Mike's Musings #1: FS2004 And FSX

By Mike McCarthy (3 December 2006)

My Celtic writing genes have been busy: There are twelve more finished articles in the queue behind this one, and I have several others in various stages of completion. (Nels will space them out as he sees fit.) Some of the articles relate directly to Flight Simulator, as this one does. Others deal with various aspects of aviation in general, many having to do with my being a "Jonah" as a passenger and as a low time private pilot.

With Nels' kind permission, all of my FSC writings will be republished in several months on my upcoming writing web site, TheWritingBlog.com, which is soon to be under construction. (When I get a round tuit...) There you will find not only the FSC pieces but also articles on a wide range of other subjects, with special emphasis on the music business, and on photography.

If anyone would like to pay me to write, that would be terrific. In the meantime, that's enough shameless self-promotion, at least for now ... No, wait a minute ... By Celtic writing genes I mean this: My father wrote about economics, I am a former software reviewer for Computers & Electronics Magazine, and my son is the noted science fiction author Wil McCarthy. Writing is in our blood.

It remains to be seen what will happen when I install my Level-D 767 and DreamFleet 727, both of which have been sitting idle since these add-ons were released. If my home machine can't keep up, that will be fine -- even though its panel is not realistic, I like the default 737 because it is easy on my tired old eyes, and I already know that it performs well for me.

I'm concerned about clobbering my hard-won FS2002 setup, but here's a list of utilities I run with FS2002 that I believe are either FS2004 compatible or that have FS2004 versions. I've not tested them all in the FS2004 environment. If you need information about the FS2002 versions of these utilities, write to me. Here are my favorites ...

Manuel's Airport Chart Viewer -- AIRCHV50.ZIP, for FS2004, by Manuel Ambulo. This is a nifty little utility which will give you a zoomable always-north-up diagram of the airport you're at along with taxiways, gates, runways, etc. The program has too many features to describe here. It draws its information directly from the FS databases. My experience is only with V4.0 on FS2002 so I can't vouch for V5.0.

AFCAD 2.21 -- AFCAD221.ZIP, Lee Swordy's airport CAD masterpiece for designing airports or adding gates to existing ones. I haven't tried this, the FS2004 version. In the FS2002 environment I use AFCAD V1.4 to declare all runways at a given airport to be of the same length. This will cause ATC realistically to pay attention to the wind direction. The airport visuals are not affected by these changes. It's available here.

FSUIPC -- Need I say more? (www.schiratti.com/dowson) No longer freeware but definitely worth the modest price for the registered version. Many of today's add-ons will not run without the registered version.

AutoSave -- A Pete Dowson clever freeware utility program, also available via the Dowson page at the Schiratti site. When using default aircraft, or any aircraft which obey the FS scenario save rules, this program will make a running series of snapshots of your changing situation so that you can roll the simulator back to just before you messed up your approach.

IWillBeBack -- Jose Oliveira's useful little utility for automatically pausing FS on long-haul flights. Freeware, it can be downloaded from JustFlight It requires FSUIPC.

WeatherMaker -- Available at www.weather-maker.com/files/weathermakerfiles.zip. This version of WeatherMaker is a freeware utility which allows you to construct simple dynamic weather scenarios. It is easier to use than the FS custom weather feature while being more flexible than the stock FS2004 weather. It works with both FS2002 and FS2004. A more elaborate payware version is available from the maker at www.calibresoftware.com Both versions require FSUIPC.

Another utility I sometimes run is Ted Wright's venerable Nav 3.1 Beta, available at Ted's site. One possible way to use this masterpiece is to fly with FS2004 but to also have FS2002 installed for use as the Nav 3.1 database. A few FS2004 navaids would be missing, and you would lose the moving map feature, but this approach worked for me, perhaps because I had installed FS2002 before FS2004. A similar FS2002 program, Super_Flight_Planner by Alessandro Antonini, is available at http://www.simtakeoff.com/planners.htm. I haven't tried it.

All in all I now like FS2004 but, for reasons I will explain in a few months, I don't have time to bring my FS2004 installation up to the level of my FS2002 setup, especially with respect to the aircraft fleet I assembled.

At the office I have a 2 GHz machine with 1 GB of main memory and a 256K Nvidia GeForce 6100 graphics card. I thought that, if I pulled the same degrade-the-graphics tricks, FSX would perform adequately. However, in the immortal words of John Belushi, no-o-o-o-o. (But that's one word, isn't it.)

FSX takes forever to load on my office machine. Even having optimized the hard drive FSX scenery database using Ultimate Defrag, it takes me forty seconds just to get to the FSX home screen. From there it takes me another 190 seconds to load a typical saved flight. All of this admittedly was timed from a cold start, but even so ...

Microsoft says that the design point for FSX is the upcoming Windows Vista. I was a beta tester for Vista, and I possess Release Candidate 1, but I had to back it out due to bugs which interfered with my normal office software operations, bugs which I was unable to work around. I'm not going to reinstall Vista RC1 just to see what happens with FSX. (Yes, a beta tester is supposed to persevere, but I simply don't have the time to play with it.)

So ... No 3D. Yes, simple clouds. Autogen density normal. No filtering. Lock to 10 fps. Most other sliders all the way to the right. The result? I like the graphics very much, but the simulator stutters as it tries to keep the scenery cache ahead of the aircraft. Even I, with my very flexible performance standards, find this unacceptably irritating.

Regarding the stuttering, maybe I didn't optimize the drive correctly. Maybe it's my breath. I suppose I could try deinstalling FS2004 and then re-optimizing the hard drive for FSX only, but I don't want to do that either, not while most people are still running FS2004. I will say that I very much like the FSX default 737-800 even though I need to wear glasses to read the MFD. It's a good compromise between fanatical realism and over-simplicity.

Mike McCarthy
xxmikexx@qwest.net

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