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Dazzyt66

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Posts posted by Dazzyt66

  3. Posted

    Hey, maybe its age, but I'm really struggling with deciding on a spec for a dedicated PC for my XP11.

    I currently run it on my Macbook pro, but really want to start setting up a dedicated station (16gb+ ram, gaming graphics etc.) so that I can run with as much graphic realism as practical in the budget - I just dont know where to start.

    I have built PC's in the past, so am open to that, there just seems a massive array of choice nowadays. I've looked at off the shelf and ideally (as I'm retired) want to spend as little as possible (around £400 max). I have monitors, keyboards etc. so am only looking at the PC hardware itself - OS wise I'll probably transfer my OSX licence to a Linux install instead so a no OS build is fine.

    Can anyone drop me some links to either self build specs or straight unit purchases which will also be upgradeable in the future for graphics etc. Used is fine so long as I can upgrade parts if needed.

    TIA

    Daz

  4. Posted

    9 hours ago, thibodba57 said:

    Is this the default FSX Mooney we are talking about.  If I recall and this is just to verify what you are saying.  You can only paint the one side of the aircraft.  The left if I recall.  This is them mirrored onto the right side of the model.  If this is the case then no there is nothing you can do.  If you want to see an N-Number you'll need to add it into the aircraft selection screen for registration or in the aircraft.cfg.  I'm not sure what it's labeled anymore been so long since I've really bothered with adding it.  This however looks hideous and unrealistic.  Unfortunately it's the only option with default aircraft.

    Yeah, it is the default - so it is as I thought about replicated sides 😔 bummer! You are right, the label you can add looks hideous! Lol.

    Carenado Mooney beckons methinks.... 😍

  5. Posted

    Hi,

    I really enjoy flying the stock Mooney Bravo so I decided to paint a version in my own colours. It has been a significant learning curve as I’ve never done it before and far from an expert in Gimp, however, I now have something half decent which will keep me happy for a few days... lol

    BUT, unless I’m missing something, the Mooney Bravo is only ‘half’ modelled and then the sides are replicated to match, which is fine as I have worked out which bits go where for my colours (with a LOT of trial and error). Unless I’m missing something.

    So, my key question is: I have added my registration to the lower rear fuselage in a nicer format than the fsx default BUT obviously with the mirroring of the parts, the registration runs backwards on the opposite side. Is there any way to overcome this?

    My only tools are Gimp and DXTBmp...

    Cheers

    Daz

  6. Posted · Edited by Dazzyt66

    3 hours ago, PittsS2B said:

    Before you give up on FS9, Dazzy, I'd suggest a glance at HaraldG's current Hungarian thread in the Avsim Screen Shots forum, which gives some idea of what FS9 is still capable of as a GA sim.  It really sings on modern computer hardware, both at busy airports and out in the hinterlands.

    Cool. I’ll take a look. I haven’t given up on it yet - it runs great on my i3 laptop and I love flying on it, it’ll be interesting to see the difference with FSX. I’ll probably run them both as I experiment going forwards 😀

  7. Posted · Edited by Dazzyt66
    Additional info

    1 hour ago, edetroit said:

    Strikes me that you may be a "low 'n slow" guy....in which case I understand the attraction of FSX. (which is not much younger than FS9)

    Really FSX should be bypassed and head straight to P3Dv4. IMO

    I will be here waiting for you when you come back. 😎

    😂 I’m sure I’ll get there eventually... 10 years or so... as I just got a copy of FSX for £5...✌️

  8. Posted

    Thanks for this. I am getting stuck into it. It’s great fun!

    I carried on my search on fsdeveloper and through a link there I think I have found the answer using Autogen annotator - I will give it a go!

    Yeah, I have been making changes one at a time - and indeed had a few false starts, but seems ok - so far...

    Although I am tempted to get FSX as well now, there are some low costs available on eBay... 😀

  9. Posted

    Hey,

    ive trawled through literally hundreds of threads to try and find a definitive guide to this.

    Q. Can I add Autogen (buildings, trees etc) to photorealistic scenes for fs9?

    I believe the answer is yes, but I have no idea how to start. 

