starflight

Laminar keeps saying there's no system with even high end parts that can run XP10 at max settings smoothly all the time. Last year I got what I considered the sweet spot in price/performance (i7 3770K, 4GB GTX 670), beyond which I'd have to spend a lot more for fewer gains. In the air: generally no issue unless I'm seeing lots of clouds. But even with CPU and GPU moderately overclocked, and without everything on max, my system will drop to below 25fps near a number of custom sceneries.

Chris, further to the note above... in the current CYYZ v0.7 beta the airport ortho photos also have planes, shadows, and other ground clutter "painted" onto the ground. Will these be Photoshopped or otherwise edited out in the final version, at least for the airport surfaces? You've noted they're already public domain, which I think means you can do pretty much anything to them as long as you credit the source...

I uninstalled all custom scenery except OpenSceneryX, and it turns out what I saw for downtown San Francisco is XP10's default for that part of the city (financial district). Quick request... Can someone please check the financial district area of downtown and report if it looks similar to the pictures below? The roads even appear in the local map, just not on the terrain, not even at extreme road settings, and a quick Google didn't turn up anything... thanks

Downloaded the North America OSM+autogen package. One problem with its coverage in my home city is that roads that are there in default XP no longer show up. In some cases it looks like the roads disappear into the ground rather than just end. Some buildings seem lower than they should be, too. I'm wondering if there's a slight difference in elevation data between the XP mesh and the OSM database that's throwing things off. Check out downtown San Francisco, same thing--almost no roads anywhere between buildings.

For systems that can handle it (or if you turn options down/off), there's also the X-Speed plugin that lets you go up to 10x sim speed. Its current downsides are: - only 32-bit - displays the target simspeed but not the actual simspeed multiplier like the built-in XP10 commands do. You can guesstimate it by running the sim-timer and outputting it to screen... if 10 sim-seconds pass in one real-second, it's obviously going 10x. X-Speed was absolutely indispensable when developing and testing groundroutes at CYYZ Toronto Pearson International for World Traffic.

It's available as a beta at x-pilot.com. It's missing a bunch of taxiways and aprons at the moment, though you wouldn't know it until you taxied over the ortho imagery and wonder why the plane is acting like its driving on a dirt surface.

Pan up/down in XP10 is R and F I believe--if not its one of the ones next to those. You must be in 3D cockpit view first.

I've also tried the Simheaven sceneries for both Toronto and Hong Kong. Surprisingly, in both cases the orthos looked extremely washed out or overexposed. Not sure if I did something wrong, or didn't have the settings high enough...

I think Austin's comment needs to be put into context, beyond his trying to sell people on the then-upcoming plausible world feature. Orthos are ok when you're flying higher up, but he was talking about the up-close experience (ground-level up to 5000 or 10000 ft) of orthophotos, where shadows and other objects are "painted" onto the ground, and 50cm photorealism won't ever help with that if they aren't edited out of the orthos themselves. Chris K's recent CYYZ beta is a good example of this--outside the airport, the underlying orthos are a massive improvement when combined with the default autogen (and/or custom objects that he and his team have added). At the airport itself, the orthos do an excellent job of making it seem more real... up until you come across planes painted onto the apron and at the gates, and shadows that don't make sense. I actually wonder why these can't be removed--the orthos he uses are public domain AFAIK, so it shouldn't be an issue to photoshop these out.

Yes, and like Geofa it's just a bit too far out of the major city to have autogen defined. It really annoys and frustrates me that we can't just draw different land-use boundaries in World Editor SimCity-style, and let autogen do its thing. What's the point of autogen if we have to place or draw every building or facade ourselves either in a custom scenery or in OpenStreetMaps? I tried both and gave up after realising i was wasting far too many hours and was aggravating my carpal tunnel issues. It's far too big a task for one person, and who knows when a new OSM recut will be done anyway. And osm2xp isn't a solution either because then you lose the roads! I hope someone can point out an obvious solution that I missed.

Agree on the 4GB video card--I've already gone past 2 GB on some settings and custom scenery. OTOH, I have both Win7 and XP10 sitting on a single 256 GB SSD. I actually have *three* copies of XP10 on it-- different versions for testing and backups. I still have plenty of space. If original poster isn't planning to jump straight into the deep end of custom and ortho scenery packages, I'd stick with 256 for now, and get a larger one when you need it. For me personally, this'll be at least a year from now.

It'll let you do another if you copy-paste the url into another browser, or delete all browser cookies. Most won't bother doing it twice (or more), but there's no way to lock out those who want to skew the results. The survey isn't directly linked to avsim's own membership database, it doesn't require you to enter and ID or password, and they say responses are anonymous, so some skewing will definitely be possible.

