Looks Really Great, but I Can't Buy It

[strider1 575]

Noooo.... They still have the 777 to release, the 777 ER addons, 737 ER and possibly BBJ models, 747 2.0, 747-8, DC6 and possibly a 787 but dont worry they have a secondary team for Xplane so its not like the project is on hold but it may take a few years

A few years, grrrr...... I can't go back FSX......

Can we at least try to keep this thread on FSX performance and some ideas to help? Rather than a "PMDG should do..." or PMDG/Xplane product speculation thread

[klimchuk 6]

Can we at least try to keep this thread on FSX performance and some ideas to help?  Rather than a "PMDG should do..." or PMDG/Xplane product speculation thread?

 

In many areas FSX is old (obsolete) product. You can try to set it up alone and succeed but with powerful add-ons like PMDG it's becoming almost impossible task. Especially if you have limited resources: RAM, CPU, GPU. Microsoft is also adding complexity by not supporting FSX and making its bugs last forever.

[CaptCraig 226]

I forget what I did exactly, but I used to get FSX stutters when using certain weather textures and crashes on final with certain products.  Now I don't for some reason.  

 

I think I remember doing something where the FSX config got totally set back to default.  I then read one or two threads, and did the ******* fix and it was TERRIBLE.  I lost all hope.  It was stuttering LIKE MAD with no weather and the trike.  Then I just fiddled with certain settings in the .CFG until I got no stutters anymore with the trike.  It turned out to be the best settings I've ever had with my FSX.  

 

I wish I could remember what threads I read and exactly what I did.  I'd also attach my .cfg file but everyone's machines are different.  

 

Damn FSX is a tricky beast.  

[bob34 124]

 

 

Ryan is 100% right. No one should expect PMDG to tune their systems for free

 

I'm not sure what I would be doing if I wasn't tuning. Fly? B-o-r-i-n-g.   B) 

 

 

Was hoping Ryan or someone else could help me.

There must be a setting in the fsx.cfg that causes my wife to enter the room and ask questions during the takeoff and landing phases of my flights.  Cruise and taxi = no problem.

Added wife_interruptions=0 in the FSX.CFG but it didn't work.

Anyone else getting this?

[CaptCraig 226]

I'm not sure what I would be doing if I wasn't tuning. Fly? B-o-r-i-n-g.   B)

 

 

Was hoping Ryan or someone else could help me.

There must be a setting in the fsx.cfg that causes my wife to enter the room and ask questions during the takeoff and landing phases of my flights.  Cruise and taxi = no problem.

Added wife_interruptions=0 in the FSX.CFG but it didn't work.

Anyone else getting this?

 

All the time.  BUT I'm OK with it because when I hit the attend button, a beer comes within 30 seconds.  

[Robert McDonald 167]

I'm not sure what I would be doing if I wasn't tuning. Fly? B-o-r-i-n-g.   B)

 

 

Was hoping Ryan or someone else could help me.

There must be a setting in the fsx.cfg that causes my wife to enter the room and ask questions during the takeoff and landing phases of my flights.  Cruise and taxi = no problem.

Added wife_interruptions=0 in the FSX.CFG but it didn't work.

Anyone else getting this?

 

You need to become closer friends with Ryan.  He is the all-knowing, all-seeing, swami of all time, I'm sure he can put the proper setting to have your wife hang a u-turn prior to interrupting your takeoffs and/or landings.

 

He's such a good sport, he'll even do that for FREE!

 

Now that's a buddy for life! 

Guys- I've been a flight sim pilot since ACES put the first Cessna 152 on Miegs Field. That sim required a monochrome monitor and a 16 bit processor running around 3.4 Mhz. It was fed from a single sided single density 360 MByte floppy drive.

 

I also write engineering simulations of complex real world interactions that must be considered in real life high rise architectural and structural design such as the effects of uneven heat and deformation caused by the sun's relative position or climatological variables. Many of these simulations can be represented graphically and lend themselves to large or massively parallel computers such as the Crays and the IBMs. The calculations are also tremendously iterative and deterministic. At some point a relevant range is encountered when additional changes become meaningless.

 

What we are asking FSX and the current stable of addons to do often results in competing goals bidding on finite resources. An extremely complex aircraft such as PMDG's NGX or the VRS FA18-E models complex multivariate subsystems that in real life are handled by separate computers with redundant backup. In the flight sim we ask the computer to create and control the flight envelope around which the graphical representation of the aircraft is built. Now add in the graphical embellishments such as shading and reflectivity that make for life-like models. If these aircraft flew in a dark vacuum FSX would handle them with ease.

 

But we aren't satisfied with that are we. We also want the air they fly through and the ground they fly over to be very close to real life and have all that happens rendered in real time. There's the rub. We expect an aircraft flying at 300 KIAS and 200 feet AGL to give us a sharp and realistic rendition of the envelope so if we were to take a snapshot of our flight, the resulting still picture would look like a Leica wide format portrait. Even the camera system on the SR71 Blackbird can't do that.

 

FSX performance limitations and those of our current generation hardware are capable of providing low altitude, high speed and high alitude high speed realism. Unfortunately they can't do them both at the same time with the same settings. The relative field of view at 300 feet is significantly smaller than the field of view at FL300. The optimal settings for each are quite different so we shouldn't expect even top end systems optimized for say, a military aircraft flying close ground support to provide the same gaming experience that an intercontinental passenger airliner can deliver at FL370.