    I have some photo scenery I got from eBay, and I can create my own using FSET but how to I get Autogen on it so it isn’t ‘flat’ everywhere? Ideally I would like to place stuff too so it becomes more real at low levels.

    i have sbuilder and whilst I can do the island tutorial that comes with it, I can’t work out in my head how to do this with photos. I think the answer may be to use sbuilderx and import for fs9 but I don’t want to go down another blind alley.

    i guess this is the problem coming new into something that’s 15 years old now... 😔

    Any help much appreciated!

  10. Posted

    12 hours ago, sascha said:

    Welcome to the FS9 party, FS9 still delivers much enjoymant! I also recommend getting a good weather add-on like Active Sky Evolution or one of the many freeware ones (although for me ASE is the best hands down - but still expensive).

    Thanks, I’m still experimenting with weather so all suggestions welcome. I’ve also seen people rave about your Evo textures so I may have to consider those at some point too... for an old platform this can still work out costly! 😂 

    • Upvote 1

  11. Posted

    4 hours ago, domvc10 said:

    Nice to see newcomers to FS9.

    Fsearthtiles is great I use it for small areas but you could use it for larger. the uk vfr scenery on CD like you have is fantastic, I have it for the whole country so if you can find the rest on Ebay I suggest buying it. I have used FSearthtiles to update some of the areas as its a little old now and for example in my home area some new housing estates where missing.

     

    There was a great project on this site, www.shepsshed.com , however looking today it's no longer active. It was a collection of autogen trees so you had quite a few areas where you had proper tree coverage over your photoscenery. I have a lot downloaded so maybe I will see if I can somehow contact the author and he might allow it to be loaded into the avsim scenery library. It's a great shame we are often losing some of the great websites and there addons.

     

    I also recommend taking a look at this website for scenery it has a big list of free scenery. It covers the whole world and is updated regularly. Here's the link to the UK section.

    http://www.freewarescenery.com/fs2004/uk.html

     

    Enjoy your journey into fs9. May I recommend one additional item. Weather. You can get a couple of weather addons for your sim which inject the current real weather into your sim making it much better. If you scroll down the forum a bit you'll find a couple of topics. I recommend FSGRW but it's a bit pricey. (sorry for the topic divergence there)

     

     

     

     

    Hey, don’t apologise! I’ll take all the advice and tips going. I have ordered a couple of vfr disks from eBay so it’ll be good to see what they look like. I’ve also started to use some FSET tiles to cover South Yorkshire, which is great for high altitude but I now am looking how I can ‘model’ that a bit better with some trees, buildings etc. I’m sure these libraries still exist somewhere I just gotta find em!

    I downloaded FSRealWX - but I haven’t really used it in anger yet... 🙂

  12. Posted

    On 7/12/2018 at 9:31 PM, Ramjett said:

    I recently "discovered" FS EarthTiles in my search for a photoreal scenery application that worked easily with both FS2004 and FSX since I use both in my flying hobby.  Creating FSX photoreal was a breeze, but like many in this thread, I found all my FS2004 photoreal showed up with grey textures.

    I searched all nine pages of this thread for the answer to the problem and never found anything that worked, so I went back to the user.rtf doc and read it page, by page, by page, especially the part about the .ini file format, as I was sure something was wrong there.

    That was when I noticed something I had missed each time before.  When compiling the scenery for FS2004 the FS2004SDK copy of ImageTool that you place in the FSET folder must be renamed from ImageTool.exe to ImageToolFS2004.exe (just as you must rename the platform specific resample.exe to either resampleFSXSP2.exe or resampleFS2004.exe) for the scenery to compile correctly.  Once I did that rename I have had 100% success compiling FS2004 Photoreal Scenery.  it doesn't look as crisp as the FSX sceneries, but it is still exponentially better than default scenery.  After adding in autogen with the FS2004SDK Autogen Annotator the result is very, very nice, even at ground level.

    Randy

    Mate, I have spent most of today trying to figure out why I keep getting grey rectangles! THANK YOU! I have looked high and low for the answer and came across this by chance!

    I might have to write a definitive ‘how to’ to save the next keen scenery builder some time...!

    YOU however are a star!

  13. Posted

    5 hours ago, Chock said:

    Depends what floats your boat really.

