JonP01

I think this question sits better here than in a hardware forum since it is specific to Prepar3D and gamepads all have the same generic type of configuration (due to practical limitations I use a standard layout gamepad for Prepar3D since my cockpit setup is actually for race simming). It works absolutely fantastically for every aircraft I have (I have a different controller configuration file for each one) except for the one glider I have. Like all gliders it has spoilers but they are at the "mercy" it seems of the Prepar3D controller configuration limitations. In other words, if you do not have a spare controller axis for the spoilers, so far as the default options are concerned, you can only either allocate a key (or button) to have them fully on and another for fully off (or otherwise use the mouse to move the spoiler lever). That might be fine for airliners where you can happily use the mouse to arm them or set various positions because you are not hand flying, but in a glider you already have your hands completely full 100% of the time with stick and rudder and trying to use the mouse at the same time to set the perfect spoiler position really is practically impossible (yes, granted it would obviously be possible if I had dedicated flight simulation hardware but I don't see that happening while I am still able to race - one day I will get too old for it and then I will get the full hardware for flight simming only!). So I was wondering does anyone know a way to have the spoilers behave the same sort of way the throttle might work (where you can have two buttons - one button increments the setting progressively increasing it and the other button increments the setting by progressively decreasing it. Obviously with a glider this is pretty much vital since the spoiler position is critical for controlling airspeed on the final approach and when landing. I have JoyToKey but there does not seem to be any way to create a virtual axis from two buttons or two keyboard keys (which is effectively what I need to do). Has anyone successfully created a workable virtual axis from two buttons (or two keyboard keys would be fine as well - I can then use JoyToKey to map those keys to the two buttons). If I can create this virtual axis then that would solve the problem since then I can allocate this axis to the spoilers. Otherwise I would somehow need to "introduce" incremental functionality to the spoilers the same way it is done by default for things like the prop, throttle, mixture, etc. Thanks

Can someone explain the technicality behind the re-entry map that shows the vehicle heading West from the West coast of New Zealand across to South Australia then it shows an abrupt change of direction "on a dime" to head in the expected north-easterly direction toward to West coast of the US?

For anyone who prefers the minimalist approach of Nvidia Inspector, these are the values you can input into the relevant RTX Vibrance fields based on the corresponding percentage settings in the Nvidia App GUI (so in other words, you don't need the Nvidia App once you know these values if you don't wish to use the Nvidia App). The values are the same for both the intensity and saturation fields though obviously you can have different values for each if you want (and you probably will). % Value 0 0x00000000 5 0x00000005 10 0x0000000A 15 0x0000000F 20 0x00000014 25 0x00000019 30 0x0000001E 35 0x00000023 40 0x00000028 45 0x0000002D 50 0x00000032 55 0x00000037 60 0x0000003C 65 0x00000041 70 0x00000046 75 0x0000004B 80 0x00000050 85 0x00000055 90 0x0000005A 95 0x0000005F 100 0x00000064

It does sound crikey but it is not as crazy as it appears. There is obviously only one actual config file - it is just that my scripting changes whatever needs to be changed for a particular run and there are 168 possible variations. One of the reasons I have the prepar3d.cfg file changed before launch is that some parameters would be changed were I to venture into the user interface. Also, it would be a pain to keep changing all the settings (the scripting otherwise changes automatically) every single time I go out and fly. But the logic is: 1. I have 7 aircraft. So that is at least 7 variations to begin with since the sound parameters and force feedback parameters are different for each aircraft (the controller file is different too but I just get my script to copy in the relevant control file as part of the launch). 2. Within each of those 7 aircraft I have two further subsets - one for night and one for day but all they actually change is the colour of the AI labels (so they are equally visible at night and during the day - dark blue for the day and white for the night). 3. Then there is a further subset for AI traffic variations - since I do not want to overload the sim with too much aircraft traffic (I am not a huge fan of it anyway but like to have some), I have an option to pick either commercial or GA traffic. 4. And finally, I have different settings for road traffic for different combinations of ORBX regions - although I own most of the regions I ended up dividing them up into 6 "regions" - each having different settings that reflect how much of a system load they represent (though in this case the main thing that varies is the density of the road and sea traffic though as we all know that does make quite a difference in some cases). so the combinations are 7 x 2 x 2 x 6 = 168

Mine is all "in house" but it would do the same thing. I actually have 168 x prepar3d config files!!!!!!!

