Kuragiman

Beautiful shots. I haven't touched a simulator in a year. Got tired of every flight being a 40 minute setup so my frame rate wasn't destroyed. It gets a little old after 5 years... maybe when I build my new system at the end of the year I'll give it all a go again. It's going to be like starting over. Going to have to learn it all again. Flying a modern commercial jet is not like riding a bicycle. XD

NEVER! I refuse! I love seeing the contrails of a dozen other craft on their way to their own destinations as I zoom about! The beauty of programs like Ultimate Traffic 2, you don't have to shut anything off. Just tell it what you want it to do in whatever scenario you are in. I don't need 8-10 more FPS when I am already at 40k. I need it when I am at the airport itself! Sadly... not happening with the current software tech being used. Need more GPU usage, less CPU! I want all my cake, cookies and ice cream and want to eat all of it! Why!? Why... T_T

The best way I've discovered to get Daedalus aircraft out of your airport is to go into the UT2 interface and tell it you want a PDF print out of the airport's flight schedule for the week. It will produce a neatly organized multi paged chart for each airline that airport services and has a flight plan setup for that week there. While keeping this chart handy, go into the livery manager in UT2 and start looking for these airlines and start checking to see if that that aircraft model has a livery for the airlines on your PDF chart. UT2 has a filter that let's you pull up aircraft/airlines that don't have liveries but are scheduled to fly in the UT2 schedules. From there you need to go out onto the big bad Internet and find aircraft models/liveries to replace the ones missing. It is time consuming for sure but if you spend a few days in there you can weed out a lot of Daedalus aircraft. It took me about 2 hours to eliminate all the generic traffic spawns at MMMX-Mexico City for example. In the end I ended up with a beautiful highly active Mexico City with all the correct liveries running around.

I think this package lighting only starts fogging up when in fact the weather becomes bad. If I read right, it looks at the moisture in the air and that triggers the fogging on the light beams. It's a nice effect. Flight slimming is art in motion and everyone perceives what looks 'good' differently when it comes to art. It's a good package. It is mostly useless if you spend ALL your time in the VC but if you are a film maker or like flying outside the aircraft it's a nice add-on to have.

GEXP3D and UTX for USA flying. FTX Global/Vector for Euro flying.

13 pages of a stressing out over... water? I guess I can be thankful that I don't fly 50 feet over water in my 737 so I can skip this update. I see no other benefits of moving to 3.1. Like others, my v3.0 is running great and everything works fine. I think I'll hold till 3.2.

T_T I didn't shoot any messenger... I don't know if you guys are attacking my posts or being helpful. Listen, by all means, try every setting until you are blue in the face but when those settings fail don't waste time on the logic that, "It worked for XXXXXX person! Why doesn't it work for me!?" This is the point I am making. Trust me, I have done every single setting I've ever watched Rob do or Matt do or anyone else that's thrown their 2 cents into the arena and I found what works on my system. These are great places to start but some like to start and finish there and as you said Rob, they complain about how crappy the software is when those settings don't work out and in fact it's just their PC not able to handle what they are throwing at it. I see this behavior constantly. I know, i use to be a person that would complain loudly when I first got into this madness 3 years ago. I don't remember if he said it, but everyone who makes a video like this need to stress that these are settings for 'their hardware'. I feel if you leave that off you could be doing major damage than good to someone who doesn't understand how the different settings affect smoothness and FPS. Again, my point is, these videos are great but when those settings melt your PC have the mindset and flexibility to pull back the settings to something more manageable and don't whip FSX/P3D to go faster and harder. You are just killing it rather than helping it.