    Photorealistic terrain is kind of cool in that it is a high altitude photo mosaic map of the real terrain which you are flying over, so you could literally fly over your own house's location and you would see it below you, but the effect is only really convincing from perhaps around 1,500 ft altitude and upwards, since it is a frozen snapshot of the terrain, get low down and it becomes apparent, - particularly when looking at oblique angles - that you are looking a flat 2D image draped over a 3D mesh. Flying around in an airliner at 30,000 feet it looks just like the real thing though, so if that's what you mainly plan to do, it would be a good choice, if on the other hand you want to be hedge-hopping over the countryside in a Piper Cub at fifty feet off the deck, it won't look too good.

    Vector/Landclass add-ons such as Ultimate Terrain on the other hand, place 3D roads, railways, rivers, lakes, trees, bridges, buildings etc in their geographically correct locations based on a library of objects and it will also make coastlines more accurate depictions, so, if for example there is a dual carriageway which passes your house and there's a church opposite where you live, Ultimate Terrain will place that Dual Carriageway road accurately, put some reasonably realistic houses where there should be some, and will put the church where it should be. It won't be photorealistic, so the houses and church etc will be fairly generic, but they'll definitely be in the correct places. Flying at night you'll see accurate street lighting and traffic lighting etc over those accurately-placed streets and roads.

    Lots of the stuff UT does is customisable, so you can play about with it a bit to get it looking how you prefer. Considering Ultimate Terrain costs 30 quid, and covers either all of Europe, or all of the US depending on which one you buy, it's quite a lot of bang for your bucks and will certainly make the places you fly to look more like they do in real life than the default FS2004 scenery does.

    There is nothing stopping you from using either one, or both of these scenery solutions, it depends on what you prefer visually, and only you can decide that.

    That was really helpful. Thanks👍

    I’m definitely flying at lower altitudes atm so that is something to bear in mind, although I’m erring more towards the photo realistic because I want to be able to fly vfr locally and the Earth Tiles solution should let me do that myself once I get my head around it.

    Budget, obviously is also a factor. As I’m retired I have to meme my hobby pennies count so I don’t want to spend somewhere wher it could be used better elsewhere!

    All that said, the basic enjoyment I get from fs9 each day as I learn more is great!

  15. Posted

    Sorry, me again!

    I’m having great fun getting to grips with FS9 now and it totally fits the job for me atm.

    I’ve updated my airports and some textures etc already from suggestions here and I have my first VFR disk of Scotland and the Orkneys etc arriving tomorrow courtesy of eBay. V. Excited!!

    So, my question:

    I’m deliberating spending money on ultimate terrain, which I think I would still be able to use if I upgraded my sim and pc later. But is there a better option? FS Earth Tiles looks interesting from what I’ve seen on YouTube etc. but I’m worried about the security issues and legalities of using such a thing. The .ini file setup scares the pants off me! Although it seems it would suit my needs as I progress further afield than Europe. Assuming it still works nowadays of course!!

    Any advice dear new friends?

  16. Posted

    7 hours ago, meesterlijk said:

    I decided to fly above the USA. I usually fly short airline routes from large airport to large airport. There is alot of scenery for the US. I dont fly in other regions.

    Yeah, I’m doing a similar thing around UK, then off across Europe and around the world. I guess I will look up scenery and airports as I go and as I build my FS world... 🙂

    • Upvote 1

  17. Posted

    4 hours ago, Chock said:

    If you want some UK realism in terms of scenery for FS2004, then you'd be hard pressed to do better than this combination:

    https://www.justflight.com/product/vfr-real-scenery-volume-1-southeast-england-download (see sidepanel of this link for other volumes.)

    Then, for a load of freebie UK2000 scenery (used to be payware), check this out:

    http://www.uk2000scenery.com/newsite/My_Homepage_Files/Page22.html

    So would you say the vfr disks are better than FS World?

    Im downloading the uk2000 stuff as well. Thanks 🙂

  19. Posted

    11 minutes ago, Skywatcher said:

    The extreme versions are great! For UK the UK2000 stuff is fantastic. Aerosoft make a payware Heathrow and there is also a UK2000 version. Bit of a search will bring up plenty of opinions on these. 

    You'll want to start playing with ground textures, cloud textures, water textures to further enhance FS9. There's heaps out there to look for, download and play with. If you have a wife, good time to tell her you are now a flight simmer and no longer have time available for the things you did in the past.

