The 'Official' Screenshot & Tips thread 4 FSX enthusiasts & flight simmers.

[Soya]

Half Price Sale at http://www.earthsimulations.com/index.html

IMO all the GenX & matching Treescapes are worth getting.

Also, enjoy my latest video for a blast to the past. (best viewed at 1080p)

 

[Soya]

Just got the treescapes and installed and now am getting fatal errors and cant load FSX.

Will a repair work or am i looking at a nicelong time shuffling discs and doing a fresh install (FSX, Accelleration, REX, Ultimate Terrain, Genx for 5 volumes, treescapes, 737, 767, ATR.....yadda yadda yadda......

Hope you got it sorted, the ES forums should be helpful. I do know from experience, and I believe it printed in red letters in the treescape documentary, that if you are using any ORBX scenery, MAKE SURE you set the region to default before applying any ES scenery, treescape or otherwise. If not, the 3d libraries will get seriously buggered up and you will probably need to refer to a backup or reinstall. Same goes for any other UK(Europe scenery) make sure that ORBX is set to default before installing any scenery software.

Beautiful! Tiny nitpick, but Oneworld (Iberia shot) wasn't formed until 1991

You are correct, but I needed 1 more livery for the video and I already used up all the classic ones that were available to me.

Enjoy this random batch of shots showing off the DC-9 with its six normal definition release liveries:

 

[Soya]

Please enjoy another batch of my shots, this time featuring the photoreal scenery of Scotland from Playsims, with various aircraft from my hangar.

(shots unedited apart from resized & JPG'ed, inc REX & ENB):

 

[Soya]

Hey guys,

I do run 2 GTX580's in SLI mode but FSX does not make use of SLI and ignores it. When my FSX was still running (it hasn't run since last October, been getting crashing errors with a bug report in terrain.dll) I managed to run FSX fine while PC was set to SLI mode, it just didn't make use of it (I checked the SLI bars, they didn't move) but had no crashing due to it (at least, not that I know of).

Out of curiosity Shahpor, what kind of crashing are you getting? My FSX been dead since last October, crashes as soon as I try to load a flight (terrain.ddl error) but pretty sure that is not due to the SLI cause I been running with it on for a year+.

On another note, glad to see this thread alive and working out well for people, thanks to many offering friendly advice etc. Keep it up guys and enjoy your flying. As I mentioned above, I sorta fell out with my flying since FSX started crashing on me every time and I tried everything to fix but no avail. Obviously I need a complete fresh reinstall but I thought I would hold back for a while due to 1) personal issues and work IRL 2) wanted to play some other games and also try out Train Simulator 2013, which I am enjoying 3) Waiting to see what happenes with P3D and perhaps upgrade to that this year depending if they are about to release a new version. However, I am coming back to it (put to much money/time and effort to just leave it) hopefully sometime this year, but in the meantime, please enjoy your flying and share the world of flight sim with others in this thread.

Happy Flying...

Soya.

PS One of the reasons for my quality of the screen shots is that I ran FSX in 2560x1600, so by the time you carefully resize your screen captures to @1024, you get tremendous detail left over from the large screen size. Like these past shots:

 

[Soya]

Happy Easter all.. Don't forget to check around the online flight sim shops for special Easter discounts, I saw a sale at both Aerosoft and Just Flight.

If you see any others, feel free to list them for others to see.

 

[Soya]

Welcome to the FSX world/thread Jamdale, you should be in good hands here, plenty of info in this thread with tons of useful links and also lots of experienced and helpful people here.

Like Ghutchison said, it will take some time and lots of patience, but if you have that, flight simming can be a real joy and a great time consumer.

I would also probably recommend reading the info in this thread not from the start but from the end and work you way back, as there is probably more up to date information/links in more recent posts. That way, if you are taking notes, you won't need to erase some old notes for new ones. Also, you can skip past most posts that just have screen shots in them, that will be @30-35% of this entire thread, which will save time.

Have fun and good luck.

 

[Soya]

Hi folks,

I trust everyone is well as I return with my first screen shot post in over 6 months, life sure does fly-by (pun intended) when you are busy. But I finally had some time to get my FSX up and running again and will hopefully be posting a bit more regular. For now, enjoy this three star return with Captain Sim's new offering of the L-1011 Tristar, which I have been thoroughly admiring and enjoying for the past few days, as you can see in the shots:

(unedited apart from resized & JPG)

 

[Soya]

Thanks guys and some great looking views/shots above too.

Just ordered myself a treat....

...Dell U3014 on its way

You are in for a real treat! Running FSX at 2560x1600 is just flight simming on a whole new level of detail and visual beauty. Looking at your sig, your hardware should be able to run it pretty well at that res, you will of course lose some FPS due to the higher res but a worthwhile trade off.

 

[Soya]

Hello folks,

Catching up on some of my screen shots, enjoy this various mix:

 

[Soya]

Nice screens all but that reminds me,

From my experience with screen shots, if you are taking shots involving photoreal ground scenery, make sure you match the season & time of day of your flying with what the scenery shows you. In other words, most scenery is imagery taken during summer time and check the shadow line on the buildings/structure, most of the time it will be an afternoon sun setting. You will find you get much more realistic shots if you match the sun position with what the scenery is showing, otherwise it will look a bit unnatural and odd.

