eslader

At least on my rig, it will work whether I start Pimax Play before the sim or I forget and don't start it until after the sim is already loaded in. This is 2024, though, and I wasn't using a Pimax when I was still on 2020 so your mileage may vary. You won't break anything experimenting with this, so go ahead and see what works.

It's not uncommon if you live in a decently populated place that there will be a VR arcade somewhere near you. You pay an hourly fee to play VR games. That would be a great way to get a quick test to see if VR could work for you without committing to buying expensive hardware.

That represents a fundamental misunderstanding of how AI works. Real humans understand that a question is being asked and that the goal of the asker is to get a correct answer. AI doesn't understand any of that. It doesn't even know that it's having a conversation because its name is a lie; it's not intelligent. Even if you ask a liar a question and get a fake answer, at least you haven't caused the human to suck down enough power to run a microwave to generate the answer. ;)

No, that's what a search engine does. AIs try to interpret what they find online, and they aren't capable of properly vetting the answers they get. They're also designed to come up with answers even if they can't find any. A great example of that is that a whole bunch of lawyers have gotten in trouble over the past couple of years by using AI to write briefs that they then submitted to the court. The problem is that AI likes to cite cases that don't exist, which judges catch and then the lawyer gets nailed. Here's one recent example of that. So when you ask an AI a question, you know that it's going to give you an answer no matter what. "I don't know" is not within its repertoire, so when it doesn't find an answer, it's going to tell you a lie. Even if it finds an answer, it's not terribly good at figuring out if the answer that it found is accurate. All that boils down to, when you run an AI search, you can't rely on the answer and you have to go and verify everything yourself, which kind of eliminates the advantages of having the computer do your work for you.

Hardware demands of the Crystals is going to depend on which flavor you get, but all of them are pretty hungry. I have a Crystal Light, and my 3070Ti could not run 2024 without the graphics settings turned down so low that it blurred out the gauges to unreadability. I had to upgrade graphics cards and now I have more GPU than I technically need for the Crystal Light but that's because I'm hoping it's still good enough for the next VR set I get, which may well be a Crystal Super if they don't come out with something better. I don't necessarily need the higher resolution of the Super but I'd sure like that horizontal field of view increase. At any rate, despite claims on Pimax's website, I probably wouldn't consider one unless I had a 4080 at minimum.

Yep. Back in the day I had a friend who maintained the computers for the flight sims at a major US airline. This was before 9/11, so she was able to invite me over many times to go flying in sims that weren't scheduled for real pilots. Flew the 747-400, DC-9, 737 and 757 many times. We absolutely treated it as a game. She thought nothing was more fun than to wait till I was about 500 feet above the ground on takeoff before killing 3 of the engines. Or I'd be coming in for a landing and suddenly find myself in a supercell when it had been CAVU the whole flight. Fun as hell. And that was back in the early 2000s - I bet they're much better now. Level D sims are the greatest video games ever made, bar none.

Go into the Windows joystick settings and see if the calibration window shows joystick movement when you move it around. If no, then you have a problem with Windows not seeing your controller. If yes, then go into MSFS's axis settings and check for movement indication when you wiggle the stick. If that moves, then you're either setting the wrong axis (which can happen - the MSFS in-sim controller setup scheme is so bad that I bought an external one) or your plane has gust locks that you haven't taken off, so the controls aren't moving because they can't.

That's what I've been saying. Back in the FSX days, I really wanted to fly bizjets but there were very few that were even decent, much less good. Now there are so many I don't think I even have them all. Great time to be a simmer.

I mean, in fairness, AI is set up to tell you what you want to hear, so when you complain to it about a product, it's going to cheer you on. I don't really get who you were trying to convince of what with that post.

The forum has a list of words that are censored and replaced with that phrase.

Your negativity would be more impactful if it weren't a constant. 😉

Sorry, I was unclear. In my case, the unnecessary drivers were Nvidia. In other people's cases, it's Realtek. Best I can tell, it's not a problem with the specific driver itself, but that there is an audio driver on the system that isn't being used when the sim is running. I have no idea why this would be an issue, but when I disabled the unnecessary drivers the stuttering went away entirely. BTW, I didn't stutter every time either. It's a difficult bug to pin down, but people have had success with the audio driver approach.

Agree with Farlis - start a thread in the hangar and link me to it and I'll be happy to talk further about it.

I mentioned having the same problem in SU3 in another thread I'm too lazy to find right now. I was thinking it was something to do with calculating the physics of the tires on the ground that was causing stutters, but others chimed in and pointed me toward sound. It's the sound of the wheels on the pavement that is, for some reason, causing problems if you have unnecessary sound drivers active. In addition to the Realtek drivers that were running the VR set I was using at the time, I also had Nvidia audio drivers because my LG monitor that does not have speakers thinks it does and Windows kept installing the drivers for it. I disabled those, and the stuttering-on-rolling stopped. Might be worth a look for you as well, disabling any sound drivers you aren't actively using.

