fs4fun

Since OP mentioned TTools, there is also AI Flight Planner, you can download it from fsdeveloper

Chipped in. I hope you can be on the road again soon.

Using 2D or 3D? I'm away from my sim but I've selected approaches and transitions in the G1000 using the 2D popup. I think there are some click spot issues in the VC. Might be worth filing a ticket. DTG has been fixing quite a few of the reported issues.

Wrong forum, you should go here for help: http://www.avsim.com/forum/121-ms-fsx-fsx-se-forum/ Or here: http://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/7/ DTG Flight Simulator is a new flight sim product that is under development and not available yet. It is not the same as FSX:SE.

There's not much public data, but you could look at the FSX:SE page on steamspy, take a WAG at its market share and come up with a rough estimate that way: https://steamspy.com/app/314160.

I don't understand the negative reactions to this type of question. How is Martin supposed to know if he doesn't ask? Would people prefer they don't do any community outreach? A lot of flight simmers are nerds (some may not want to admit it :smile: ). Tweaking can be part of how people explore the inner workings of the sim, which is interesting stuff for some hobbyists. I sometimes refer to these settings (eg. the bufferpools/rejectthreshold settings) as "nerd knobs". I agree that it should not be a requirement to dig into them, but I'd like to have information available about how the sim works and be able to understand how to tune it if I decide that I want to. The problem with Flight School is that moving the scenery slider left turns down a swath of settings, some of which didn't actually affect FPS but greatly degraded visual quality. For example, you move the slider left because autogen is too high, but then it also turns down the texture quality. Autogen has a huge performace and stability impact, texture quality does not but it degrades visuals. The traffic settings had a similar issue. I don't know what the perfect answer is but I found Flight School settings to be a very poor solution.

Cool video, reminds me of the 757, which in part this aircraft is the replacement for. Yes, it's for noise reduction. The engine chevrons help smooth the mixing of turbine and bypass air flows (and maybe also with mixing the engine flows with ambient air).

I always set the sim up first, make sure it's running well, then the graphics card settings to refine the image quality. But the order doesn't really matter, if you know the graphics card settings to use you can set those first.

My preference is to fly and not tweak, but there are simmers who like to explore the tweaking options to gain insights to the inner workings of the sim and to squeeze out every possible bit of performance or graphics quality from their systems. So it is a part of the hobby, but also everyone has a different system and sees different results, so I think even for those who would rather not tweak it may be a necessary evil and access to all the control knobs becomes important. The really important settings are the ones that have a high performance impact. In FSX there are a lot of settings that people just enable and set to maximum because they have low FPS impact and turning then down just degrades the visuals with no performance gain. There are a relatively few settings that need to be adjusted, things like traffic percentages and autogen density, or with DX9, disabling light bloom. A useful capability in FSX is the ability to save/load different display settings profiles so users can tune the sim to different flight scenarios. For example when flying an airliner the scenery is less important so we can turn down scenery settings and give the sim more cycles to simulate complex airliners systems. On the other hand when flying a simple GA aircraft low and slow, I'd want scenery settings turned way up. There are some addon applications that work with FSX to help with performance I'd suggest you look at: Virtuali's Addon Manager, SimStarter, and Scenery Config Editor. These are tools to help with optimizing FSX and managing profiles for different flying scenerios. I'm sure there must be other such applications but these are some popular ones. For me, smooth stutter-free performance is tops, but as long as that is achieved I like to get visuals to look as good as possible. Very long load times are a pain but the only time I've had that happen is when using traffic addons since they add tons of aircraft. It would be great if DTG's sim can optimize for this, maybe by building an aircraft index. I like to be able to adjust traffic percentages for Airline, GA, road traffic and boats, and control autogen densities Some other tweaks that I use: WideViewAspect Affinity Mask Fiber Frame Time Fraction Buffer Pools and Reject Threshold TEXTURE_MAX_LOAD Hide Info Text DisablePreload LOD_RADIUS One other point is that besides settings and tweaks, I always set up an Nvidia Inspector profile to get the best possible image quality (Filtering and Anti-aliasing, SGSS etc). It would be great if this step could be eliminated.

