mixture as two of the keyboard keys since that is one of the least frequent adjustments when actually flying. The only reason I never went to a full setup with rudder pedals yoke and throttle quadrant is because my simming machine is primarily for sim racing and that requires a pretty hefty permanent setup. If I ever stop racing (I will when either age catches up to me or this machine and the racing wheel dies) then my plan was always to get the full setup for flight simming only. And probably P3D instead of FSX so long as I can still get all my scenery and aircraft onto it. I would be curious to know if this issue ever found its way into P3D but I guess 99% of people who use it have proper yokes, pedals, throttles, etc.

It is FSX Steam running on Windows 7 with a Ryzen 2700X and Nvidia 2060 Super GPU. Yes - buttons only for throttle, prop and mixture.

You might find that the Steam client updates that will enforce these changes were actually being made a couple of months before the announcement. This was possibly to prevent people trying to "bypass" the system and remain with Windows 7 indefinitely. I can't remember which version of the client it was but I believe it was one from very late last year. I suspect that unless your machine does not have an updated client since that time, you may find that your Windows 7 machine will no longer work in truly offline mode once that 2024 cut off date passes. What I mean by that is never even needing an internet connection at all to play FSX. The previous clients still enabled fully offline game play indefinitely. Then the client changed at the end of last year and although you could still play a game "offline", you could only go offline each time by being online before starting the game, then moving into offline mode when actually playing the game. This was a critical change to the previous Steam clients up to late 2022. I have always been careful to make regular drive images and I picked up on this early this year. As a result, with my current setup, if I do actually have to go online with my Windows 7 FSX machine (very rare indeed), I will disable the Steam client from even being able in load in the first place - because if you ever go online for any reason - it will automatically update to the newest version even if you are not using it or playing any games. And once it is updated, there is no going back unless you have an old drive image. The simplest explanation - if you have been online with a Windows 7 machine and Steam running in the last 5 months or so it is likely already too late for you unless you have a system backup from perhaps around December last year (exact date I am unsure of).

For anyone who still might want this information, it would appear that the downloadable listing sits "un-claimed" per se since no one appears to want to take on the hosting costs (presumably not helped by the sim now being 17 years old). Although there is a google drive link to it, it is simply far too large to successfully download. I have found a partial workaround though, which solves one aspect of the problem (but not another). I am simply using a coordinate converter app on my Smartphone while I slew in the sim to the precise object I either wish to remove or change the scenery density threshold (although I can modify the cfg file to show coordinates as fully decimal they are too hard to read because the FSX font is far too small on my 21 inch monitor (though I guess I could temporarily massively reduce the resolution)!!. Since I already have a good idea of the associated BGL file, it is then a matter of exporting the ModelConverterX XML output to Excel and then performing a text to columns operation and sorting the objects by latitude and longitude order. It is then fairly simple to find the precise object by the coordinates rather than having to know the GUID. Of course if you then want to modify all objects using that same GUID, it then also becomes a simple operation in Excel and then importing the output back into ModelConverterX. Slow and cumbersome, but as they say, it gets the job done! But every time I keep dealing with old FSX's shortcomings I am more tempted to get a much faster GPU and take advantage of P3D!!

Thanks. Yes I know - it was one of the utilities I was referring to in my original post. However it can only do this when you import a specific file/s so far as I am aware. And all you can then do with it is export it then create your own manual list of associated GUIDs - but still with no description associated with it - for that you have to "look" at every object manually. What I am after is some sort of database where I can enter any GUID and it will perform a search and bring up a description of the object and preferably a picture of the model itself. I believe such a database was actually created however I do not know what became of it - all links are dead or no longer working.

I have seen numerous people complain about this issue over the years but the threads never seem to go very far - so presumably the complainants ended up living with it as I have. But with Winter here down under coming I use this time each year to further refine my FSX setup, add more scenery and fix anything up that is less than perfect that I discovered over the year. About the only really significant annoyance I have still remaining with FSX that might possibly still have a resolution is - as the title says - a "slowdown" of the repeat button repeat rate after a certain period of time has elapsed when running FSX. The only solution is to save the flight, close FSX and start it up again. And this can often cause problems with complex add-ons where saving the flight does not really save everything like it does with simple, stock aircraft. This issue seems to only effect movement of the controls pertaining to throttle, mixture and prop rpm. What will happen is that when you start the flight, the "speed" of the response to pressing the associated button is fine (as I have it setup, thus how I intended it to work) but at a certain point in time during the flight, the response slows down to less than half the speed it used to be. This is incredibly annoying given that at the time when you need throttle response to be as fast as possible (final approach and landing), you have a very sluggish throttle that simply does not respond quickly enough. As I say there has been quite a few discussions in the past about this and many solutions or theories offered - but none of the solutions or suggestions ever worked. My theory is that it might have something to do with the FSX engine prioritising certain things - and when too many non-essential things get "piled" up by the FSX engine and don't get processed, the engine seems to start cutting corners and not doing things correctly anymore. Examples of this are ever increasing blurries, wind shear that goes completely nuts with 180 degree shifts, ATC messages that start to "lag" behind or no longer make contextual sense etc - things people have complained about regularly in the past. Most if not all of these problems go away when more processing power is thrown at the sim, or things turned down (the latter not really an option any of us like). I did notice that as I built more powerful machines, the issue with the slowing throttle response tended to not appear 100% of the time or took longer to appear - these days it can happen within about an hour to 90 minutes. And I also notice it tends to happen when (of all things) ATC gets heavily caught up firing multiple messages to a large number of aircraft at once (including my own when I might get half a dozen instructions within a minute). This suggests my "priorities" theory might be correct. Anyway, I just thought I would check to see if anyone ever found a solution, though I suspect short of running FSX on a state of the art 2023 machine with an ultra fast processor (or turning things down or off to the point where it is no longer is a decent simming experience), this is likely one bug / issue that I have to live with (just like the other things mentioned as well as the mouse slowdown, etc).

