eghansen

A few comments: There should be very few compatibility issues with switching from a 32-bit to a 64-bit system. A 64-bit system expands the capabilities of FSX, but does not require add-ons to use these expanded capabilities. It is much the same principal that allows 32-bit FSX to run on 64-bit Windows 7 or 8. without any problems. Many of the hardware advances that FS11 could take advantage of will never be improved upon, so it would be worthwhile to write a new FS to take advantage of these improvements. Then it really would be the last version. Some examples: 32-bit software can make use of to 4 Gb of RAM or 2^32. 64-bit software can make use of 18,446,744,075 Gb of RAM or 2^64. There will never a 128-bit operating system. 8-core processors is probably the most cores you will ever see in a processor. There is some talk of 16-core processors, but you will never see a 64-core processor. The marginal advantage of adding extra cores in speed diminishes the more cores you add due to the difficulty of writing software that uses all the cores well. Much of the software around today uses only one core even if more are available and there no reason to change because there would be no noticable increase in speed.

I have the same problem when it is raining (at sea level). fps gets very slow.

I have had FSGenesis mesh installed on my machine for many years and have not noticed sunken or elevated lakes. Mesh also is created from real data. If the mesh is done right, then a mountain that is 3824 m tall in real life will be the same height in FS9/FSX. Vector data can be accurate or not, especially when combined with accurate mesh. Most of the roads in the US, Europe and Japan are roughly in the right place, but can still look funny. Interstate 15 east of Miramar MCAS in San Diego is in the right place, but the cars plunge and rise out of culverts which in real life are bridged by concrete bridges. Freeway interchanges are flat with no visible bridges. Fixing this would take a lot of work. Textures are not created from real data. Generally, the default forest, desert, water and grassland textures look good. The default farm textures are passable. The default urban textures are terrible. Addon textures and autogen may look better, but they still do not accurately depict what the real terrain looks like.

It is a little more complicated than that. I had Windows 7 Home Premium on my system which as a limit of 16 Gb of RAM. I have 32 Gb of ram installed in my motherboard. I could have upgraded to Windows 7 Professional which would have used all my RAM, but that would have cost somewhere around US$175. However, I was able to upgrade to Windows 8 for only US$39.99 which uses all my RAM, so I chose to do that.

A couple of programs used in FSX no longer work when I upgrade Windows. MRAI Compiler ceased working when I went from Vista to Windows 7. I spent many hours on the net searching for help using the error message generated, but to no avail. ModelConverterX (MCX) ceased working when I went from Windows 7 to Windows 8. I can not return to Windows 7 because it does not make use of all of my installed RAM. When I try to load a .dae model into MCX, I get exception messages and the model does not load. When I check the event log, it says that the triangles in the model are discarded because they do not contain any area. Any help with either of these problems would be appreciated.

I am looking for help with software issues. It seems that every time I upgrade Windows, one or more of the custom FS software no longer works. When I upgraded to Windows 7, MRAI compiler stopped working. Despite several hours searching for an answer, I was not able to fix the software and no longer can use it. When I try to use MRAI Compiler, I get error messages saying that a file is missing/unregistered. Now, I have upgraded to Windows 8. I needed to do this because of Windows 7 would not have used all my installed RAM. Unfortunately, ModelConverterX no longer works in Windows 8. I always get an error message when I try to convert .dae files to .mdl files. The software seems to believe that all the triangles in the model have no error, so it discards them. I believe that both programs were were created in Microsoft Visual C++ (if this information helps). I don't miss MRAI compiler too much, because there are an ample supply of flightplans available from others. But the loss of ModelConverterX is sorely missed. Google Sketchup is the easiest way to create a new model and if I can't convert my creations into a .mdl file, then it is useless to me. Does anybody have any ideas?

