Microsoft Flight Simulator X

Ok I'm up to mission 7 having skipped the soaring mission as the tow rope kept breaking :p and I didn't by FSX to glide anyway.

But the fight from Edinburgh to Glasgow has me stumped I'm using mouse and keyboard So F1 is to idle and F2 and F3 are to increase decrease thrust. Now even though I reduce throttle to as low as possible (without idling) on my descent from 6000 to 3000 I can't keep the speed down as instructed. You have to stay at 210 knots but this simply isn't possible unless I'm doing something wrong. Also I have the feeling that the co-pilot asks me to extend the flaps and idle too soon which leads me to fly in to the tenement buildings on the north side of the clyde around 3 Nmiles from the start of the runway. I must say I can take off no problem and my flight to Glasgow was just perfect hehe

Any experts point me towards good sites for landings, thanks.

(I just wish I could read the training center without installing the 13 gigs on my laptop :( )

EDIT: Just wanted to make a small edit since there are 3-4 new players out there enjoying this sim. I started doing the missions but the lessons section is much more fun educational and structured. My advice to any wannabe FSX buyers or rookies is to do the lessons both ground lessons and flying. The lessons are great fun the guy is fun too at talking very witty with loads of puns and you really learn much more than simply doing the missions. I don't know how far the lessons go beacause I'd only time to do the 1st two lessons but already I know much more about what's happening with the plane and what the dials are telling me.

Can't wait to get my joystick (hopefully this weekend) :D
 
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Hi All,

Just done a full rebuild of the PC and have upgraded to Vista Ultimate.

Reloading all of my FSX Software but have hit a problem with Traffic 2005. Just found out that it's not Vista Compatible.

On the site it says that it is being replaced by Traffic X but no details as to when that is going to be released. Anyone got any info?

Also does anyone know of another product similar to Traffic 2005 to generate more AI aircraft that is Vista compatible? Payware or freeware.


Cheers

Taff
 
I'm currently using MyTraffic X for AI whilst I wait for TrafficX to arrive. I'm afraid your guess is as good as mine as to its release date though :(
MyTraffic has good support if you need it, and has recently been upgraded to use the latest FSX models. You even get a nice upgrade to the ATC speech if you want. I've had no problems with it in Vista Ultimate 64, though you must remember to "Run as Administrator" when installing.

For freeware AI, most people use WorldofAI or ProjectAI. There have been some problems installing these in Vista, but most have been solved if you look at the respective forums.

jas72 - if you are having trouble getting your speed down, deploy your spoilers for extra drag. I think it defaults to the "/" key but don't quote me on that. Just don't forget to retract them afterwards :)
 
Dual Core really works with FSX - SP1!!

As part of the process of building my new PC, I decided to undertake a major overclock of my new E2160 processor. In doing so I thought I would take the opportunity to log FSX performance as I increased the FSB, primarily to vindicate the received wisdom that FSX is CPU intensive. My target is to get a minimum of 20 FPS at ultra high detail settings in the most challenging of environments.

I decided to create a standard flight: Ultra High settings, JFK Airport, "Building Storms" weather, Day, Stock Beechcraft Baron. I would take off, and circuit the airport once, keeping the view out the passenger window onto the airport buildings, so giving the PC a chance to catch up with all the changing graphics, and then take a rough average of the FPS.

My old kit: an AMD 3700 San Diego clocked to 2.7 Ghz, on an EPOX 9NPA with 2 Mb OCZ Platinum RAM, a Radeon X1900XT, running a 19" monitor @ 1280*1024 - XP Home, achieved a very stuttering 9 FPS

My new kit: an Intel E2160 clocked from 1.8 Ghz to 3 Ghz, on a Gigabyte P35C-DS3R with 2 Mb Geil RAM, a Leadtek Geforce 8800GTX running a 24" Dell 2407-HC monitor @ 1900* 1200 - Vista Home Premium.

The results:

FSX Vanilla - 1.8 Ghz - 5 FPS
FSX - SP1 - 1.8 Ghz - 8 FPS
FSX - SP1 - 2.25 Ghz - 14 FPS
FSX - SP1 - 2.43 Ghz - 12 FPS?
FSX - SP1 - 2.7 Ghz - 12 FPS?
FSX - SP1 - 2.88 Ghz - 12 FPS?
FSX - SP1 - 3.0 Ghz - 15 FPS

Yeah - slightly odd and not particularly great results you may think. I'm putting the 12 FPS hole down to crapola memory dividers. It got moving again when the memory got back to 1:1. However, the registered FPSs were not telling the true story. Each time I upped the FSB, and ran the flight, it t progressively smoother. 12FPS felt like 18, pretty good, but not silky smooth. At 3 Ghz (this E2160 is wild :) ), the registered 15 FPS felt easily over 20 FPS. Apart from an initial 2 or 3 seconds to draw the buildings, it was very, very smooth. Why? Then it hit me like a bolt... DUAL CORE now works properly in FS!!! I tabbed out of it and checked my CPU meters and sure enough, for a second they registered both cores running at least 50%. Once I tabbed out and Core 1 was 100% and Core 2 was about 75%.

As for the lag drawing the airport buildings, I'm putting that down to the 1Mb cache on the E2160. Presumably an unclocked (£120 more expensive) E6850 would do a better job.

