FSX Add on

[tzetsin]

If your a flight sim fan, and you want to breathe some new life into the ol' girl, FSGENISIS has a sale on that gives you (as far as i can tell) every terrain mesh add on they have for 43 bucks canadian. I took the plunge and bought it, downloaded it overnight (10.5 gigs) and i am truly amazed with how much more it adds to my simming experience.

Any true MFS fan will understand when i say that there are many many add ons for flight sim that just arnt worth the money they expect you to pay, but yet, there are some who's value are top notch, Id definatly say that this is one of them. Cant beat the price for what your getting for sure!!

......................default.. ..fsgenesis
Mexico resolution 612m.. ..38m
Canada resolution. 76m.. ..19m
US Mainland........ 38m.. ..10m
US Alaska............38m.. ..38m
US Hawaii............38m.. ..10m
Europe................76m.. ..76m
Alps....................76m.. ..19m
Japan.................76m.. ..76m
rest of world......612m.. ..76m

As you can see the "rest of the world", and the united states get the biggest boost to the resolutions, but canada's resolution is pretty damn good too.

I took some screenshots in case you were wondering what kind of difference it would make for your sim ( NON simmers wont know what default looks like, and i didnt take before an after shots, so you can just enjoy some nice FSX shots, meby they'll woo you into joining the simmers world ;) )

Here is a shot over Banff, of the canadian rockies, with terrain mesh resolution of 19m




This shot is just outside of Valemont BC





This shot is in south america, at Rio De Janeiro





These next few shots are in the Alps near Sion, Switzerland








And who can resist flying through the Grand Canyon when it looks like this??

[3.0charlie]

It's been a while since I fired up FS... FS Genesis offers probably the best mesh out there for the price. I have that complete package too. I used to sim a lot using FS9 with the Wilco, Runway12, ActiveSky and PMDG addons, amongst others... but was it ever a struggle for my rig back then! How is it running FSX with the Quad?

Also, why are you limiting your FPS to 10?

Here are some of my s/s, when I was into heavy simming and editing...

LH 744 tail.


LH 744 in SYD.


T/O, LH 744 - shot a la Sam Chui.

[tzetsin]

Are those shots with fs9? they're pretty nice. the runway textures are great!

when was the last time you ran FSX? the sim had a big problem when it was first introduced. Pre sp1 would only grant you 3-4 fps at the runway no matter what kind of rig you had. On my laptop with a 1.6ghz c2d 2 gigs of ram and a nvidia mobile 7600 gives me about 20 fps consistantly on medium settings (a little lower at the runway, or very large cities with alot of autogen enabled and of course bloom and AA turned off) The quad, even at stock speeds far surpasses the rest of the system as a bottleneck, i've noticed its mainly the hard drives on my system (mind that i'm very overclocked @ 3.8 with my ram giving me almost 9000 MB/s and fsx really isnt all that "graphically" intensive anyway) that were giving me a slow down. After installing a 6x raid 0 array though its smooth as silk almost 100 % of the time at 100% max settings (mind that before the raid array it was very smooth, even at max settings as long as you didnt try flying at 500 feet through the middle of tokyo at 800 knots in the F18)

I've got the fps locked at 10 fps in those shots because of the way tileproxy works (if you dont know what tileproxy is, its a program (( for free :D though in beta)) that downloads and loads into fsx, satelite maps from map servers such as Googe Earth and 3 others really enhancing the land class textures on fsx and fs9) At 10 fps tileproxy loads 2900 tiles/s (typical quad computer is 1200 but the raid array really helps here) where as at unlimited fps it loads about 40 tiles/s lol huge difference. Actually if fsx is running a constant 10 fps its definatly playable anyway (if your running a nvidia card though you'll want to "clamp" the "texture filtering - negative LOD bias" or anything other than unlimited will kill your fps for some reason)

Quad vs Dual? Not really sure... the way fsx works the cores is(from my understanding), core 0 does all the work, while the rest of the cores pre process the terrain. Youd think the quad would kick butt here.. BUT... the other cores have to send the info back to core 0 anyway and alot of the time that the other cores are running at 100% is time spent in loop waiting for core 0 to get back to them anyway. so a fast dual core would probly perform just as well as a quad.

Another add on that really looks like the next best thing is Flight Environment Xtreem, its a weather engine/cloud textures/water textures/runway textures/lights/(something else to do with the waters waves or something i didnt understand) program. Its going to be out "soon" (you know how that goes) but theres dozens of screen shots and previews here --Dawn of a NEW Era-- - Flight Sim World AND (if your still enjoying fs9 instead) its also available for fs9.

[Shadowmeph]

I tried playing one of these with just keyboard and mouse but it was pretty hard to do I kept crashing lol
what type of gaming gear would you recommend to play with FS? Like joysticks exc.

[tzetsin]

to be absolutely honest, though i do have a very nice x52 saitek joystick and throttle, i use the keyboard and mouse 90% of the time. Flight sim 9 is next to impossible to use keyboard and mouse, but flight sim X is really quite easy

[tzetsin]

heres some shots of abbotsford with tileproxy and defaultish textures (some add ons here that i cant stop without alot of work ie. roads, rivers and terrain mesh)






Vancouver is behind the plane here

[3.0charlie]

Those default vs. enhanced shots are beautiful. I went crazy that way too with texture mapping a while back... but was it ever hard on the CPU and GFX. Back then I was an alpha tester for MS and my rig (P4 3.2 - X800XT PE) couldn't handle it at all. I went back to FS9 and never looked back. I just may again, once I find the time to do so.

My shots were taken for a s/s comp, when all the painters were going crazy for Photorealistic Tails. The runway came from a prog called Airport Environment 7.0 (if I recall well) that was heavily modified for s/s comps - what you don't see on the s/s is the FPS: I would have been very lucky to hit 2 FPS...

[sswilson]

Those shots are absolutely amazing!!!

I gave up on flight sims once it got to the point that you needed a textbook size manual to run them, but it's great to see what kind of GFX folks are getting out of their high(er) end rigs.

[3.0charlie]

Text-book size manual? You mean dictionary size. I remember reading the 300+ pages of the PSS (Phoenix Simulation Software) Concorde manual, with no flightplan example... I still have it! I'll never let this one go. The level of realism was unsurpassed back then - it even had a fully functionnal INS.

[tzetsin]

ah, well you could call me a flight sim tourist lol, i dont ever "fly" the plane, i just stick it on the outside view, use the keyboard an mouse... i've got hundreads of hours on my flight sim and i still dont know how to land and take off properly. with fsx (or 9) a good cloud and terrain program and tileproxy you can pretty much fly where ever you want and enjoy it like someone else is flying for you an you just look out the window. and your actually looking at the terrain as it is in real life. Want to fly around new zealand? go ahead, want to go canyon flying in an f18? sure no prob, just turn off crash detection first ;) hawaii? alps? check out mt everest? meby you'll even see the base camp there. Flight sim isnt all about the plane anymore as the screen shots should attest. welcome to the days of the virtual tourist.