    Ha ha ha ha we’ve already had that conversation! Lol

    Yeah, I’ve noticed there is loads of stuff out there, which is why I’m trying to get some steerage in the right direction to avoid a few blind alleys (hopefully)!

    😀

    • Upvote 1

  20. Posted

    11 minutes ago, Skywatcher said:

    You might want to start with this for UK airports. Then also check out the UK2000 payware stuff.
    http://www.uk2000scenery.com/newsite/My_Homepage_Files/Page22.html

    Props there are millions of them pay and free. I'm sure you will get specific aircraft suggested. You might like to take a look at some Milton Shupe aircraft to start with. Great freeware!

     

    Thanks for this. Had already downloaded the extreme demo of Donny airport and it looks really good! I was tempted to download all of these to update the UK, so think I’ll do that now... 👍

  21. Posted

    Hi all,

    After a disastrous experience of Flightgesr, I recently installed FS9 on my old Dell laptop (until I get a new one it won’t easily run fsx) and OMG I’m loving it!! 

    I'm now trying to sift through the masses of info here to make it the best it can be. I currently get around 40fps so I’m assuming my questions below may impact this...?

    My aim is (silly I know) tour the UK and then the world in a light aircraft (either Beechcraft SKA 300 or small jet).

    Anyway, my key questions are:

    Is FS Earth ok to use as scenery or will photographic packages be better for realism (eBay has a good selection of UK versions) or is there an alternative?

    Best small prop or jet to accomplish the task?

    Similar question about updating airports to be current(ish), I’m flying out of Doncaster and have seen new versions to buy but this seems an expensive way to go about it....

    Any other key add on that will make it as realistic as possible.

    Oh, and I don’t want to spend a fortune, although I’ll invest in planes, airports and scenery if they fit the bill!

    Help me Obi Wans, you are my only hope!  🙂

    This resource is flipping brilliant btw, I’m just trying to save myself some time...😉

    Thanks in anticipation!

    Daz

    Ps I’m sorry to be a newbie at this late stage!

     

     

     

     

  22. Posted

    2 hours ago, himmelhorse said:

    Daz,

    I have been using FS2004 for many years and have just migrated to P3Dv4.  The reason I did this after much personal anguish is also, I believe going to be very relevant to you.

    FS2004, for most purposes is dead and almost buried.  Do not mistake what I am saying. It is still a great platform but major further development is not going to be forthcoming.

    As you have stated, your hardware is not really going to give you much satisfaction with FSX or later derivitaves, but should be ok for FS9.

    An alternative to flight lessons may or may not be a viable one for you but you should at east consider a hardware and software upgrade in lieu. I base this on an hour per hour cost/satisfaction  basis.  The choice is yours and one that only you can make. 

    FS2004 IS alive and well, it just is not going anywhere and will not go anywhere in the future. I still use it and love it but there really are better fightsim platforms out there. There is still a lot of old technology aircraft and sceneries out there but if you are looking for a complex airliner (for instance) there is basically only the iFly 737 and 747 available.

    At 52 years of age you are still a youngster with many years of flight ahead of you, whether it be in the real world, Flight simming or both.  

    There is also still many many simmers out there in this community including me, still using fs2004 and who will be more than prepared to help you out with good and constructive advice.

    Good luck and let me be the first to say "welcome to our world" ... You are indeed among friends

    Regards

    Tony

    Thanks Tony. I a man indeed looking at new hardware too, but to dip my toes FS9 seems a good enough place to start. 

    Thanks for the advice, I’m sure I will have loads of questions as I progress!

    Daz

  23. Posted

    Yeah, I know, why?

    I’ve been using FlightGear but as I’m new to flying I’ve found it hard going, although I can fly a Skyhawk pretty well now lol.

    Anyway, I had X-Plane on my iPad, which is good but expensive for PC and as my PC is just a Dell Inspron i3 I didn’t think FSX would work well and most people still say that FS9 is just as good and stable. As I just want to fly on my own, Fs9 for £8 on Amazon seemed a good deal! So here I am!

    Anyway I’m Darren, 52, based in Doncaster, about to have my first flight in a real Cessna - possibly with a view to take lessons if I can afford it,

    Be good to know if FS9 is still truly live and kicking (it seems from recent posts here it must be) and I’m looking forward to exploring this forum and taking my sim as far as it will go.

    Daz 😀

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