Lurk

indeed!

Been using REX weather engine since... two days ago. Reason: I re-discovered Active Sky. I'm eager to see what REX team's upcoming (knowing their timing, might as well be another 6+ months) Weather Direct program will bring to the table, since they claim it to be a revolution. So far it's a brutal pros and cons battle between REX and ASN for me: REX Essential Weather Engine cons compared to ASN: - slow interface (very slow, as a matter of fact) - painstakingly long weather injection at sim startup, often with brief hangs in the sim, with the weather not loading more often than not, requiring to close and re-launch REX weather radar - massive frame rate drop (!!!) - sudden visibility and coverage changes; application settings seem to have no effect here whatsoever - flashing high-level skies, stutters and frame rate drops at weather injection, both in Standard and WXPlus mode ASN pros compared to REX Essential Weather Engine: - light-weight fast interface - instant weather conditions at flight startup with no pre-injection pause, stutter or hang - plane finally flyable, smoother frames probably due to reduced CPU cycles - seamless weather conditions - under-the-hood weather injection, with no visible effects on sim performance. I've tried pretty much all payware and freeware weather injectors, and nothing comes even close to ASN in terms of visuals, performance and fidelity. That said, REX textures + ASN seems indeed like the perfect combo, at least for me at this very moment.

been a long-time REX Essential user. I really like their products and recently bought Texture Direct and Soft Clouds, must have add-ons imho. I was also using their weather engine, the good/bad scale unfortunately leaning toward the latter in the past months, plus it takes them forever to release updates. Tried ASN last night with a free trial key. Holy heaven. I'm sold, the difference is a no-brainer, not to mention the ASTOUNDING fps increase in my particular situation. Being a customer who really likes and supports REX products (couldn't fly without their textures and clouds!), I'd love to post some constructive criticism on their forum. Their weather engine currently stands no chance against ASN. I encourage anyone who hasn't to try it out, I doubt you'll ever look back. REX team, come on, color me impressed! :wink:

works fine for me. FSX:SE + WOAI + DX10Fixer. only downside to using WOAI, which has otherwise excellent models, is that all, and I repeat ALL aircraft textures don't have mips, which causes the planes to shimmer ingame. I'm almost through with the painstaking process of adding mips to the literal hundreds of the WOAi textures in my Airplanes folder. I'm longing for a tool which adds mipmaps to textures in subfolders.

really strange. other than thinking it has to do with your monitor connection. probably not relevant, but do you have WideViewAspect=True in fsx.cfg?

for those of you struggling to make this work with FSX:SE, I can confirm that by following SteveW's advice to install simconnect 10.0.61242.0, I was able to get the program running again. BTW, if you have FSX:SE installed, the Simconnect.msi executable to install 10.0.61242.0 shoul be located at FSX\SDK\Core Utilities Kit\SimConnect SDK\LegacyInterfaces\FSX-SP1 in your FSX folder.

it seems to me that add-on scenery makers should be very damn aware of this and release carefully optimized products to begin with, instead of having end-users do the job instead of flying. There is no reason for a wannabe pilot to see every crease in the leather of their seat with the sim struggling to maintain 10 fps. I think many developers should keep in mind that while everyone likes to take pretty screenshots in FSX, some of us actually enjoy smooth flying just as well. I'm surprised this is not common knowledge among add-on producers by now and considering the sim is 10 years old. I also do reckon there are many developers as well which put a lot of effort into optimization.

yep, I did try levels at first, but obtained more satisfactory results with liftgammagain. I guess it all depends on what shaders you have activated before and what settings you use on each. But I did try the exact same figure as in your screenshot! :smile: @Fi5kuS iirc automatic installation in FSX only adds a link to the ReShade.fx in the FSX folder. You can have the Mediator along with the files it comes with when you download it in any position on your hd (I suggest a folder called ReShade where you keep your frequently used programs). What is it exactly that doesn't work for you with automatic installation?

used the tool last night on my home airport (freeware) scenery. after optimizing a couple of textures following the guide stickied here on avsim (which I suggest even the skeptical ones as myself to read thoroughly) in order to better understand the process and get the hang of it, I used the texture optimizer mentioned in this thread to downscale the .dds's from 2048 to 1024. Besides reducing the texture folder of the addon airport from 500Mb to roughly 150Mb, I noticed greatly reduced stuttering (not placebo) when taxiing and taking off and no visible reduction in IQ. Provided one does things carefully and gradually (no need to suddenly go optimizing everything immediately), after many doubts I'm becoming convinced that lighter textures can actually make a difference in the sim. I really suggest to read the guide here in the forums. Key is to leave some textures such as props, fresnel ramps and lightmaps alone. The guide is clear in this regard as well.

I promise I'll get back with a few pics, including one of my Pipeline tab. For now I can tell you that to avoid becoming crazy finding a balance between day and night, I was able to obtain good results by adding the liftgammagain SweetFX shader only for night flying. What is incredible about this tool is the ability to fine tune the settings down to each individual's perception of reality.

I'll post my presets from my FSX pc, but in the meantime here are a couple I've uploaded last night. In my opinion ambient light is what is really missing from default FSX. When combined with some of the shaders I've listed before - mainly used to improve IQ - the ambient light shader is what really makes the difference. I also use Shade, which helps the overall atmosphere with its presets for brighter light and gray day.

the program is absolutely safe and reliable, and the interface allows to remove the profile and return to your previous situation with no side-effects. No need to manually uninstall anything. There's no tampering with the installation whatsoever, everything is done without any alteration to FSX files. It is powerful, safe and straightforward at the same time, provided you enjoy experimenting.