Thanks for the replies. Everything works fine - I was just wondering why it did it but I think you are both right about the add-on method. If I count the number of areas I have that use that method, it equates to the numerical gap as it were. The reason I had some concern is that I have my own scripts to launch P3D since I have a lot of different configurations of a whole lot of things depending on what aircraft I am flying, what region and even what time of day (or night). Everything automatically reconfigures at launch and part of that entails tailoring the scenery appropriately. it is when I buy new airports I notice this (and I do not try to alter it since I have done that in the past thinking I was "fixing" something wrong but with unintended consequences!).

When editing my launching scripts for Prepar3D I was reminded that there will be certain area numbers in the scenery.cfg file where the corresponding layer number does not increase commensurately. So for example, when the area number increments by 1, the layer number might increment by 2, thus bypassing a particular layer number altogether whereas area numbers never do this (at least from what I have seen). If ORBX Central for example, updates my scenery.cfg file, it will purposely jump 5 layer numbers at one point where the area number only jumps by its usual 1. I have always wondered....what is the reason for this? Why do the layer numbers jump "ahead" of the area numbers? Is there some technical reasons related to P3D that requires this or is it something that the scenery developer requires?

I was admittedly very slow to the party on this one - 11 years infact (it just goes to show you can sim for many years and somehow magically through absolutely nothing but sheer luck - and ignorance - avoid the bugs that others find very quickly). I am talking about a well discussed issue that reared its head around 2015 and so far as I can tell, was never, ever resolved. You would fly, for example, from ORBX Concrete 3W5 to ORBX Darrington 1S2. A very short flight - lovely and scenic and just the thing if you only have half an hour to spare. You would then arrive at 1S2 and (to use the words of one of the respondents) it becomes a ghost town. No objects. No nothing. Maybe a bit of autogen if you are lucky. And the low resolution satellite underlay. That's it. There were only ever two solutions offered: one was to use the old ".OFF" trick on the 1S2 polygon file and then you would have everything except of course the polygon. Meaning no proper runway, taxiways, etc. A last resort sort of thing if you ask me! The other option was to re-load the entire scenery library when you were about 5 miles out from 1S2. Not great - you are basically loading the entire flight all over again as the refresh scenery option does not work. But it does "work" if you love the ultimate mid-VFR-scenic flight immersion spoiler! Now although I have owned most ORBX PNW airports for years, I have never flown from 3W5 to 1S2! I've done the opposite many times. And I've made lots of flights out of 1S2 and lots into 1S2, but never from 3W5! So I never knew about this bug till I decided this weekend to do that flight. What followed was a day of reading old forum posts and trying everything at my end to see if there was a solution other than the two offered (there wasn't). As Alex Goff finally admitted, it had him stumped, had everyone stumped and all the theories about too many objects, etc came to nought. So it was never fixed and we live with these workarounds. For my own part, since I have written extensive scripts to pre-configure P3D before it loads up, I've just added an option in this case to load the whole PNW region with 3W5 and the whole region without it - since 3W5 is actually the culprit here - get rid of that and 1S2 works perfectly. But as soon as you ever load up 3W5 (either by flying from it or because you overflew it enroute to 1S2), 3W5 will forcibly unload all the objects at 1S2. This is also probably why people find 1S2 "unloading" even when they fly from elsewhere - if 3W5 is the last airport to load into your system enroute, then you will lose all the 1S2 objects. But if any other airports loads afterwards and then you go to 1S2, it is fine. What I am interested in finding out is whether Lockheed Martin were able to shed any light on this and whether there are any other instances where this unloading occurs (it would be when two airports are within the minimum scenery loading radius of each other - in v4 that is 32,000 metres though you can change it manually though go into the interface and it always changes back to 32,000. Actually if I get some time I'm going to ".OFF" files at Concrete to see if I can find whether there is a specific culprit (including autogen files), since everyone else seems to have only bothered experimenting at the Darrington end (but I think the bug is triggered by Concrete - Darrington just happens to be the victim). It's certainly an interesting "bug" (if you can call it that - someone like to blame ORBX - I just blame it on these things being extremely complex and sometimes things happen that are too hard and not worth the angst to solve as the issues rarely occur.