The Holy Grail is no quip at anyone. It was general statement. People see these 'My Settings' videos and think it's the answer to all their problems and then they end up right back at square one. I turn off cloud shadows for one reason; Shadow Clipping. I have variable start profiles too and in some of those profiles I have cloud shadows turned on at 80000 meters. Even when I turn up cloud shadows to MAX setting I still see the shadows get clipped on the ground and it's an irritating graphic anomaly to me. Clouds shadows look great, but flying up at 40,000 feet, I can see where the cloud shadow rendering just stops dead and this results sometimes in shadow maps that are cut in half and it just irritates me to look at it. It's a personal preference. If I could set the cloud shadows to the same draw distance I use for Active Sky Next I totally would leave them on 24/7 because I would never see the cloud shadow dead zone. I don't fly my simulator to 'Just Fly It'. I like to kind of roleplay when I am flying so I like more realistic levels of traffic at my airports where I have to hold short and give way and follow company traffic and all that jazz. I don't care if I am #8 in sequence. That's how it works in reality and I go for reality when I fly thus the high AI traffic settings. The models that UT2 uses are quite frame rate friendly so I crank it up, sometimes a little higher than my rig can handle. Nothing like a 6 miles final at KDFW or KATL and watching your FPS go from 30 down to 12. XD

The two things I took away from that video were HD Trees and the Soft Cloud setting he prefers. Everything else is highly subjective to your PC's hardware and I know a lot of folks are going to run out and slam their sliders like he did and wonder why their FPS is in the drain. Hopefully everyone understands that these are not universal 'Holy Grail' settings that everyone can use. Not everyone can use these. I know I can't because I prefer 80% AI traffic to his no traffic which murders the CPU but I still get a nice 25-30 FPS at payware airports with it dipping lower in bad weather scenarios. We still can't 'have it all'. You have to cut out somewhere. For me, it's 1k textures with mostly high slider settings, no car traffic, 80% AI traffic in UT2 and cloud and terrain shadows off. Now.. when those two 980ti's are in my system or that new video card coming in 6 months that has the power of two titans SLI'd... we shall re-evaluate the settings ^_^

You will NEVER win the battle of technology. Something "NextGEN" will always be coming out when you go to buy. If you can afford a nice video card that is out now do it. Sell it on eBay later when the next one comes along then upgrade. The question I ask myself before I go get a new video card is "Do I really need this?" If all my other games are rocking and rolling on high or max settings but my sim still acting like a 20 FPS turkey then No, there is no reason for me to drop $700-800. As to "revolutionizing" simulation, I highly doubt it. The simulator itself needs to be revolutionized rather than relying still on aged code that just can't make good use of today's hardware.

The only time I have witnessed this behavior is while creating airports myself and this behavior usually occurs because of an error on the AFCAD designer's part to properly setup taxi points for the aircraft to follow and stack up on. Example; I am currently working on KBUR-Burbank and I forgot to put the proper Hold Short point so all the aircraft were taxing up to the runway and on to each other and sitting there getting extra close and intimate with each other. I theorized that this was where airplane babies come from but then I just realized I made a mistake when designing that taxi route and runway entry point XD.

I loved the blue lights too and flew with them for a month before someone chimed in on one of my screen caps that it was a bug and linked the fix. No more gentle calming blue glowies at night. As stated, UTX is region based, not global but it does add significant landclass updates to coast lines, streams, rivers, lakes, towns and cities and adds speciality landclass like mass grave yards, parks, golf courses, universities, etc.

Thanks for the explanation Jean. I had a browse on the EZDOK forums but there are a ton of threads regarding Spot Views. Do you have a more direct link to the thread in question? I would appreciate it.

Pictures are worth a thousand words. The blue textures on the highway WAS a bug. I took these to send to Flight1 to ask what was up with the crazy blue (even though it kind looks cool) and they pointed me to the patch that fixed the issue but you can see that city lighting is visible even out to 50-60 miles. These were taken when I first installed the GEX World and UTX 2.0 USA so I hadn't adjusted my 3D lights yet. There are a lot more lights that show now in my current lighting config with little loss of FPS.

To be honest, they look the same to me, as far as 3D Lights go but I like the customization options in UTX better.

^^^^ THIS I dumped FTX Global after moving to P3D in favor of GEX World and UTX 2.2 USA. Superior in my humble opinion, at least in the P3D universe. Better autogen, better colors for us USA flyers (FTX Global I think is better colorwise for Euro flyers) and better VAS performance. Worth the investment for sure if you fly in P3D.

If you have UTX 2.0 Usa and Canada, congrats, those install into both FSX and P3D. Older GEX and UTX products will require something like the migration tool and still may not function properly. GEX WORLD P3D was created specifically for P3D to take advantage of all of it's DX11 upgrades and I highly recommend replacing your older GEX products with GEX World P3D.