 

If your hangar is as full as mine, you can take a morning flight in your Carenado Cessna CT182T from Gunnison to Telluride Colorado flying photorealistic mountain canyons courtesy of MegaSceneryEarth. You can land and have a quick lunch then jump into you EagleSoft Cessna CitationX and fly to New York LaGuardia at FL450 and Mach .950 dodging weather created by REX Essential-Overdrive. The next morning you can report as Pilot in Command on an American Airlines B747-8i for a flight from KJFK to EGLL. Oh, and I haven't even had time to clean the windscreen on my Navy F/A18-E by VRS, or qualify for carrier ops.

 

I guess what I'm saying is that FSX lacks the ability to make on the fly changes to critical system variables. Because it can't, it will never be a "one size fits all" platform. That means that the tweaks that work for one of us won't work for all unless we're willing to be satisfied in the "middle" and accept less than optimal performance in several areas of what we call quality. This operates varying aircraft in varying environments without overworking one aspect of your system or another. For instance, be satisfied with 24fps and a 60NM weather range in order to operate a wider set of aircraft in a reasonable though not "perfect" environment.

 

Far too many of us seek the "perfect" optimization and there ain't no such thing.

 

Without a doubt, the finest analysis and detailed explanation for the how-come-it-stutters-crashes-freezes I've EVER read.  I want this made as a permanent sticky, etched in granite and embedded in my driveway!

 

Given the massive real-time tasking of so many disparate elements, the calculations, the rendering...

 

ah... THE HUMANITY of it all!

[bob34 124]

 

 

You need to become closer friends with Ryan.

 

If I was going to hang with Ryan, I'd rather grab my bass and jam. And 200% for sure, my bass keeps the wife on the other side of the house.

 

Back on topic, "scenery management" was mentioned as part of the fix.

I missed two points:

1 - exactly which photo scenery causes this. Would something like Mega EHAM fit this classification, or is there a different class of scenery considered photo-real?

2. How exactly is this scenery management taking place? Is this simply enabling/disabling scenery in the FSX scenery menu or is there an external tool?

[altstiff 71]

For me the simple thing to cure OOM errors was switching textures to 2048 from 4096. That and that alone put a major kink in the OOM assault on my simming.

[Tabs 2,790]

bob34, on 02 Jul 2013 - 9:54 PM, said:

 

If I was going to hang with Ryan, I'd rather grab my bass and jam. And 200% for sure, my bass keeps the wife on the other side of the house.

 

Back on topic, "scenery management" was mentioned as part of the fix.

I missed two points:

1 - exactly which photo scenery causes this. Would something like Mega EHAM fit this classification, or is there a different class of scenery considered photo-real?

2. How exactly is this scenery management taking place? Is this simply enabling/disabling scenery in the FSX scenery menu or is there an external tool?

1. In this case it was MegaScenery Earth 2.0, but any similar product would do the exact same thing.The product consists of photographic ground textures for every square inch of a state - like having Google Maps generating your scenery textures or something to that effect. I'm not talking about high detail airports or airports that have an underlying photoreal base texture (most of the good ones do). While those do add to the VAS load too, the impact pales in comparison to what I saw stemming from having all of the state-wide photoscenery enabled. Bob had most of the eastern US enabled with this and it was just too much - many people I'm sure could get away with just enabling it for the states they're going to pass over on their route and be fine. FSX allocates VAS for everything though, so you have to pick and choose what you want, you can't just leave it all active, especially if you're using other high VAS addons at the same time (aircraft like the NGX, a bunch of realistic weather, AI traffic etc)

 

Default scenery and stuff like the Orbx FTX areas for the most part aren't using separate unique individual texture tiles for every single piece of land area like these photosceneries do. It's a relatively small group of textures that get reused and repeated in a convincing way, but isn't a literal photo of the area you're flying over. Stuff like the FTX regions, UTX etc do add to the VAS load too but it seems like it comes more from things like massively increased autogen density and all the extra waterways and roads etc - not textures.

 

2. You could do it through the FSX scenery menu but that would get tedious if you switched stuff a lot. I used this http://sourceforge.net/projects/fs-sceditor/

 

You can set it up to group sceneries together and this allows you to turn all of those things on or off with a single click. That's more ideal for this type of thing where you want to turn all the photoscenery on for GA flying but disable it for airliner stuff.

[RickB1293 9]

Gentlemen,

Let your efforts in search of that most perfect of FSX tweaks be guided by these simple fundamental principles. They are part and parcel of any graduate level study of Applied Mathematics. I learned them at the knee of one bloody professor or another and are, therefore, the god-awful truth.

 

The Theoretical Definition of the "Optimal" Solution

 
The optimal or "best" solution to any given problem is the one that draws a mathematically precise line from an unwarranted assumption to a foregone conclusion.
 

Likely Outcomes In Heuristic Computatonal Models (Binary)
  
1 - Saying something is when it ain't

or
2 - Saying something ain't when it is.

 

 

And to those among you who would rather be flyin' than tweakin' -- Go buy an Apple and fly that! :p0503:

[CaptCraig 226]

this place went nuts

[RickB1293 9]

Indeed

[Don t moderate me this way 882]

this place went nuts

 

 

Indeed

 

 

The place you're talking about is AVSIM, isn't it?  

[FDS-PCOS 0]

I'm not sure what I would be doing if I wasn't tuning. Fly? B-o-r-i-n-g. B)

 

 

Was hoping Ryan or someone else could help me.

There must be a setting in the fsx.cfg that causes my wife to enter the room and ask questions during the takeoff and landing phases of my flights. Cruise and taxi = no problem.

Added wife_interruptions=0 in the FSX.CFG but it didn't work.

Anyone else getting this?

Absolutely hilarious.. Great post...

Peter

[BilboBaggins 82]

This is a bug in Flight Simulator that has been there since the beginning, and I'm not sure even Pete Dowson could offer a workaround.