How do you keep FSX interesting?

Hi, I live in the UK too, what are your favourite UK addons?

At the moment all I've got is southern england photoscenery.

Night Environment - British Isles is definitely a must-have for night flying! I made a video showcasing it if you want to check it out.

 

I personally use FSEarthTiles to make my own VFR Scenery. It's free and does an amazing job at that. Shep's Shed then also has some free Autogen you can put on top of it to make the UK look as realistic as possible.

 

UK2000 airports definitely, World of AI does me fine and look for a good ENB Series, that just makes everything look better. 🙂

 

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Check out my YouTube Channel for more Simulator and Gaming content!

 

https://www.youtube.com/c/drawyahgames?sub_confirmation=1

Well, I am still interested in FSX (and P3D v2.5) becuz I had lots of addons over my 20+ years and recently computer broke and nothing would load...so had my computers fixed okay? I didn't and haven't loaded anything back up but the basic sims, plus UTX, ASCA .\,ASky Next and my PMDG 777s. I am having a blast flying the planes because I have great skies now...after I realized after all these years that I can't see anything anyways at 35000 feet LOL, BUT now I have beautiful skies, clouds, storms and sunsets when landing the beautiful Triple 777...so I'm Interested,,,Yessir!

You wake up after a night of debauchery with your rich friends to find that they have transported you and your plane in a C-17 overnight to somewhere else on the planet and left you. You sorta remember a girl named 'Ginger', lots of tequila and something about a bet that a really good pilot should be able to find his way home from anywhere on the planet with minimal equipment (i.e. no GPS). There's some fat bum needing a shave kicking you in the ribs and asking for hangar fees while some little peon without any shoes in a dirty 49er's jersey pumps gas out of some questionable looking drums into your high octane, 'clean', tank. As soon as you pay them they disappear without providing the least bit of information.

 

You have a huge database of Navaids, some leftover tequila, a chicken sandwich, a jug of water and plenty of maps but your GPS is out, you can't raise anyone on the radio and none of the airports where you land have any identifying marks of any sort. There aren't even any people. Or planes. Or cars. Or another chicken sandwich.

 

(In your best Rod Serling voice and rhythm) In a few minutes Pilot A will have to figure out what part of the world he's in and try to get home to Wife A. There won't be any of the usual signposts to suggest a way. There won't be any friendly policeman or hopped up ATC controllers either. Pilot A will be on his own and- he may find his way home, eventually- after a slight detour- through- the Twilight Zone.

 

Meanwhile, light up a Pall Mall.

 

 

I've been putting my plane into a random airport without knowing where I am and without GPS, ATC or anything else except the sun and the stars and then trying to figure out what part of the world I'm in and how I can get back to a part of the world I know. Sort of Bear Grylls meets FSX.

 

You have to put your hand in front of the Airport Choose menu, run the slider up and down and pick one at random. With the thousands of airports a small drag of the mouse goes through hundreds. Then set the time to dawn.

 

I have no add-ons installed to enhance the bleak FSX scenery which is partly why this is so hard. I'm about to invest in the Ultimate Terrain and GEX land class software. Maybe that will make this easier. (Update- they didn't.)

 

Set the time to dawn or just before to look at the stars. Turn off Airport and Navaid displays on the Multi Function Display or HUD.

 

You can estimate Latitude from the sun and the stars (if you have the constellations file, 44constellations_fsx.zip, loaded).

 

You can estimate most common wind directions from runway alignments.

 

Following rivers and coastlines can lead to major cities. The problem is that many cities don't have their identifying landmarks- and there are very few signs.

 

Mountain ranges, rivers, lakes oceans, geology, geography and overall terrain can give you an idea of the region.

 

Note your altitude when on the ground.

 

You can estimate magnetic declination from the North Star.

 

Map-making skills would be incredibly useful here.

 

See how long you can stand it before looking at the map. It can take hours even in the F-111 at Mach 2. I thought I was flying over Canadia and when I hit the sea of Azov I thought I was over Hudson Bay.

 

This will drive you crazy. If you fly with no traffic it's eerie with nothing in the sky or on the ground. Plus not knowing where you are really makes it like being in the Twilight Zone. Terror at 20,000 Feet- Yea!