Just had some time to try the update: The controller UI has been redone and is greatly improved Tree textures look better With the DA-42 I'm consistently getting over 40FPS on my laptop. More importantly, I don't see any stuttering when panning around, so I think both smoothness and FPS are improved. I'm still using settings that I tuned based on the initial release. I might turn up some settings based on these performance improvements. The glideslope indicator on the G1000 is fixed (that's a bug I reported a couple weeks ago) Negatives: Sadly the horrible washed out haze effect remains. The display settings remain lobotomized, requiring FSc.cfg tweaks to get properly balanced settings. Cockpit shadows are still ugly. I turn them off. Consider how great DX10 fixer does this by comparison. DTG you already have a good example to look at! An easy fix that would make this sim look sooo much better would simply be to color-match airport background textures with the Orbx ground textures Overall a good and welcome update. Keep them coming DTG!

The FSX SDK tools are very primitive, but the advantage is that lots of great user-friendly third party applications can be built which then call the primitive SDK compilers. This has been a big win in the long run, but even better would be to have open, documented file formats and even libraries (DLL's) and API's to help read and write simulator data files. Probably not if DTG is changing the file formats, but I hope DTG will work with the ADE developer to make sure ADE can work with the new flight sim. SBX seems no longer maintained so not much hope there but I'm sure the community has people that will like to create some new tools, maybe built as extensions to a free GIS tool such as QGIS. Please also make sure that compilers such as resample continue to support common input file formats for GIS data.

Hi Paul and welcome. That's a great question and I sure wish there was a book but I don't know of any one-stop ways to acquire the knowledge needed to develop things for MSFS. The problem is that the subject matter is so broad and the tools and techniques so varied and evolving (and in some cases very complex), that trying to capture all the information needed into a single book would be very difficult, and the audience is probably not that big anyway so the rewards for such a work would be small. I've only worked with FSX but my understanding is that there are many differences from FS9, so to keep things simple at first I suggest you pick one platform and work with that. Get the SDK (FS9 SDK is a free download, or if you have FSX Deluxe or Gold Pack it's on the DVD's) and look over the documentation. Sign up at fsdeveloper.com and start exploring the resources and forums there. I would also suggest picking a specific subject to learn, such as how to create an aircraft repaint, or how to update an airport, and go search for tutorials and also find the tools you need and practice using them, then do a project with the skills you learned. As you repeat this process you'll learn more tools and skills. Besides fsdeveloper.com there are tutorials online elsewhere (some here in AVSIM's libraries), and look on YouTube for tutorial videos. You'll be doing lots of Google searches as well. Just be persistent and ask questions as you go. Good luck!

The 737NGX also includes the OC, so either the 777 or the NGX will get you there.

One other thing: Lighting!! For example doing nice lighting at an airport is absolute misery. I'd like to see light objects where you can configure the color, brightness, cone and other properties and they actually cast light on the ground and on other 3d objects, and that fade out properly at a distance, and otherwise have correct physical properties. For 3D modelers, using the attach tool to add and configure lights attached to an object would be fine I think.

+1 on all Jessica's comments about modeling tools. Basically look at what's in the FSX/P3D 3dsMax gamepack and that's the functionality needed. I'd like to suggest taking a look at Fusion360 as well. It seems much easier to use than Blender and has a freeware license for hobbyists. Besides ATC and AI, the Weather API's need to be massively improved to allow for a third party weather engines to do their jobs, instead of the uber-hackery that Active Sky has to perform in order to inject weather properly. A good replacement for FS2002 ground polygons please, which allows for proper materials settings. It would be great if tools like resample, shp2vec, bglcomp etc work as they do in the FSX/P3D sdk's so they can work with existing tools such as ADE and SbuilderX. Please also talk to the folks at fsdeveloper.com, people like Arno Gerretsen and Jon Masterson and see if they can get the tools they make to work with your SDK. That would be a tremendous jump-start. The same thing with payware tools like Instant Scenery. Are you thinking about doing anything new in the area of gauges programming, or will we continue with XML code? What about flight dynamics, can I continue to use AirWrench or will you be changing the airfiles and aircraft.cfg formats? To answer some of the OP questions: - I use Photoshop, Gmax, would like to use Blender - Other tools I use: For scenery Gmax, SbuilderX, ADE, ModelConverterX, Instant Scenery. I've dabbled in aircraft development and used Gmax, Airwrench, ModelConverterX Since SbuilderX is no longer maintained, it would be interesting to see if terrain tools could be integrated with a free GIS tool such as QGIS.