Keto Ketchup

I fly into mostly smaller (compared to LAX, for example) airports, so hopefully this will work well. I'd just like to see realistic airlines rather than these weird pink and yellow airlines.

Thanks! I just went to download it and it says "currently online" (clicking the link gives a 404 error). That's a bummer, but I'm guessing this is just some temporary server maintenance or something. I'll bookmark the page for later. Question - are the aircraft models performance-friendly or more detailed like flyable aircraft, or better yet, do users get to choose?

This AIG - what is it and where do I get it?

I understand that volumetric, variable-density fog is not easy on a GPU, but more diffuse "everywhere" fog is actually "old tech" that is very easy on modern GPUs. Using this type of fog and varying the intensity based on one's location in a cloud could be a good compromise. It would definitely be better than nothing in my opinion. I don't personally need to see my wing "slicing" volumetric clouds like the video I present (as cool as it would be), but I would like a sense that I'm actually inside a cloud, and simple diffusion fog that "flickers" in intensity based on where I am in that cloud would give me that.

For the ones that say we should see wingtips inside of clouds clear as day, check this: I've been on enough commercial flights to know that this video is accurate. And I live in a mountainous region, and when we're literally "in the clouds", I often cannot clearly see a wing's length away walking around my own house. The foggy mist is right there in my face, something that I don't get from the current version of MSFS. In MSFS, I never truly feel "in" the clouds.

I do, with ultra-quality clouds, so I'm interested to learn how some of you are avoiding this.

Unfortunately HDR has come to mean multiple things. The "old" meaning is where, say in photography, you have a camera that takes three different pictures at different exposures and blends them together so that images are neither washed out or too dark (shadows and bright skies can coexist nicely). Then there is the artsy HDR that takes this to an extreme to give a very iconic photographic look, where shadows and highlights are over-emphasized for dramatic effect. And of course now we have true HDR, where you go from 8 bits to 10 bits or more per color channel, driving 4K HDR TVs and monitors with very bright brights and dark darks. This is the version of HDR that doesn't translate well in a typical SDR screenshot. But I suspect a GeForce filter is not this true HDR, but rather the aforementioned simulated HDR in an SDR color space.

That's what I was talking about.

Your comment does not answer my question. As for real life, I've been on enough commercial flights to observe wing tips being obfuscated by the "fog" that is the interior of a cloud. I just can't remember if I experienced the same thing in MSFS when it first released, or if I'm confusing real life memories with sim memories. * credit to the sim for being realistic enough to make me question if my memory is real or virtual

Bummer. Am I imagining that they used to be more "solid" when the sim was first released?

Do these SU10 clouds have substance when you are inside them, or can you still see your wings in full clarity?

Are you planning on buying a hardware yoke with pedals? I ask because I've been considering that myself. I'm not sure I can fully justify it (MSFS is just one of my many time sinks), but I'd be interested to read your own experience if you're currently "yokeless" and decide to buy hardware for improved immersion.

I'm glad we can still control load order, as I have my own personal scenery package which both adds and removes things, and to remove something my package needs to load after whatever package has the thing that doesn't belong (for example, the very amazing VFR addon has one antenna that no longer exists IRL in my area, so I removed it with an exclusion rect).

Is Windows 10 a minimum requirement to run MSFS? In other words, is anyone currently running it on Windows 7 or 8? I find it weird that Microsoft, which is known for its support of backwards compatibility, would force people to upgrade Windows in order to continue to run a piece of software that was originally released for an older version. If Windows 11 becomes mandatory to run MSFS, that'll be my cue to switch to XP12. Thankfully Windows 10 will be supported until at least 2025. I also would not be surprised if the modding community finds ways to trick MSFS to think it's running on Win 11 when it's still on Win 10, so I'm not going to lose sleep over it.

I'm still running Windows 1909, which required some trickery to keep it that way. Newer is not always better. I also froze my Oculus software to a pre-Facebook requirement version, though IIRC that requirement is being reconsidered. Ironically it was a mandatory update that killed MSFS for me a year+ ago and kept me from flying until more recent updates fixed what that previous update broke. I'm definitely a "If it's not broke, don't fix it" kind of guy, except when I first get a product - I spent days fine-tuning (which usually means removing crapware and disabling unneeded services) of my operating system when I first got my gaming laptop. Though a new laptop full of crapware and enabled spyware telemetry is "broken" IMO, so I'm not breaking my rule by "fixing" these things 😉 Now it's perfect (at least for me), so I do my best to keep it that way.