There are two reasons I will always stick with P3D. the first is that I have a Mickey Mouse internet connection and it can't even reliably stream a highly compressed Full HD movie. Even basic websites take achingly long to load. But this is Victoria, Australia and without saying disparaging things about the state of my nation at the moment, all I will say is if something works at all then I guess one cannot complain.... But there is another reason - I have my own private weather "engine" that I actually began writing all the way back when Weather Themes became a thing back in FS2004. I have continued to work on it over the years and even just last month I made quite a few more refinements to it based on how Prepar3D does things differently to the FSX I had up until mid 2024 (which in turn did things differently to its predecessor FS2004). And I honestly could not go flying without my own generated "weather" because it is the thing that resolves (at least to my mind) the "issue" that X-planers like to criticise of Prepar3D - the lack of the feeling of being in the actual air as a dynamic "fluid" itself. I know there are lots of commercial add-ons that do very complex stuff but I like what I wrote because I can tailor it precisely to what I want, it is totally offline and I was able to tailor it specifically to the sorts of weather patterns and characteristics I get in the region where I live (certain wind pattern characteristics, high humidity, thermals, an unofficial "wet season", etc). Obviously I cannot use what I have written with anything else other than Prepar3D (my latest version won't even work with the old FSX anymore - too many changes have occurred under the bonnet with Prepar3D) and I am extremely thankful to Lockheed Martin that not only did they retain the Weather Theme functionality introduced all the way back in 2004, the refinements they have made to it are quite amazing - especially when you spend as much time with that functionality as I do (keep in mind, being offline, I couldn't get online weather anyway).

Same here - I did not wish to jump through hoops with the hundreds of individual add-ons I have, none of which officially support it. The other thing is that I am told the ability to get a high quality end result with anti-aliasing declines with each new version - those that have tried versions 4, 5 and 6 say that 4 remains the best if anti-aliasing results matter greatly (and they do to me which is why I stuck with 4 - I did try 5 and could not obtain satisfactory image quality as too many things on the screen refused to be "improved" at all by any anti-aliasing types that I would attempt to apply). Having said that, I suspect P3D has been developed from version 5 onwards more with an eye to very high pixel density 4K and 8K monitors where the need for extensive anti-aliasing would not be as great (though if my experience with P3D is anything to go by, you really need a seriously high pixel density (somewhere between that of a phone and a small high end laptop) or otherwise need to throw a heap of AA at it (or not be fussy about the shimmies that will otherwise result).

I just thought I might add as an interesting aside to frame rates and "doubling". Prepar3D one could argue actually saw it earliest genesis in Combat Flight Simulator 2 (CFS2) that preceded FS2002 by a year or two. It was in CFS2 that Microsoft decided to go all out with a massively revised engine after the terrible bagging that flight simmers gave to FS2000. CFS2 was their first retail "test bed" and I often wonder if they chose the Pacific region because it was light on the scenery! I remember FS2000 well - it was just a hopeless stutter-fest and it did not seem to matter what hardware you threw at it (remembering that back then you could buy hardware twice as fast as what you currently had every 6 months or so!). I remember reading about this somewhere (I do not remember where) but Microsoft were extremely vigilant in creating a new engine that did its best to maintain a target frame rate and was willing to sacrifice the rendering quality of the scenery to maintain it. That is how the whole thing of the blurries started. With FS2000 there were no blurries but we started getting them from CFS2 onwards and by FSX (because of the ever increasing computing hardware requirements) they got worse before they finally started to of course get better again to the point where now we have P3D that is so highly evolved from those roots, blurries don't even cross our minds anymore. But as for frame doubling, many simmers did not realise that with CFS2 and FS2002, if you were running, say vsync at 75 Hz and the reported frame rate (using the usual red text info up the top was also saying 75 fps, you actually were not getting 75 actual individual frames - you are only getting precisely half that. It was not until FS2004 that what you saw on the frame rate readout was what you were actually getting on the screen. My precise memory is a bit flaky but I seem to recall this half frame rate thing also occurred on FS98 and FS2000 as well (I only took up flight simming from FS98 so can't speak of earlier versions). Oen reason I bring this up is because by the time FS2004 came out, I never had a computer fast enough to run it at the same frame rate as the monitor refresh rate anyway - so I always settled for half which on an 85 Hz CRT gave me around 43 fps. So this is the first time in 28 years of using only the flight sims based off those original Microsoft products where I am seeing for the first time what a high frame rate actually looks like in a flight sim! Before this Smooth Motion, the best I ever managed was 43 fps until I build my new (for mid 2024) machine when I then managed to tune it to 50 fps at 50 Hz. But now at 94 fps it really is wonderful - I can pan around and although there is still obviously motion blur, it is massively reduced (I shudder to think what sort of frame rate I would need to no longer perceive motion blur during panning but it would need to be something insanely high as I am very sensitive to motion blur!).