I can run the NGX in MOST (not all) scenarios with 30 FPS locked in the Virtual Cockpit. AI traffic can make this number start to creep to the mid 20's but that is not PMDG's fault. If your PC is properly configured and your FSX/P3D is not full of ridiculous settings your hardware has no hope of processing then you can get 30-40 FPS in the VC and 60 FPS externally.

Yet their new Nassau airport looks amazing, runs great and has tons of AI traffic running around it with Ultimate Traffic 2 and even WOAI. You are sure you installed it all correctly? Granted, Nassau is not a 'MEGA' airport but their quality of work is not terrible at all, at least not on this product. Maybe they sucked in the past but they make gorgeous airports now. Ah well.

Oh the hilariousness of a group calling someone out when they themselves are in violation of using other peoples work without full permission. XD Don't throw rocks in glass houses. Glad Matt is getting the strike removed.

I have been satisfied with PC Aviator and all of my purchases over the last 3 years are still available for download in my order history.

The PMDG 737NGX is superior to the Aerosoft Airbus products in every way. The Airbuses are good but the 737NGX takes it to the highest level of realism. This is a full on Study Sim. Everything pretty much works as it does in the real aircraft. The virtual cockpit is pretty spot on and the night lighting is excellent. Hundreds of liveries are available both from the AVSIM library and PMDG's own built Operations Center that comes with the NGX. Keep your FMC Navigation date up to date using NAVIGRAPH AIRAC cycles. FS2Crew's NGX Reboot is an amazing product to have with the NGX to put the cherry on top. You will get 3 SOP's to choose from which covers a vast majority of major airline's operating procedures. It is exactly what you are looking for in a FO simulation. Seriously, if you bought only one commercial airliner simulation this is the one to get. You will not be disappointed. I fly for Southwest Virtual which uses the 737 exclusively and a majority of us use the NGX in our operations. Get it!

You change it for P3D unless that is the settings you want for EVERY game you play.

Be careful of wanting 'Real World' AI traffic levels at your airports. You are asking for your FPS to drop drastically. I personally run with 80% commercial and 20% GA traffic set in UT2's interface and I am quite happy with the traffic. At large US airports such as KLAX and KDFW I see well over 80 aircraft around the airport doing their thing. Any more than that and my beast starts to big for mercy. If you are wanting 200+ aircraft at your airports you better have a 6ghz processor on liquid cooling because no amount of slider settings in P3D is going to save your FPS. AI Traffic can and will eat your lunch if it is allowed to spawn crazy amounts of traffic. If there are others out there running with 150+ ground AI at your airport I would love to know your secrets. 80 on the ground is my PC's breaking point. Anything past 80 and I start to lose an FPS here and there until it's in the lower teens which is not acceptable for me. I don't like to dip under 25 myself which is one of reasons I like UT2. I can set the target FPS rate and if the computer consistently drops below that it will scale the traffic back automatically until 25+ FPS is achieved again. The one thing I don't like that UT2 does is spawn traffic at airports I am not going to or from just because it's xx number of miles away and while you can tell UT2 not to spawn ground traffic at xx distance you run the risk of neutering your airport you are arriving at or having it do its infamous "pause" while it spawns in all that traffic on your 5 mile final which is a bad time for that to happen. I wish they had used technology like AIr Traffic Manager did where it just preserves traffic at your starting and arrival airport and nothing extra anywhere else. New York city is notoriusly bad with UT2 active because it wants to spawn planes at KJFK, KEWR and KLGA all at once. 5 FPS is not fun. XD

Actually, it is recommended you get rid of NI altogether. It is not required in P3D. If you make any changes do it via NVIDIA's control panel. All you really need is to tell the video card you prefer Maximum Performance and if you fly with locked frame rates set the control panel's Prepar3D to Adaptive V-Sync. SGSS is going to eat your lunch, even at 2x. Dump it. Also, KATL is brutal, PERIOD. I have a beast of a machine and if I leave my Scenery Complexity at Extreme like I do for every other airport I own I get single digit FPS because of all the tiny objects and 150+ Jetways that KATL spawns in. Great looking eye candy but not practical for flying. Just my two centers from experience.