Finnerz

I flew this beauty a while back (in sim of course :smile: ) and have just confirmed that it was a paper moving map with stylus (sadly not modelled in sim)! From Wikipedia: I'd read the basic description on David Maltby's site but never thought to look further into it, so I'd never realised quite how cool it was.

Thank you so much for pointing this out Tom. I'd noticed X-Plane seemed to maintain much better FPS in heavy areas like LA after running FSX (which is in max power mode in Nvidia Inspector) than when run first and it looks like you've hit the nail on the head. I can't wait to try this when I get back from uni.

I'm not a sufficiently experienced and hardcore X-Plane user to know how/if this can be done with the default X-Plane camera system, but it might be possible with X-Camera - it seems to have a lot of key assignments and that could well be one of them.

Thank you all so much. I went for the EVGA in the end and I'm loving it! I'm being frankly bowelled over by what X-Plane can look like with all the HDR effects turned on, and despite being perpetually CPU limited, it somehow improved my FSX Heathrow framerates. Finlay

HI all, First up, I'm having trouble with the Avsim search and I have tried Google, with limited success, the results not being specific enough or too varied to help much. After a very, very long time I've decided to buy a graphics card, and as it is to be used for X-Plane and non-flight sim games as well as FSX, I'm going for the top of my budget and looking for an air cooled GTX 980 Ti. There seem to be several contenders but due to a 290 mm case restriction, I've narrowed it down to three options: EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Ti SC GAMING ACX 2.0+, Gigabyte GTX 980 Ti G1 Gaming, MSI GeForce GTX 980Ti Gaming. I know there are other similar cards like the Asus Strix but that is too long for my case. From what I can gather from reviews (in particular this one http://techreport.com/review/28685/geforce-gtx-980-ti-cards-compared/7), the EVGA has reliability and warranty but performs worse and is midrange for sound, the Gigabyte is the most powerful, but is loud and could need a few returns to get a fully working one (reports of coil whine, which sounds like a bad thing!), and the MSI is quietest and in the middle for power and reliability. I bought my current graphics card for £30 many years ago so I have absolutely no idea which way to turn, and could do with some advice. For example, is the extra power of the Gigabyte noticeable in games enough to put it over the MSI, which is looking like my favourite at the minute; or is the EVGAs reliability and warranty worth its shortfalls. These are the kind of questions I'd appreciate help with as a complete newbie to graphics cards. (How I wish it was a simple as the CPU days when it was just i5 or i7!) Many, many thanks, Finlay

Yes it is: from the forum announcement "full compatibility with DX10 in FSX SP2, XPack and Steam".

I can also recommend Fly UK. It is UK based so there are a lot of European flights and although there is no A330, there is a recently added X-Plane livery for the JARDesign A320. However the ACARS system requires XPUIPC, which may only work on Windows, I can't remember. Flights can be chosen from a large schedule, which is updated twice a year. Good luck wherever you end up!

Although you can't access betas with it, the steam version is otherwise near-identicle and goes on 33 and 50% off sales a few times throughout the year. Finlay Waller

#Manuals

I bought this over a year ago so things might have changed since but back then you downloaded and installed the product and it would work at all FSDreamTeam airports and at a few specific default airports (maybe with a time limit, probably 5 - 15 minutes if so) without buying a license. Then once you've bought it you enter those details into it and it will work everywhere without a need for reinstalling.

I read in the comments on the developer blog that us Steam users should get beta access when it hits the release candidate stage. I don't know if it will always be this way though.

I have no idea if it is any good at all but I saw a thread about a (I think 3rd party) plugin that lets Radar Contact work with X-Plane.

Steam access only comes when there is a release candidate.

There's a thread on the x-plane . org forum about the plane where questions/updates are occasionally answered/given by the dev team, and they stated in the last few days that they're still hoping for a 2015 release: "Target release is still 2015 and we are optimistic it will materialize. So enjoy summer and be nice to eachother"

I'm no expert on this but I seem to recall that there's a limit on the number of VC animations you can have in FSX and presumably P3D so if you have realistic rain effects, you can't use a load of animations for switches and things. I expect someone more in the know could give more details on it though. However, if anyone does work out how to get around this limitation at some point, there's a good chance it will be PMDG.