A little primer on how RAM works: 1. All of the aircraft and other add-ons that work on FSX 32-bit or Prepar3d 32-bit would work fine on a 64-bit FSX or Prepar3d. None of them would have to be rewritten. It is for the same reason that FSX, which is 32-bit code runs perfectly fine on Windows 7 or 8 64-bit. When FSX or Prepar3d is running, it sets up a table of addresses (called "pointers" in the trade) that remembers where pieces of code are stored in RAM. If it is 32-bit code, the pointers can be 32-bits long. 32-bit code can only store addresses up to 4 Gb. It is possible that some of the add-ons would not be able to take full advantage of the potential of 64-bit software in much the same way that FSX does not take full advantage of the 64-bit Windows operating system. 2. What RAM does: When your computer needs a piece of data from your hard-disk or solid-state drive, it copies that information from storage into RAM. Because the amount of FSX data you have on your hard drive exceeds 4 Gb (my mesh files alone are 23 Gb), the computer only copys data from the storage into RAM as needed. If RAM fills up, then it deletes some of the information in RAM and copys new information from the disk into RAM. This process of constantly deleting from RAM and copying from disk is called "swapping". Because it is much slower to load information from disk than use it once it is in RAM, the less swapping the better. If you have a 64-bit software and operating system plus a lot of RAM, your computer will do much less copying from disk to RAM than if you have 32-bit software and 4 Gb of RAM. There are several situations where having 64-bit software would be wonderful. One of these is when using photographs for ground textures instead of repeating patterns. Quality photographs of ground textures are very large and require a lot of RAM to load properly. Another use of 64-bit software would be with ai aircraft. You can use high-quality models such POSKY or IFDG for your ai aircraft instead of Aardvark or Fruit Stand. I have tried this and they look great. But the speed of FSX slows down a great deal because the models and textures are so large, they have trouble loading into RAM all at once for a large airport.

I purchased FSGenesis mesh for the whole world about four years ago. I don't know what the density of the mesh is in meters, but the file sizes are much larger than the FSX default. This particularly truie in areas outside of US, Europe and Japan. Example: dem0801.bgl 4039 KB FSXdem_0801.bgl 104436 KB dem0802.bgl 12551 KB FSGdem_0802.bgl 304852 KB dem0803.bgl 862 KB FSGdem_0803.bgl 48619 KB I certainly notice the difference between default and FSGenesis!

I think that many people in the FS community should take a legal course in a university on copyright law. Must of what I hear in these forums is drivel. All the rights you have regarding copyright are spelled out in US Copyright Law and more information can be found at http://www.copyright.gov/. The only rights a copyright holder has are those that are given to him by federal law in the country where there is jurisdiction. He cannot make up his own rules just because he feels like it. If I am going to violate a copyright, I have to make money or take money away from the copyright holder. I have to take something the holder is selling and give it away for free or make money from it. Notice that the key word here is "money". If I take something that has been distributed over the internet to the world for free, and then give it to others for free, I am not violating any copyright law. If I alter something that is being given away to the world for free and alter it (such as with an aircraft texture) and then give it away for free, I am not violating any copyright law. I can be arrested and charged with a felony for selling something that I do not have the rights to. I can be sued in civil court for distributing something for free (such as music) that is being sold for money (such as through iTunes). I can be sued in civil court for selling something that I do not have the rights to. The purpose of copyright law is to keep other people from making money from your work. But if you are giving away your work for free to everybody on the planet who wants it, you have no legal right to change your mind months or years later and tell people that you did not want them to pass on your work after all.

Scenery does load when you use it. But FSX has to create a database with each .bgl file in your scenery with long/lat coordinates so that it will know what file to load when. The more files you have, the more time it takes. Having said that, you probably can load all your scenery at once if you have a decent processor (mine is an i7). It might be a good idea to load the scenery off the external HD on to an internal 1 Tb HD because it will load faster through a SATA connection than through a USB connection. The phrase "alleviate performance hits on some computers" is so vague that I think they are probably just covering their butt. If you have a computer with 1 Gb of RAM and an old Pentium processor running on Windows XP, you will have problems with FSX no matter how much scenery you use at one time.