So much this. As a rural pilot, I don't even bother flying at night because it's just over-the-top unrealistic. I tried to go in and remove the LM textures for roads, since it would make the area I fly look way more realistic; even in towns, street lights are not that common, and they are definitely not uniformly spaced like in MSFS. Unfortunately I've not found the right file yet. Though now that I think of it, these street lights float above the roads rather than emit from the roads like a typical light map... Anybody have any ideas how to disable ALL street lights? Surely there's a config file or something where I can just change a 1 to a 0 and turn off the power, LOL.

I'm pretty frugal, so I've only bought one airport (a large airport closest to my home where I fly* from IRL). But when considering things like a flight yoke, I figure whatever I spend on this hobby is WAY LESS than anyone who flies real aircraft for their "hobby". Heck, the cost of fuel for a single flight is likely more than the grand total that I've spent on MSFS, not counting the computer itself. And while a flight sim is not the same is real life flying, the scenery in the area where I would fly IRL is so good now in MSFS that I feel I get almost equal enjoyment from my much cheaper hobby. * commercial flights, as IANAP

If all else fails, you could. That mod* comes with its own cache, allowing you to turn off the sim's rolling cache but still get the benefits of cached data. I personally use it with Bing's default maps rather than Google's since, Bing is more up-to-date in my area. * Specifically the older 5.0.9 version. IIRC the latest version removed the caching feature for some reason.

The other day I looked at the sky IRL and thought the clouds looked a little too sprite-like. No joke! There was a weird coloration between the cloud edges and blue sky that just looked fake to me. I guess that's proof that we're living in a simulation, LOL.

Did somebody say Linux?

From the store or by the sim itself? In other words, if I make my own hometown airport for myself, will it work fine if I just use single texture assets without LOD, or will it visually disappear at a distance? I'm not worried so much about geometry, as the buildings at my airport are pretty simple and wouldn't really need LOD reduction. I'm not one to model every windowsill and door trim, I just let the textures create that illusion at a distance. I'm not looking to sell my little airport for money, I just want it to look right from the air and taxiway.

Oh yes, my preference is for the company to fix their own game, but I've learned not to wait around for that (it's already been two years) if it's in my own power to fix things. For now I'm using the map replacer this thread is about. It's absolutely amazing how good the terrain can look without artificial green tint! Unfortunately most of the autogen buildings in my town have puke-green roofs for some reason, and this mod doesn't fix that. Someday we (or better yet, Asobo) will get rid of ALL the puke green!

One of the three OTA channels we get is PBS, which has Doctor Who reruns, LOL.

It's bad / outdated color correction data that tells the sim to shift colors in certain areas to an oversaturated green. In my area this is because the original satellite imagery was taken in early Spring, so all the vegetation was dead and brown (and there was even white snow in the woods). Asobo's solution was to tint the entire area green, which applied to everything, including roads - not the smartest way to fix the problem. A couple years later and now my satellite imagery has been updated to beautiful mid summer, but Asobo never updated their color-correction file, so everything still looks NMS saturated with puke green roads.

Color correction is separate from editing the map imagery itself (hiding clouds, cars, etc). I recently discovered this in my crusade to get rid of green roads. In my area, Asobo's raw imagery perfectly match Bing's most recent map, with the noted exception of the corrections you speak of. The color correction is handled by a separate CGL file, which means the green tint is applied by the flight sim itself, and not on the aerial imagery servers. It's this separate color-correction metadata that Asobo needs to fix to greatly improve their default terrain quality (at least in my geographic area). It's too bad that Asobo doesn't expose map imagery and color correction metadata to developers. I've been able to access is (thanks to studying the tool this thread is about), but it's not trivial. My plan is to make my own map server, where I can optimize the latest Bing imagery myself - removing clouds, color correcting areas on the actual images, even removing baked-in shadows around my local airport and home town. Wouldn't it be awesome if any developer could easily do this without creating their own map server? AFAIK MSFS doesn't provide an easy mechanism to drop in your own "ortho" like XP-11 has, which is a shame. Perhaps someday!