Off topic (sorry!) but this just made my day, thank you.

I have Skymaxx pro v2 and also use (just) the sky textures from Aerosoft's Sky Tools (which are free). It took me a little while to get it working but the Skymaxx interface lets you change themes without a moving files and a sim restart. I quite like it, but I struggle with having a choice of themes to use!

It's also probably worth checking out other places for freeware airports that use other object libraries to get more complexity than you'd get in the gateway packages. Not sure what's available in the Avsim library but it's probably worth checking out x-plane.org (sorry for invoking the name of another site, please delete if necessary) for some of what you can get for free there.

Let the fun begin, I took the plunge a month or so ago. Sorry if I'm not supposed to talk about other sites here, but it'd be worth signing up to X-Plane.org if you haven't already, if only to get access to a vast amount of useful free stuff (I don't know how much is here in the Avsim library). Have fun!

Thanks very much for the advice! I'll have a go at disabling the mesh, good idea. I'm getting a bit confused with the FSRealWX website and the pro version etc. but I'll have another go. Thanks.

I'm a new user and I've only just made my first few responses over there to get posting privileges. However, I did a flight through the Scottish highlands (a place I love) in the default C172 (with much aileron trim) over the awesome AlpilotX HD mesh v3 (various download sources for that) between scenery gateway airports under Skymaxx pro clouds (my only paid addon), and although my pc strength and corresponding rendering settings gave me foul visuals at low frames, there was something about the feel (and night lighting in particular) that made it feel really great none the less. I'd say it's worth sticking with, it really seems to be worth it. As for how long, I've been on and off for a few weeks now but once you've got some scenery for your favourite area to fly and some acceptable rendering options, I'd hope you'd be able to get some enjoyment out of the sim pretty soon. Good luck!

Hi all, I'm relatively new to X-Plane and I'm looking for some advice as to a weather engine and what I believe to be a haze issue. I have a low end pc (specs I believe show up on my profile) and due I think to my GPU, I struggle to reach 15 fps with even very low settings. As I really didn't like the default clouds at there lowest settings I bought Skymaxx pro which looks, to me, an improvement. However, I'm looking for something free to power it. I got the Noaa plugin, but I can't work out what settings I need in it, in particular the switch to metar setting and what it does. If it partly uses the default weather, then I fear it suffers the same issue of apparently only updating once an hour. I've also briefly looked at EFASS but not worked out how to use its weather engine (and also been somewhat put off as I don't think the engine works over a network), and yesterday heard of FSrealWX. Also running Active Sky Next for FSX, I appreciate none will be as advanced but could anyone advice me on which will give the most "realistic" weather depiction in X-Plane, and if it is the Noaa plugin, how to use it properly. The other issue is one I don't really understand; I'd thought that there was supposed to be some form of fog at the edge of what X-Plane draws, possibly called haze? However, when I fly (here using HD Mesh v3) I seem to just get a jagged horizon which looks particularly bad when mountains just sort of stop. I tried getting the real terra haze plugin but I can still see the "edge of the world". If someone could advise me on a suitable image sharing site, I'll put in an example screenshot and my rendering options. I'm hoping someone might have an idea if there's something wrong here or if I just have to live with it until I get a better graphics card. Many thanks and I'm sorry if this has come out a bit blunt, that wasn't my intention.

The old torrents are now working so all is good, thanks again for all your hard work. Now for the fun part

I too bought the Steam version a couple of months ago. I'd say go for it, but I don't remember getting the option to choose the download path on installation, so buy it but try and change the install path before downloading, otherwise it'll end up buried deep within the Steam folder. I also heard there are plans for betas to be available on the Steam edition at some point in the future, which would be an added bonus.

Thanks, I've gone and downloaded some of the new ones. What I'm wondering is if I can seed a file I've already downloaded with the new torrents without having to download the file again first. I've tried using the update torrent feature but it just causes the program (uTorrent) to crash with a message about memory. Thanks again and I'm loving the new updated torrents I've got going.