 

I wrote this up a few years ago and don't know if I ever posted it. The story is probably inspired by Gera Godoy Canova, the most prolific and creative person in our community. And I thought I was the Wildman.

 

Happy simming,

 

Phil the Wildman

Sitting on a very long runway in a random airport in snow and mountains with the sun in the south in the Sikorsky JRS-1- I think this is going to be a long flight.

The correct pronunciation is “Pell-Mell”.

Hey PC Wildman. That may be the best FSX post I've ever read!!!! What a killer concept!! Even though all of my RW flying was before GPS, Sat Nav. etc., even in combat I was never quite that far out of knowing where I was!!

 

I love it!! It reminds me of an old typed word only pc game Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy!:cool::cool::cool::cool:

Thanks Rupert,

 

You scared me at first. I know you are a Senior member and I was wondering how far we can go on this forum. I don't mean to promote cigarettes and alcohol and I thought you guys were going to censor me.

 

I used to play that game. It was one of the first adventure games before we had graphics. I always got stuck because, not having read the book, I didn't know to put the fish in my ear. You have to watch the movie, and now I have to read the book.

 

Thanks,

 

Phil

Index update of this thread showing members main posts.

(Note the page numbers are with the Default forum setting which gives 10 posts per page)

p1- Swampy puddles (also pp33/34)

p2- Photoreal cross-country.

Interesting Airfields and Flights.

Bell X-1.

p3- Glider assault.

p4- Thermals (also p5 and p8).

Map printout and bad weather flying.

p5- Earhart's last flight.

Livery art.

Hang glider.

Thermals (also p4 and 8).

p6- Glider tow.

Carrier (also on p7,18 and 35).

Multiplayer.

p7- Carrier (also p6, 18 and 35).

p8- Dole air race.

Thermals (also p3 and p5).

p14- Terrain mods.

p15- Aspen approach in snow.

p16- Default NY.

p17- Boeing 737.

p18- Helipads.

Iris Texan with FTX and XOPI.

Carrier (also p6,7 and 35).

p19- Turbo Duke avionics.

p20- Intercepting AI aircraft (also p22).

p22- Following roads.

p25- Photothread link.

Flight 19 final flight route.

p26- Leadville high-altitude takeoffs.

p27- Parachute jumper.

Jurassic flight.

p28- Archaeology.

Yosemite.

p29- Landing into Eagle, Colorado.

p30- Trike ultralight.

p31/32- Chopper roofpad landing.

Hiller H-23 heli writeup.

p33- Overheated engine blows (also p42)

Sextant navigation.

Swampy puddles (also pp1/34).

p34- Swampy puddles (also p1/p33).

Kingsford Smith trans-Pacific flight.

STOL operations.

p35- Eyepoints and seat raise.

Carrier (also p6,7 and 18).

Dials HUD-style.

DME flying.

p37- Zoom and Viewpoint examples

p42- Hot stuff, engine fires (also p33)

p46- Pacific atoll navigation

MAIW rules. Try to get that working in FSX. It's a challenge and worth it.

Something I found really interesting is that I use the autopilot all the time, even on tiny aircraft. The problem with that is that it does get boring. Two days ago, I tried doing a tiny flight (Gatwick (EGKK) to Redhill (EGKR)), about five miles without the autopilot at all, and found that I got really tired very quickly - it is much more stressful! Though that is probably due to my inexperience and lack of skill, so...

I, personally, hardly ever use the autopilot. I figure that everything has a failure at some time or another, and if I can't fly the plane, then I could "die". Even in the sim, I'd rather avoid that. If I rely too much on the autopilot, in my mind, it WILL fail, and at the worst possible moment. Besides, an autopilot can't do aerobatics :)

So, the less I use an optional system, and to me, the AP is optional, it can't fail me just when I need it most. Hydraulics will fail, the AP will fail, radios will fail, Nav systems, EVERYthing in the plane will fail. Heck, I bet my friggen flashlight would fail when I've lost all power to the lighting systems some time.

Anyway, the better I can operate the aircraft and all it's goodies, the better I can react when a failure occurs. So, I hardly ever use the autopilot :D And I can do aerobatics a lot better than any autopilot ever could!

Just me, though. Everyone is different.