There may be many countries that have press freedoms comparable to the US. But, since Aviation Herald solicits contributions in Euros, I assume that any filings for defamation will be somewhere in Europe. The filing against untied.com is actually for copyright and trademark infringement. In all fairness to United, the logo in the upper left corner of this website is a modified version of United's logo and their complaint is probably a fair one. It is also being filed in Canada, not the US. Needless to say, the website untied.com is much more defamatory than anything I see in the Aviation Herald and all of it is directed against a single airline.

Ahhh! And thus we have one of the most fundamental differences between the US and the rest of the world, especially Britain. Note that the original posting came from someone from Florida. And the responses came from people outside the US. In the US, we are used to a completely free and unhibited discussion. Because of the First Amendment in the US Constitution, there really is no such thing as "defamation." Companies can sue for libel, but the best they can get would be monetary damages awarded by a jury. It also would require a civil trial which in the US can take several years. In California, it takes about five years for a civil trial to reach a court. In the meantime, there is no way to force the postings to be removed. In the US, we not have only have postings which may be defamatory, but we have entire websites devoted to trashing companies, individuals, ideas, etc. We have learned to live with it. Many actually like it that way. You can check out www.untied.com. This is a website which has been around for 15 years and posts complaints about United Airlines.

I think you could use more RAM if your motherboard can handle it. I am a great believer in RAM. It is very cheap. I just bought 16 Gb, 1600MHz DXT3 ram from NewEgg in two 8Gb slots for $75.00 I now have 32 Gb of RAM and the more RAM I add, the better everything seems to run on my computer.

One of the few things I miss from FS9 is the locked spot view. When I switched over to FSX several years ago, I spent a lot of time figuring how to recreate the the locked spot view from FS9 in FSX to no avail. I believe that the locked spot view was something hard-coded into FS9 which is no longer there. I don't think it can be created externally, but I would be happy to be wrong. I don't understand what the problem is with the 45 degree angle thing. All you have to do to change it is turn NumLock on and hit the arrow keys in the numpad to spin the aircraft around.

I am not sure that I get the question. Any scenery, aircraft or other information used by FSX must be loaded into RAM before FSX can make use of it. Because FSX is a 32-bit software, the most that it can load into RAM at any time is 4Gb. FSX always loads the user aircraft, the traffic files, databases of all scenery, aircraft, effects files etc. into RAM upon starting it. The items that are loaded on-the-fly are mostly ai aircraft and scenery files. Ai aircraft and scenery is loaded into RAM as needed. There is no reason to keep your OS and FSX applications on an SSD at all. The OS is loaded into RAM when you boot up the computer and stays there until the computer is turned off. The FSX application is loaded into RAM when you start FSX and stays there as long as it is running. Both the OS and FSX can be stored on a standard spinning hard drive with no loss of performance when running and only a slightly slower boot up. The most important parts of a computer for FSX is the video card, processor and amount of RAM. A good video card is crucial for maintaining frame rates. The processor is crucial for maintaining good response time for the controls and running the ai traffic. The OS needs to be 64-bit or your FSX performance will be seriously compromised. Because FSX can use up to 4 Gb of RAM and 4Gb of RAM is the total RAM available from a 32-bit OS, FSX will use much less than 4Gb with a 32-bit OS because it will be crowded out by other applications. I have 32 Gb of RAM and the additional RAM (in addition to being quite cheap nowadays) has solved most of my problems with slow response. Video cards typically have some installed RAM (typically 1 Gb) and also cache some RAM on the Motherboard (1 Gb). Windows, video drivers, FSX application files, other software (such as STB) can all load into RAM outside the 4Gb used by FSX if you have enough memory. With a lot of RAM, I often run FSX full-bore and stream a video to my TV set, download something on iTunes and check something on Google Earth, all at the same time without problems. If you have lots of money, buying an SSD is impressive, but better performance in FSX lies mostly with the video cards, RAM and the processor.