 

[Soya]

Hey guys,

I have been trying to find out if the new AMD HD7990 card is any good with FSX. From what I have read, the specs on the card outshine even the Nvidia Titan, esp in memory bandwidth and shaders. From reading its specs, my guess is that it should be awesome for FSX. But cannot find info yet on how this card performs on FSX, if anyone finds any info or a link, please share.

Regards

 

[Soya]

Yes CPU is still of major importance in FSX but the GPU is still responsible for handling textures/shaders etc. Considering most new aircraft/scenery uses much higher detailed textures then before, I am pretty sure that is handled through the GPU. The more VRAM, faster memory bandwidth, higher shader handling etc, should afaik handle things like blurries (which are much more common with higher scenery textures and flying at higher speeds), dealing with texture popping and the all important cloud/vapor handling (which is why in the past NVIDIA cards where always better then AMD cards due to more shader units being on their GPU's thus cloud handling was smoother whereas AMD always tended to suffer from slight micro stutters when flying with heavy cloud cover).

Here is a comparison between the two cards http://gpuboss.com/gpus/Radeon-HD-7990-vs-GeForce-GTX-TITAN-specs but like I said, I just wanted to find any info if anyone had actually used that card in FSX as it may not be any good at all for FSX. Also, I didn't know NVIDIA was bringing out TITAN 2.0 soon, I'd be interested to see if that can handle FSX better at all. Again, CPU is still the major bottleneck but I am talking in terms of the higher resolution of textures that FSX has to deal with nowadays, so it be good to find out what the best CPU/GPU is with these new cards coming out. It might still be a case of sticking with a low/middle end GPU and getting the fastest clockable CPU you can get. My biggest gripe with FSX atm is indeed texturing, both blurries (which really annoy the hell out of me) and texture popping, be great if a better GPU could solve that (if it is indeed the GPU that is responsible for that).

Lets keep our ears to the ground over the next few weeks/months on the new GPUs and see what we can find out about them.

 

[Soya]

Was sifting through some screen shots and I was thinking of a song, "Leaving on a Jet plane" was written by John Denver in 1966 and here are some of the lyrics and pictures to go with it, enjoy:

All my bags are packed I'm ready to go


I'm standin' here outside your door


I hate to wake you up to say goodbye


But the dawn is breakin' it's early morn


The taxi's waitin' he's blowin' his horn


Already I'm so lonesome I could die


So kiss me and smile for me


Tell me that you'll wait for me


Hold me like you'll never let me go


Cause I'm leavin' on a jet plane


Don't know when I'll be back again


Oh baby, I hate to go

 

[Soya]

Smashing shots Soya,

Are you using ENB or FXAA tool for your visuals??

Great song and fantastic photos.

I do need to look into the FXAA tool.

Thanks guys, I used ENB for most of those shots, mostly default setting some with minor changes. The biggest variation, which you may already have spotted, is various sky themes via REX, having different skies (various blues and intensity) can make a big difference in the way ENB handles things, even without ENB, the result can be great if you just catch the right angle & lighting.

 

[Soya]

Hi folks,

Normally I tend to post non edited screen shots but I always end up with some shots I like but don't feel they are post worthy. So here is my attempts at a bit of editing on some of those shots, enjoy:

 

[Soya]

Hello fellow simmers,

Enjoy my latest selection of pick and mix random unedited shots from some of my FSX flight and experiences:

 

[Soya]

Took them long enough to publish that review, I remember doing the screen shot work for it well over 2 years ago. In fact, I completely forgot about it, better late then never I guess .

 

[Soya]

Cheers guys I'll have a think. TBH, I'm not really up for adding schedules manually, the package is tempting.

Almost ready to get flying! All previous purchases installed, sorted performance issues by unticking 'Light Bloom' - seems like zero difference visually but it's incredibly smooth everywhere at locked 30fps now Hours and hours of fiddling with tweaks etc and I forget to untick a box...

Yup, the FSX Bloom is like having a 800lbs gorilla thrashing inside your CPU while you are trying to maintain smooth flight. In DX9 it creates a bloom on all reflecting surfaces (aircraft, buildings and any shiny lights of which there are lots esp near airports), it looks nice to capture screen shots but while flying, it not really necessary and unless you run a NASA build room sided PC, you are unlikely to get smooth frames. However, it must be noted, after my own experiences, that having FSX bloom on during DX10 mode will produce a very marginal drop in FPS and the bloom in DX10 is pretty nice especially on well modeled aircraft with high quality liveries (like most of McPhats & Captain Sims works). But in general DX9 flying, keep that tick off.

 

[Soya]

Some great shots in the past few pages, I'm still taking a break from flight simming at the moment (doing some train simming and other games whenever I get time on the PC atm). But I do look forward to coming back as there will be plenty of new things to try out.

Also, this -> http://oculusriftreview.com/ will definitely get me back to simming. Check out the 2nd article on War and Thunder. Lets hope either FSX or P3D will add native support for this, especially when they bring out the 1080p version and higher/better screen resolutions in the future. That is the proper way to fly sim!

Enjoy your flying boys.

 

[Soya]

Greetings folks,

Although not strictly flight sim,http://youtu.be/ACkmg3Y64_s?t=1m30s I did think the attention to detail and the love that went into making this miniature airport is simply breathtaking. The kind of detail I would love to see in flight sim in the near(ish) future.