Pat☺

Being primarily an old chopper guy in my RW life, low and slow is primarily how I enjoy simming as well. Last Fall we spent time in and around Vancouver and Victoria, BC. With a view out our hotel window of all the water landings at the Coal Harbor Seaplane Port, I decided to do some fixed wing seaplane work. I went online to Kenmore Air and downloaded their Air Route Maps, complete with routes as well as the Route's distance and est. time.

 

Since I already had the relevant ORBX scenery for that area, I'm now flying the Kenmore Air routes in the default Kenmore float plane.

 

Wonderful Scenery!!:cool::cool:

Hi there, to make FSX interesting i think of the huge number of airports that are included in FSX and take off from them. Take off from Kathmandu and fly to Everest. I take off from local airports near my house in Wales and fly the mountains. There is a whole world inside FSX that i can fly inside from all the places i've been to, to all the places i've never been to. I never get bored finding something to do in FSX.

Hi there, to make FSX interesting i think of the huge number of airports that are included in FSX and take off from them. Take off from Kathmandu and fly to Everest. I take off from local airports near my house in Wales and fly the mountains. There is a whole world inside FSX that i can fly inside from all the places i've been to, to all the places i've never been to. I never get bored finding something to do in FSX.

 

I agree! We're getting a lot of mileage for such a small investment!!;) If you like different flight challenges, go to the awards page and fly in and out of the highest, lowest, shortest, etc. airports. I first tried to do all of them using the same plane and realism set to realistic!!:eek::eek: I was quickly reminded of the old country axiom, "Horses for Courses."

I havent seen it mentioned in this thread yet, mind you I started skipping pages after page 20. But I enjoy TacPack immensely. But I am pretty competitive so I like playing against other people.

 

Before TacPack came out I had about 15 aircraft and I did what I could to master them. Realworld and sim limitations aside.

My way of keeping FSX interesting is attempting to find ways to make it playable. Maybe someday...

I bought an ORBX region (PFJ). I have spent lots of time flying around there. The guys at RTMM make it a little more interesting, but I haven't run out of things to do, and won't for a long time. My favorite part about ORBX regions is that I can take off from any random airport and land at a nearby airport, with both airports having believable objects placed around them, and are fairly close to real life.

 

You can also use the Freeware Scenery Map. Find an are in FSX that you think had believable land class and then pick two airports from the map. Look at the ICAO's and enter them into Online Flight Planner. Once you enter the airport codes, the distance (in nautical miles) will appear in the upper right corner. You can guess about how long the flight is going to be from the distance between the two airports.

New Planes, New Scenery, different VA's. Trying to catch open ATC in Vatsim.

I think doing multiplayer keeps things very interesting. I'm more of a solo person myself but I like to enjoy roaming around some some fellow pilots once and a while.

I think doing multiplayer keeps things very interesting. I'm more of a solo person myself but I like to enjoy roaming around some some fellow pilots once and a while.

 

I've never tried it, but I think air racing against other people would be fun...:)

FSX Does not accurately simulate carrier landings? All aircraft landing on a aircraft carrier deck will immediately go to full throttle when it hits the deck. There should be no apply brakes - the wire will stop the plane on its own.

 

upon landing on a deck you go full throttle in case you miss the line. is that what you meant?

I picked up FSX late last year, after a long hiatus from MS FS. I've always been into flightsims in general, although I focused on more combat-related sims. The golden standard in that regard, for me, was always Falcon 4.0 with its various community-made add-ons, like OpenFalcon and now Falcon BMS 4.33. I work in the armed forces and have a couple of real-life F-16 pilot friends, both confirming BMS 4.xx being VERY close to the real thing, so I was a happy camper.

I did have a couple of stints with both FS9 and FS2004, but for some reason it never did hook me completely.

 

Until last year, when I got FSX-SE and started spending some time with it. Although I'm currently limited to an Asus RoG gaming laptop, I do manage to run FSX fairly well. I get the odd OOM crashes at times, and I'm still tweaking settings and config from time to time.

Apart from that, I've invested in both freeware and payware scenery and aircraft, got pretty much all of the larger ORBX packages installed, as well as a healthy amount of different aircraft to fly.