Believe it or not, I don't. Even in South Africa, the 90% had money. You get 90% of the population starving, homeless and knowing it's all the 10%'s fault? Yeah, there's a reason those guys are building bunkers right now, but it's not going to help. They have to come up for air and food at some point and if they don't then great, they've voluntarily put themselves in prison and the rest of us can get on with reshaping society. In short, it may not be fun in the short term, but it will be self correcting and then after that, assuming AI ever actually lives up to what its proponents say it can do (it certainly can't right now), we'll end up with a society wherein we're much more free to do what we want because the computers are doing all the work we don't want to do.

Short-term savings maybe. The thing about firing almost everyone is that almost no one is left to give you money for what you're selling. That's a reality that doesn't seem to have dawned on the AI fanclub yet. The funniest part about that is that they tend to be staunch capitalists, and AI is going to kill capitalism dead. You can't have capitalism if most of the players in the economy can't get their hands on any money.

If I can afford to spend $125,000 on a nice-summer-day-only vehicle that, as you said, I probably can't use for anything practical like actually going somewhere, I can get this and then spend a heck of a lot less for a pickup that I use. 7 grand will get you an old F150 all day long, and to someone who can drop 6 figures on a toy, that's chump change. My thought is that I'm actually surprised it costs that little. Usually, stupid rich people toys are a lot more expensive because their makers know they're selling to people who aren't too concerned with the first digit in a six-figure price tag. 125 grand puts it within reach of the upper-middle class. There aren't too many over-the-top toys, especially in the aviation world, you can say that about.

I dunno. People are paying that much for lifted pickup trucks these days. On balance, I'd rather have the Jetson.

I do PR for tech, and I certainly wouldn't have said that. One look at how much power it takes ChatGPT to answer one question and you start sweating about the power bill alone. And that's just ChatGPT answering lame questions. Tell it to control an airspace, and the power necessary is going to be eye-opening. I work with a bunch of people in the AI world and from where I sit, there are a lot of rose-tinted glasses out there. No one seems to want to talk about the fact that 3 major AI players are each commissioning the entire output of a nuclear reactor just to run their data centers. Not a little one that runs a submarine - Microsoft is restarting one of the Three Mile Island power plant's reactors. Nuclear reactors are expensive to run, and if you're commissioning the entire output of one that means you're paying the entire cost of running it, plus profit. That's hundreds of millions per year just for operating costs - not even counting paying for the construction bill in the first place which is usually into the billions. That's fine if you're selling the power because you'll probably make a bit under a billion per year doing that, but if you're using all of that power yourself, it's just a cost. Then you have to pay for the AI hardware, the bandwidth, the people to run the whole AI side of the operation, etc, which means it's not out of the question that, in order to stay afloat, you'd need to make that same billion per year you'd have made just by selling the power. The industry is kind of approaching a cliff right now, because the venture capital firms that have been bankrolling it are starting to get restless waiting for the anticipated profits to appear. Once you drop the V-cap funding, the prices have to increase very steeply in order to keep the operation running.

I bought it back in the p3d days, and any time I got a new plane it was virtually guaranteed someone had already set up a profile for it that used my Bravo throttle. 2020 was the same way. I hardly ever had to manually configure anything even with just-released planes because someone almost always beat me to it. But these days it's kind of the opposite. I've started using 2024 a lot more since I got a system that can handle it, so I'm exploring all the new planes like the A400, C17, etc, and I'm not seeing much for online profiles of them. I'm happy to make and publish my own, but it just seems odd that they seem to have dried up so much.

I mean, did anyone seriously anticipate that? Microsoft and Google are each commissioning the entire output of a nuclear reactor to get enough power for their AI plans. That's one big power bill, and so far most of the AI ventures are being heavily subsidized for their customers. They aren't paying what it actually costs to run AI because the AI companies are getting cash infusions from V-Cap. But the V-Cap outfits are starting to ask uncomfortable questions like "so uh, when does the profit start?" Once those questions become more insistent, it's inevitable that users of AI systems are going to end up getting charged at a level that can generate a profit, which is a whole lot more than they were getting charged at first.

Except that you have to make the dynamic clouds look realistic. You can't just go from one cloud formation to the next, different cloud formation unless you just want it to look like a slideshow of weather. The cloud from formation 1 has to smoothly transform into formation 2 in a realistic way. That's one reason most KSP "weather engines" don't bother. Most of us spend most of our KSP time with rockets. You're probably doing Mach 1 within 30 seconds of launch. If you're going slow enough to see the clouds change, your flight is in big trouble and you won't notice them change because you're too busy noticing your rocket crashing.

Yes. Back in P3D I remember you could look out the side window and see the wing fade out as you went through the clouds if you had the two ActiveSky addons. You can't do that in 2020 or 2024 - it's like there's a force field around your plane that keeps the clouds from getting too close.

As a die-hard KSP fan, yeah, those clouds are stunning. But, since I run a different atmospherics mod, do those clouds move, or are they static? Because a lot of clouds in KSP addons are static, and that's a whole lot easier to do than clouds that actually behave like clouds.

Does the airspeed indicator work for you guys? I can't get it to return anything but 0.