Another problem I encountered is that a lot of "objects" are actually part of the same object file, so if you change the height of one to match its ground level, other stuff that's part of the same object will be off. This is especially noticeable if you have airport following terrain, and not completely flat like the MSFS it was designed for

That line is misleading and should've been removed or clarified ages ago, as it severely skews expectations. Marketing is what it is, though. As FloB's link mentioned, "take advantage of as many cores... Version 10 would be able to use every one" comes with a huge qualifier. I have an i7 3770K overclocked to 4.2 GHz, bought for the same reasons you're thinking about. The only time the cores and hyperthreads are maxed out is during part of the scenery loading phase. The rest of the time, the bulk of the work is done by a single core running around 50-75% (average of all cores is about 30-40%) at settings I think balance well (defined as max fps while video card isn't always at 100%. If I knew then what I know now... well, I'd probably still get the 3770K. I'd look at the 3930K a bit harder, but for almost 2x the price and only 25% performance increase according to cpubenchmarks.com, I can't really justify the extra cost. Also, the "No more than 4GB of RAM is necessary" is also outdated and unclear. Even back then, it should have meant 4GB for X-Plane, not 4GB for the entire system. Now that X-Plane is 64-bit, I'd drop at least 8GB into your system, preferably 16 GB.

I wasn't even aware of the survey until now... Apparently XP-only users tend to jump straight to the XP forums and missed the announcements and links I've added my response now though.

More from the developer: "The next post as you mentioned does indeed list it as a 737-800. Anyone else can build any other variant. I've only paid for that one. And don't be afraid to ask. I'm not going to be a tyrant about this as I want lots of different planes with all the various types available." So our concerns about variants should be put to rest, potential aircraft modellers should just check with the developer first.

I asked the developer on the org and the response was: The post has a picture of a 737 and an A320. The 737 has winglets, so looking at the diagrams on Wikipedia, it's a 700, 800 or 900 model. The very next comment after the images were posted said it was a 737-800, and based on the spacing between wings and tail I'd agree with that. (Edited to change 747 to 737)

That's an interesting point I hadn't thought of. Have you written the developer with this concern? Maybe the 3rd-party 737s will ship with all or most of the variants already (would certainly explain why it's taking so long for even the first add-on plane package to materialize). Or, this is something that just hadn't crossed his mind before. I was surprised at a couple of things he hadn't thought about, but once discussed he added to his to-do list. The developer focused a fair bit on the military side of things, so it's possible (if unlikely) that it slipped his mind that that visual differences in civilian plane variants can be much more pronounced.

System Preferences > Language & Text > Text tab. Turn off "Correct spelling automatically" It was the first thing I disabled when I upgraded the OS.

Pardon my ignorance, but what's the fog issue you're referring to? Is it how scenery goes blurry only 25 or 50 nm away? The pointless whiteout when passing through a cloud layer (even when there's so few clouds you can clearly see above or below your flightpath)? Or something else entirely?

Actually IMHO the very fact this is an X-Plane (sub-)forum means XP should be shorthand for X-Plane first (as opposed to "the sim" or "X-P"), and references for the older operating system should be WinXP. We seem to be describing the same visual problem. I've not had that happen with autogen buildings at non-zoomed views though.

XP in this context means X-Plane. I'm running under Win7 64-bit, i7 3770K oc'd to 4.1 GHz, 16 GB RAM, GTX 670 4GB. There's some fps hit for sure with global shadows at max, but my gripe isn't over speed, it's the poor visual quality of shadows on multiscreen configuration. I think whatever's behind the splotchy blocky shadows is also stretching the stars at night on multiscreen setups so they're splotchy ovals instead of nice and round. To your question about flickering sides of buildings: I also get that for buildings and roads if I'm zooming in from far away, and for some older 3rd party v9 scenery that I haven't bothered debugging yet.

One problem with shadows is if you have XP running a multiscreen setup or if you run under a very wide window. The shadows then get very splotchy and blocky, which just kills the immersion that those shadows are supposed to improve in the first place.

I started flying XP at v10.11, I had no idea the stars were rendered just fine in earlier versions. I reported the bug but don't expect it'll be fixed soon, given all the other high priority stuff.

Off, because of the deer. It's not that having deer show up is stupid, it's that they can appear at any airport with equal chance. Like the sim starting a 747 off on a grass field or helipad, it doesn't seem to take into account airfield type or size when putting deer in