I was able to solve the problem for anyone interested, however the solution doesn't really make any sense since I had to change two settings that shouldn't have mattered. Even though I am not using G-SYNC for Prepar3D and thus had the Nvidia Control Panel setup for Prepar3D as: Monitor Technology: Fixed Refresh Rate (and also reflected as such in my Nvidia Inspector profile for Prepar3D), the "solution" was to instead change the Nvidia Inspector settings to: G-SYNC - Application Requested State to Force Off (was previously Fixed Refresh Rate as per Nvidia Control Panel) G-SYNC - Application State to Force Off (was previously Fixed Refresh Rate as per Nvidia Control Panel) The above two changes then resulted in the equivalent Nvidia Control Panel setting changing to: Monitor Technology: Not supported for this Application (and everything on that entire line becomes greyed out meaning that I could not have implemented these settings using Nvidia Control Panel only). And after I did that, Prepar3D now works perfectly - no screen blackouts whatsoever - just perfect and Smooth Motion giving me 94 fps 99.99% of the time. Now why this should have fixed the problem when I already had G-SYNC set to Fixed Refresh Rate and the same in Nvidia Inspector is a bit beyond me. It should have fixed any potential problem before it became a problem to begin with but for some reason I need to actually force G-SYNC off completely even though as I say I don't use it for Prepar3D anyway. The other weird thing is that if I go to turn off G-SYNC globally (via the Nvidia Control Panel Global 3D Settings) and then enable it only for the applications I do actually use it with, it no longer works properly in those applications - there is some minor but evident stuttering whereas when it is turned on globally it is absolutely 100% flawless. This is another case it seems of Nvidia Inspector saving the day even though the Nvidia Control Panel should have resolved the problem on its own. And I have t wonder whether this is a bug that is "bigger" than Prepar3D and might be a reason so many people have complained that G-SYNC causes stuttering (whereas on my setup it works flawlessly with absolutely zero stuttering). I should add that if I change the G-SYNC setup in Nvidia Control Panel so it is turned off there, that also "solves" the Prepar3D black screen problem however than means I have to keep turning it on or off all the time depending on what 3D application I am running. Obviously my solution above means I can just set it once and forget it. To be fair to Nvidia, it could be something related to how my monitor works (it is officially G-SYNC compatible but not G-SYNC Certified). So to be fair I will just say on my system with my setup and my monitor, this is the solution that worked for me!

Thanks for the reply. I haven't actually looked into lossless scaling - I will have to get my mind around it - I already use DL DSR 2.25x so I am not sure how it would work with that. I am extremely happy however with how Smooth Motion works - to be honest I am gobsmacked and in awe of it since in years gone by I have looked at frame generation tecnologies and they were appalling. But Smooth Motion has - on my setup at least - absolutely zero - and I mean truly zero - artefacts. If I were doing blind testing there is no possible way I would be able to correctly identify the smooth motion versus having a fictitious computer literally twice as fast as the one I own. My card is an RTX4080 Super btw so yes, Nvidia did indeed make it available for 50x series followed by 40x series soon after. I actually only fly smaller GA with the two exceptions being the A2A Connie and Carenado Fokker F50. Those combined with eschewing overly "big city" complex scenery (I just stick to the relatively smaller ORBX add-ons and most of their regional packs), I had P3D running at a perfect 50 fps 99.99% of the time (the only time it ever deviated from 50 fps was the very slight singular pauses (maybe 1/10th of the second to 1/4 second at the very worst) whenever my aircraft entered a "new" ORBX scenery area. I would just get that one very small tiny pause and that was it. But since there is some overhead with Smooth Motion after some experimentation I settled on a base frame rate of 47 and then set up a custom resolution / refresh rate of 94 Hz (when I tried 50 / 100 there was clearly too many instances of it no longer being able to maintain that 50 fps base rate and thus the Smooth Motion suffered - it needs perfect smoothness at the base rate for it to work properly without any issues. With smooth motion and a base rate of 47 fps though, I get 94 fps 99.99% of the time as I got 50 fps 99.99% of the time without it. It is only the momentary black screens that are an annoyance but they are not enough for me to quit using it since as a sim racer and occasional fps indulger, I know the enormous benefits of high frame rates when it comes to clarity when panning. With P3D, these high frame rates don't do anything (at least for me) when taking off or landing or even when cruising - that 50 fps doesn't already do - they just bring a very tangible and welcome benefit - when panning around. But I will look into your suggestion - those videos you linked to are doing the same thing as what I get in terms of high fps smoothness - the only difference is yours is at 60 fps and mine is 94 fps but as mentioned, I prefer flying in simple scenarios and was happy to turn some stuff down to get that original 50 fps to begin with.