I'm not on the pc with FSX installed. Later I will provide you with the correct info. Out of memory: SweetFX - vibrance - tonemap - HDR - lumasharpen (better than adaptivesharpen from CustomFX, has less artifacting) - curves CustomFX - colormod - colormood - colorhuefx GemFX - ambient light I'm aiming at reducing the non-essential ones, so it's a work in progress. If you are interested in individual settings I can provide you with the config files. I, however, found out that monitor calibration plays an essential role in what one perceives as correct shader settings.

open the mediator application (provided you've extracted all necessary files needed to run the program in a folder you will have dutifully named "Reshade") and on the left hand there are self explanatory options, one of which, named 'Add', will ask you to navigate to the folder where the .exe resides for which you want Reshade to inject shaders. Head to your FSX installation folder from there and pick fsx.exe, at which point use the correct radio bullet depending on which API you use to run the sim (DX9 or DX10), confirm, and you are set to go. From the Pipeline tab select which effect you want to use, then go into the library where the chosen effect resides (CustomFX, GemFX, SweetFX and so on...) and tweak the individual settings from there. I suggest you start with something easy and straightforward such as Tonemap from SweetFX, for the impact and tweaking of individual shaders can be overwhelming at first. Word of advice, most of the sliders apply changes on a very sensitive basis, i.e. an integer point shift can mean a very drastic change in the sim's appearance. Once you get the heck, it's a real drug. The incredible advantage is that if you keep FSX windowed while fiddling with the mediator, you can see your changes applied instantly and experiment with shaders real-time. EDIT: seems like I found a way to post from photobucket. This is the only pic I've uploaded since using Reshade 1.0. I will post more significant ones later. the effect here is subtle, the way I like it to be. It reproduces a real life flight I took a couple weeks ago over the mediterranean along the western coast of Italy, heading south. Hot summer day with haze and low scattered clouds. The light was very bright at 36.000 feet on that early afternoon, between 1:30 and 2:00 pm.

this utility is breathing new life into my sim. Been messing around with the mediator tool for a while now, the ambientlight shader under GemFX is a key to more realistic visuals in FSX, imho. The amount of available shaders and single shader adjustments allow for infinite combinations with an unprecedented degree of customizations as far as image filtering. With its original flat color palette and virtual absence of environment lighting, FSX benefits from this tool immensly. Would love to post some screens, but I still haven't found a way to do it properly. I seem to be unable to use photobucket here on avsim.

http://www.winhelponline.com/blog/unassociate-file-types-windows-7-vista/ I've been flawlessly using this in win7 when I accidentally associate uncommon extensions. Usage is pretty straightforward. Come back if you have problems figuring it out, provided it works with win10.

pls delete

some settings in FSX-SE have been hardcoded anew. For example the slider for texture resolutions now defaults at 4096 when set all the way to the right. DX10toolbox from the DX10Fixer has an fsx.cfg tweak utility. When opened, it shows bufferpools set to 0 even with no entry present in the fsx.cfg file. It is safe to assume that because of today's GPU's, along with 4096 textures as a default and other under-the-hood optimizations, Dovetail deems no bufferpools to be the most appropriate setting on today's machines. Feel free to correct me, anyone.

I'm almost sure FSX-SE defaults at Bufferpools=0

I can vouch for LIMF, a medium sized airport in Torino, an otherwise rather large and important industrial town in northern-Italy, home of FIAT automobiles and Juventus soccer team Free and nicely crafted, DX10 compatible, it's available at www.vvtorino.it, but I can't seem to access their site at the moment :blush:

I got noticeable gains by doing the following: first and foremost, finally gave up tweaking LOD radius above 4.5. If MS decided that was the ultra-high figure than there must have been a reason. The algorythms for autogen positioning are thought for 10 year old x86 CPU's after all. As a plus, with LOD radius at 4.5 I can run both autogen sliders at very dense with no perf hit (extremely dense is too cluttered for the area I live in anyway). Disabled any form of supersampling. Let Reshade+SweetFX do the job with their SMAA shader; not as good looking, but the difference in IQ is minimal and the hit on performance negligible. Coupled with native FSX AA it does the job just fine. Running the sim in a window -> increased smoothness on my rig. Abandoned REX Essential for textures and bought REX4 Texture Direct. After a couple of hours I can't stress how much this add-on has been improved and optimized, and it looks more realistic than ever.

I think there is some kind of ongoing mass panic regarding these windows updates. I'm not saying some of them don't actually suck CPU time, but out of pure curiosity and in hope to squeeze a few extra fps like every serious simmer, I decided a while ago to follow the hype and uninstall the dreaded ones. Well, guess what, no change whatsoever. Infact I let Windows reinstall everything and only disabled GWX in Task Scheduler to get rid of the Win10 tray icon. My latest and most effective fix for the touchy flight sim we have all come to love and hate (let's admit it, it's a 10 year old software with a flimsy backbone on which we are attaching an exoskeleton made of the latest and greatest technology, and I'm talking about all the incredible add-ons which make the sim still worth using today) was to let it rebuild the fsx.cfg I've been messing with so much. My sim is behaving badly in these days as well, and it seems totally random. I've come to enjoy the moments when it runs smooth and have stopped blaming the world when it lets me down. I guess the saying "you can't teach an old dog new tricks" applies in this case as well.

imo the latest version of the DX10 fixer allows water customizations that make FSWC obsolete.

that's the way the z-buffer works in fsx. It can be a real immersion killer for those - like me - who fly in mountainous areas. Even a more recent game such as Skyrim had this problem to some extent. I'm afraid not much can be done about it and could probably be solved only with true volumetric clouds. I'm ready to crown my new hero, should someone ever find a way to alleviate this awful glitch the sim has been carrying on since like forever. btw, I own Soft Clouds as well, and although better, it doesn't get rid of the problem.

great news, thx denali, I need to reinstall fsx as well.