Hi, I am trying to find a list of all the FSX stock library objects with their accompanying GUID and a description (preferably even a picture of the object). I realise there are utilities around that can read the files and produce XML outputs and reference any given BGL file and the objects within it, etc but I am trying to find a comprehensive database of all the objects in one place. Otherwise if I come across some random GUID in an XML file I have no idea of what it relates to. Trawling through random BGL files trying to find it is obviously like trying to find a needle in a haystack. I've done a fair bit of searching on the net and found a few references to such databases however they either no longer exist, the links are long dead or the file (if found to begin with) cannot be downloaded (there was supposedly one on Google but I was unable to download it). If anyone knows where there is an online or downloadable resource (and the links to it and the resource still works) I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks.

Yep. Well he is not holding back now (lawyers have given him "sufficient" leash)! I have to admit that my opinion is more fluid than it might have been a couple of weeks ago. After Neimann's own cheating admissions from the past, my intuition tells me that anything that gives you an instant "high" in the past is a potential source of addiction very difficult to shake off in the future. I stopped playing competitive chess years ago after encountering a cheat in a correspondence game (which is the worst possible environment for cheating). Their playing strength suddenly seemed to increase by about 800 points after they fell for a combination that was probably around the equivalent high over the board club level (which was roughly my correspondence playing strength). Suddenly I felt like I was up against a Kasparov. And it was not much fun after that. If Carlson has come out and said this in a public tweet he must have a very convincing case already.

That actually sound quite plausible since at that level they are all such precise players that leaked prep might be the equivalent of a relative loss (or gain) of perhaps 150 points, meaning it would then just require a small inaccuracy later in the game and if capitalised then the weaker player will win. It would also explain the bizarre ongoing behaviour like disappearing after two moves...

I agree. It is almost impossible to cheat in high level face to face tournaments these days. And for those not familiar with chess and the rating system, the rating difference between the two players involved does actually "permit" the lower ranked player to win - just much less frequently. And yes, the higher you get in rating, the less likely a lower rated player will win - much more likely is a whole swag of draws and an ocassional win by the higher ranked player. But still wins can and do happen, especially when as n4gix points out, the better player is having a bad day. In any case, every player's rating declines with age and there really isn't any getting around it. Maybe Magnus has reached the point - just like all the Champions before him - where his strength is beginning to decline. No player stays at the top forever. There is also an aspect of chess where certain players just have great difficulty beating a lower ranked player because of a "clash" of styles. Almost every player can recount games where they just have a "difficult" opponent yet that same opponent might be easily beaten by another player who in turn can be easily beaten by that original player. Who would want to be the next chess superstar these days when all that happens is you will get accused of cheating?

I was a relative later comer to flight simming with my first purchase of a simulator for home use being flight Simulator 98. I remember buying CFS2 perhaps a year later and being stunned by the improvement over FS98. I bought all subsequent versions upon the day of release. That said, I do remember trying out FS1 I believe it was at an IBM personal computer demonstration setup at work some time in the mid 1980s ( I was working with IBM mainframes at the time). But at the time of FS98 and CFS2, I remember thinking that perhaps - just perhaps - within my remaining lifetime - flight simulator might look like something resembling old analogue 576i television broadcasts, albeit with much clearer instruments (though I did not even envisage 3D cockpits at the time). To think, however, that technology and the brilliant brains behind both hardware and software have brought us what we see in this thread....well words really fail me. It really is at a point now where by the time you've seen enough to absorb the differences, you've spent about 300 times as long staring at that precise image as it would probably would have lasted in the real time simulation before the next frame was processed and thrown up on the screen. I can only think what further iterations of DirectX will bring because quite honestly, it is (to me at least) more the way light is subtly absorbed and bounced off objects and things such as atmospheric haze that are the more fundamental details of differentiation. Bottom line is we now know that rendering pretty much what you see in real life from air is now possible to mostly achieve in a simulation (the extent of detail merely limited by processing power it would seem). But even my observations surrounding "light detail" are things I see this very day in movies and modern video that is necessarily compressed compared to original raw footage that requires massive storage. To me it always seems to be the subtleties of light that are the first victims but as mentioned, I think this will only improve over time. We've seen it improve tremendously just between Directx9 and Directx12 already!

I created a spreadsheet for myself of all navaids in the stock FSX:SE edition which I use to assist with my flight planning given that like navigating using "old school" technologies such as VOR and NDB only. The data in the spreadsheet includes the effective reception range of the Navaids. I used a utility (Easynavs) from the website linked below to extract the data. I suggest it is better though for any user to create their own spreadsheet from the above utility simply because there can be umpteen different variations of navaids in any version of the game and any new scenery at all or updates to any original data sources used by the game can effect the underlying source navaid data. So better to have an exact "match" for your own installation. https://sors.fr/aero/navaids.html

Thanks for that very detailed reply Chock. Much appreciated. And I had not given much thought to long haul flights and hours. Yet another thing to add to the mix as you say.