I am experimenting with Nvidia Smooth Motion having finally acquired my first gaming monitor (nothing remotely fancy compared to what most people here use - just a humble Gigabyte G27QC). The smooth motion itself actually works perfectly - way better than I could even have imagined however it does seem to come at a cost of a minuscule additional amount of latency though on reflection the amount is so small I think it is more of a nocebo effect than anything of true significance. I did actually "claw back" most of the additional latency by reducing pre-rendered frames from 2 to 1. I'm thinking of using it permanently if I still like it after a couple of weeks testing however there is one immediate problem I have been unable to solve. Whenever I have Smooth Motion enabled, if I access anything through the P3D menu interface after I have loaded my desired scenario, the screen will go black for perhaps 2 seconds then the normal image will return. So for example if I wish to select a weather theme, the screen goes black when I go to select it. It also happens whenever I access the kneeboard plus there is another example whereby if I have any 2D panel (say a GPS) that is partly underneath the ATC window, that also gives me 2 seconds of black screen if I do a mouse click anywhere on the ATC Window (at least I could do a workaround for that one by re-locating the GPS 2D panel if I had to). All these issues 100% go away when Smooth Motion is turned off and 100% return if it is turned on. It is obviously very annoying since I will often encounter these particular scenarios that cause the screen to go black, especially the kneeboard problem. I couldn't really find anything on this doing a search and not much if anything on the internet either (though that could simply be the fact that P3D has a very small user base in the overall scheme of things and not many users likely use Smooth Motion). Anyway, I am out of ideas to try though I have honestly just been randomly trying things stabbing in the dark (including using a frame rate limiter, changing the Windows settings so that it users or doesn't use windowed optimisations, etc). There is possibly some simple setting somewhere that solves it and it has just eluded me (apart from turning Smooth Motion off!). Perhaps it is an Nvidia driver issue and I should try to submit a bug report to them?

Having bought my first gaming monitor I thought I would give Nvidia Smooth Vision a go - not because Prepar3D inherently needs to perform better on my setup but because I know from the racing sim I run and the occasional fps game what benefits high frame rates can bring as regards mitigating motion blur. Well, it sure worked wonderfully in that respect - it felt like I was running an fps game! But it seemed to cause a problem. I could no longer land my aircraft well - or at least repeatedly well - with the main trouble being getting the flare and throttle modulation correct. I never had this problem until I tried Smooth Motion. What I am not certain about is whether it is due to the inherently increased latency (since it is impossible to do what Smooth Motion does without increasing latency) or whether it is because those "fake" frames are giving me inaccurate information as to precisely what the aircraft is doing. I went back to how I had it before and think I will chalk this down to an interesting experiment but not for me - unless someone had the same experience and could "resolve" it. It seems to me it would be wonderful if Smooth Motion could be enabled at all times when airborne and down to minimums and then at that point it goes back to only pushing out "real" frames. That would be the best of both worlds! I can certainly say I did enjoy the almost non-existent motion blur of the panning with it turned on but obviously being able to land the aircraft well and consistently is much more important to me!

You are in the US but I checked the store I buy all my stuff from and they sell the following small monitors however they have USB connections that use the Display Port protocol (I am not sure if that suits your requirements). They are: LG Gram +View 16inch WQXGA MSI PRO MP165 E6 Lenovo ThinkVision M14d AOC 16T10 15.6inch Dell Pro 14 Plus P1425 ASUS ZenScreen MB166C Philips 16B1P3302 but no, I couldn't find any with a pure Display Port - just the above that use the same protocol.