So I'm pretty much there. Next weekend, I am targeting 3.2 Ghz Orthos stable on the CPUs, but anticipate, at long last, some really decent graphics in FSX.

Finally, it would seem that MS will need to fix the FPS meter on FSX to give a proper reflection when using multi-core.

Hope this is of interest.
 
I've just upgraded to a nice quad core @ 3.2, 4gb ram, 8800 etc etc so I might give this another go. I will let you guys know if this makes full use of all the cores, I will be a happy man if it does because I will be able to crank it right up. :D
 
Pants said:
I've just upgraded to a nice quad core @ 3.2, 4gb ram, 8800 etc etc so I might give this another go. I will let you guys know if this makes full use of all the cores, I will be a happy man if it does because I will be able to crank it right up. :D
Click to expand...

It wont full utilize 4 cores until the next patch iirc, gonna wait till then till i reinstall it.
 
Kezmo said:
It wont full utilize 4 cores until the next patch iirc, gonna wait till then till i reinstall it.
Click to expand...
You can utilise four cores in SP1 with a little tweak to fsx.cfg

http://blogs.msdn.com/ptaylor/archive/2007/05/15/new-tweaks-in-sp1.aspx

Phil Taylor's blog said:
There is a tweak to control scheduling of threads on cores.

It is not recommended to change these settings unless you have a performance reduction and/or maxed out CPU loads in the PerfMonitor. The tweak is:

[JOBSCHEDULER]
AffinityMask=n
where
n num of cores scheduled
1 = 1 core 0001
3 = 2 cores 0011
7 = 3 cores 0111
15= 4 cores 1111
Click to expand...
 
Been doing a spot of island-hopping in FSX with realtime weather updates...bit bumpy up here...currently halfway between guadaloupe to barbados via martinique and st lucia...here is my postcard


c'mon in, the waters lovely :cool::cool: :D
 
Broadie said:
Been doing a spot of island-hopping in FSX with realtime weather updates...bit bumpy up here...currently halfway between guadaloupe to barbados via martinique and st lucia...here is my postcard


c'mon in, the waters lovely :cool::cool: :D
Click to expand...
They look like cirrus clouds which usually indicate instability in the air. Bet the turbulence is fun in the old girl!
 
Excellent, being watching this for a while now. Trouble is do I get this or Active Sky X? On another note, I bought an instruction book today 'Flight Simulator X for Real World Pilots' - over 700 pages and it seems to be very well written.
At the very least it's better than reading pages of help files on screen!
 
silversurfer said:
Try fraps for recording and showing fps and try rmclock to get a graph of previous as well as present cpu usage across cores
Click to expand...

Fraps records pretty much the same as the FSX FPS counter. With the performance bars in Task Manager, we can see both cores going full pelt!

cpuph0.jpg


So, I am not sure what to make of it. I've been playing FS for years now, so know what sub 20 FPS feels like - it's jerky. And I'm getting almost smooth performance on 12-14 FPS with both cores working hard.

I've done some surfing on this subject and here is the nearest I get to an answer (a similar thread on the AVSIM forums by a well respected FS 3rd party developer):

... frame rates alone aren't the only measure of what's going on. Since the threads that are spawned off to core #2 when running as ACES intended is exclusively dedicated to texture fetching, compositing and blitting, none of those operations are going to get "reported" to the frame rate counter...

Don't get so focused on one thing that you become a "frame rate junkie..."

There's a TON of stuff that FSX does in the background that must be done before a single frame gets drawn. The more "processor power" you give to the rendering process (aka: frame rate), the less you give to the "pre-rendering processing" that must be done.

FS is a delicate balancing act, and that is precisely why "tweaking" must be done. No two systems are identical, so there's no "one size fits all" combination of settings that can be applied across the board.

The goal is to find the "sweet spot" on your system that gives just enough time to the rendering process while allowing the compositing process to remain efficient.

Bill Leaming
Gauge Programming - 3d Modeling
Eaglesoft Development Group
Pentium 4 @ 3.0GHz 800MHz FSB/ 2.75GB "Ultra" 800MHz DDR/ ATI X700 Pro PCIe 256MB
NOTE: Unless explicitly stated in the post, everything written by my hand is MY opinion. I do NOT speak for any company, real or imagined...
Click to expand...

This would seem to be the answer...
 
i'm the same but for some reason the permafix didn't work for me in the config. Where in the config do you put it at the start or end?

it works when i set it manually before loading fsx.

I also have around 15-18 fps and it looks great although i'm still tweaking to get best performance/eye candy ratio. I've seen people flying over new york and it has all the skyscrapers but i can't do that even thougn i have a 6300 C2D and 7600GT card.

Some pics after i added in BA at heathrow from world-of-ai.com

[img=http://img33.picoodle.com/img/img33/9/9/30/t_20079242334m_a40a4e5.png]
 
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Got myself a new 2407 monitor so now have a 2 monitor set up. Running this under Vista 64.

But when I run FSX, I get flickering screens and can't play FSX. I knew there was a probelm for this so went to get the patch, tried to download it and on running the patch tells me it's not applicable to my system, has anyone else got this problem? and If so is there a fix?

FSX runs superb on the 2407 on it's own, but would like to have the other monitor running as well.

Thanks

Taff
 
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