Well we are all entitled to our opinions and we will have to agree to disagree when it comes to both backlight issues and OLED burn-in. The monitor I am getting is QHD 27 inch curved which in my opinion is the best resolution for 27 inches. My eyes are positioned 26 inches from the monitor. I don't want a larger monitor - even if I did I would want to increase my viewing distance and the arc of view would end up being exactly the same in any case - but for me less immersive because of the physically increased viewing distance.

I bought an OLED for my TV setup in 2024 (LG C4) and yes, it is stupendously fantastic - the best I could ever have hoped for and even imagine. It is just wonderful! But I will be getting a much less expensive VA LCD monitor for my simulator computer this week. The reasons for sticking with backlit LCD technology for my simulator computer are several: the first is that I prefer smaller curved monitors and no manufacturer makes a curved OLED 27 inch OLED - at least for sale here in Australia. The second reason is that I believe burn in would actually be a problem - too many static popups and menus, etc - in a computing environment and furthermore unlike my TV setup where I watch in a darkened room, I don't use my PC in a darkened room so I would have to turn an OLED up quite a bit - and obviously the more you turn an OLED up, the shorter it's service life and the more likely you are to cause burn-in. None of these things happen with LCD technology. Although I love my OLED and could never go back for a TV setup, I would only recommend them to visual quality nerds like myself who are prepared to "baby" them somewhat. LCDs are still great and will always have their place. They are also what I would recommend to almost anyone. A good quality gaming LCD monitor is not hugely behind the capabilities of an OLED - yes they are certainly less capable but I think people would really only be disappointed if they were already living with an OLED and were used to it. I've never had backlight bleed problems when running any computer applications (3D or otherwise) but I did with watching movies and stuff which is one reason I went to OLED in that scenario. The other main reason is that so much movie and show content is dismally dark these days and with an OLED I no longer have any trouble at all seeing the details in the darkness that the producer wants me to see but I sure did have problems with an LCD. But with a simulator computer, that is not so much of a problem (well if it is I sure haven't even encountered it even when flying at simulated night).

I have a small (buy everyone else's standards here) 27 inch curved monitor (only Full HD standard) but I actually don't want anything larger - that size is absolutely perfect for me and since I mostly fly GA I don't really need a large monitor to capture all the small instruments in a modern jet liner cockpit (the most "complex" air transport aircraft I have are the A2A Constellation and Carenado Fokker F50). The curve on my monitor is 1800R though and that seems to be quite rare / unpopular. Virtually every other monitor I have seen is 1500R or lower (as in even greater curvature). The 1800 curve seems very comfortable to me though - very natural even at the 65 cm distance from my eyes. But I do notice that after a few hours of flight simming, when I come back to my dead flat study monitor, it has a slightly "convex" appearance (so it seems to temporarily curve in the opposite direction) because my brain has adjusted to the curve of the simming screen. The feeling passes soon enough and always has - it is not permanent - it is just my brain adjusting back and fourth and it is not ideal but I sure do not want to stop using a curved monitor - I could never go back to flat again for any 3D applications. But my concern is down the track I would like to get a better 27 inch curved monitor (probably QHD) and all the better ones are universally 1500R. Whilst technically that curve actually makes more sense than 1800R I am worried this "brain aclimatisation" effect will be more pronounced since people who have gone from 1800R to 1500R say the difference is quite noticeable (and some also say they found the 1800R monitor a bit more "relaxing" on the eyes to use). Anyway I am wondering what people's experiences are with that 1500R curvature, especially if they have gone from a previous 1800R.

Is that P3D de-register requirement since the non-professional version has to have an online connection (so only from Version 6 I believe?). I only ask because I am on version 4.5 and have restored my image a few times over the last 12 months (simply because I like to try out lots of new stuff and experiment and sometimes stuff things up by mucking around) and I have never had a P3D registration problem. If there was I would get a screen come up when trying to run it telling me that it is de-activated (if I happened to have my internet connection active at the same time even though an internet connection is not required for my version in order to start it up and run it). The only software I have where an image restore requires re-activation is Topaz AI however that requires me to regularly "phone home" every couple of months at least in any case since it has a "timer" which only ever allows so much run time before a licence re-check. Obviously an image restore resets the timer and I have to then re-activate instantly.

This thread is another example of why flight simmers should embrace disk imaging software and make regular images of their installation. It means that if an update stuffs something up on your machine and you can't roll back or prefer to go back to before the update was even installed, you can simply restore an image in a matter of minutes. The other advantage is that if you want to try new software or make significant changes to the setup, you know you have a "fallback" if you are not happy with the result or something breaks. I just have seen so many threads over the years of simmers being frustrated and spending entire weekends and longer trying to solve something that broke which worked before but if they made images they could just roll back in half an hour or less. And that is a real roll back - not trying uninstall something which might bring its own issues and at best is never as perfectly "clean" as going to back to an image where those updates never occurred in the first place.

After a good deal of experimentation I concluded that this cannot be resolved by the user. There is something that P3D v4.5 it does not like either with 2560 x 1440 resolution that causes the label font to become incredibly "thin" or there is some conflict with the DL DRS 1.78x setting that causes it. Since I do not have a native 1440p monitor to test this with, I don't know which of the two it is (the resolution itself or using DL DSR 1.78x to "fake" it) but I've settled on using DL DRS 2.25x instead which resolves the issue. There is not as much performance reserve of course but there still seems to be enough to be able to use it. I will have to assume it is a problem with the 1.78x setting since 1440p monitors are extremely popular and I am sure the issue would have come up before if using that resolution natively were a problem.

For anyone else having this issue, after two days of experiments I concluded that there is nothing the end-user can do in terms of clip mode types or overrides to resolve this. I ended up changing the clip modes to normal without overrides as that is the best setting for the simulation in order to mitigate the z-fighting issues. I then moved the cameras sufficiently far back from the rear of the airframe so as to never clip.

I have some really nice external camera views on my smaller GA aircraft - it is often a camera that sits out just behind and above the wing - it provides a really great alternative external view to just the simple spot type of view. But is annoying the heck out of me though is that I cannot - no matter what I try - eliminate the significant z-fighting that occurs to scenery ahead of the camera when using this specific type of view. Reading all the Prepar3D documentation on the subject, I have tried every possible iteration of camera types and clip plane overrides in order to resolve the issue but it simply does not work. The only thing that does "work" is to change the clip mode to normal and then move the camera further back (to behind the tail of the aircraft) so that the nearest parts of the airframe are not clipped when the camera operates according to its internally defined algorithm. Then I get exactly the same (minimal to non-existent) z-fighting that I see from inside the virtual cockpit. But I just don't understand it - how does Lockheed Martin provide a default camera view from inside a virtual cockpit that does a universally supremely good job of eliminating z-fighting in scenery objects ahead of the aircraft yet when I try to use any external camera - normal, minimum, spot - it makes no difference - with and without near and far overrides - I get the horrible z-fighting with a camera in this type of position (so external to the aircraft but close to the airframe itself). If I did not know any better, I might think that Lockheed Martin uses a different (less precise) z-buffer precision (perhaps for performance reasons?) for any camera that "knows" it's origin is from the exterior of the aircraft versus any camera that "knows" it's origin is from within the aircraft (since I have never seen z-fighting to anywhere near this extent from any interior positioned camera where I do not specifically define the clip mode in the camera.cfg or aircraft.cfg file. Does anyone have any tangible insights here since I'm basically resigned to just redefining these external cameras as normal clip mode and then moving them sufficiently far back from the airframe to avoid any clipping (since as soon as I go fiddling using any near and or far clip overrides at all, the z-fighting just starts all over again).

Yes, it amazes me that they basically graduated straight from trainers to the actual machine and for the most part it had to be them on their own. I just couldn't imagine getting out of any trainer into a Spitfire, Corsair or what have you. Apparently the Germans had their own host of problems with new graduates being thrown into a very deep end with the very narrow landing gear track of the BF109. As an aside, I bought the Blu-ray set of Black Sheep Squadron (loved the series back in the mid 70s) for a Christmas present to myself. In the first episode Boyington tells his newbie pilots (some of whom we are lead to believe have only flown trainers so presumably even a Ryan) that the Corsair just does everything the same as the trainer except that it has guns! Yeh, right!!