 

So far there's very little with FSX that is not interesting. I love spending time flying around, I do it almost every day. I still have a load of bluray movies and tv-series that I've bought, that have been put on the backburner since I'm spending my evenings and weekends flying instead, and that is practically unheard of in my case.

 

What I tend to find interesting is sightseeing, flying around and enjoying the scenery. Often enough places I've been over the last 10 years, as well as places that I've always wanted to visit, but haven't gotten around to yet. Just last weekend I flew a Bell 212 down through Grand Canyon, as well as Yosemite and Monument Valley. Awesome trips really. But I also do local stuff from Norway, like reliving the summer trips to northern Norway that me and my girlfriend have done over the last 3 years. Lots of nice scenery, with mountains starting down in the ocean and going straight up.

Only limit for now is that my laptop, while still fairly powerful, grinds to a slideshow around major cities, especially in the USA. Sometimes other places too, often I need to pause the game to let all the nicer textures load, before I fly a bit more again. Not perfect, and a non-starter in the long run, but for now I make do. A big cruncher of a desktop will find its way into my apartment withing the close foreseeable future...

 

Also, like probably everybody else, it's an easy fix to get a new airplane to fly, and keep things interesting that way. At this point I have more planes than I've got time to focus on, so I won't get bored anytime soon, if ever.

I have this weird fetish for Cold War bombers/newer bombers, it was actually the main reason for getting FSX in the first place; I wanted to fly the B-1B Lancer, and got the Virtavia B-1B at the same time as I installed FSX. Been spending a fair amount of time with that. Once the bug bit, I got many of the other cold war bombers as well. The Virtavia F-111 (I go for the FB-111 version almost exclusively), Captain Sims B-52 Driver, IRIS Avro Vulcan, the Area51 B-2A and just yesterday the Virtavia B-47.

So far I'm enjoying the B-1B and the F-111 the most, although the B-52 is awesome.

 

Just as with the scenery, and flying in areas that I have visited, I tend to do the same with many aircraft. With the exception of my bombers, I often get aircraft that I have traveled with at some point. The PDMG Boeing 737-800/900 is one of my latest, and I'll probably be spending a lot of time with that. Being a military guy, it's a safe bet I'll be flying the P-8 version... :rolleyes:

 

I've flown with a lot of different military aircraft, and most of these currently sits in my virtual hangar. Captain Sims C-130, had quite a few trips with that over the years. Jumped from one back in my airborne days, flew up north on a NATO exercise in 2012, with the exact same aircraft that ended up crashing in the Kebnekaise mountain range in Sweden just a few days later.

Flew with the C-17 in Afghanistan, so I got the Virtavia C-17 yesterday.

 

And I've enjoyed more than the usual amount of helicopter flights for a ground pounder, so I am more than just a latent rotorhead :)

Our main transport helicopter here is the Bell 412 SP; the closest I got to that was Cerasims Bell 412 EP. Very nice model. Since I enjoy the good old Huey blade-slap so much, I immediately ended up getting the Cerasim 212 as well, and finally the Cerasim Bell 222. I love them all. Over the last 2 weeks, they're probably the aircraft I've spent the most time with.

Having flown with the UH-60 Blackhawk as well, I got Cerasims version of that. Once again, a very nice model. I also loved riding along with the Chinook (jumped from that one as well, over Kosovo), so I've got both Virtavia and Milviz CH-47.

The only helicopter that I have ridden, once, on a NATO exercise in 1999, and haven't actually got yet, is the CH-46 (sorry Rupert....). Will probably end up getting that as well...

I was taking part in an exercise with our own troops in the UK just a couple of weeks ago, and we had brought 2 Bell 412s over, ferrying them across in a C-17. Just to show how much I enjoy being around helicopters, whenever they started up, you'd find me standing next to the groundcrew, just feeling the noise, the blade slap and the sweet whiff of jetfuel. Loved every second of it :o

 

At the end of the day, I gotta echo Rupert here....I like it low and slow, and sometimes low and fast, with my bombers. But there's just so much that I can do with this simulator, I don't think I'll ever run out of options, or become bored. Just yesterday, with my brand new Captain Sim C-130, I just decided to go low and reasonably fast. Was surprisingly enjoyable!

After finding Jan is alive and well. Though apparently his PC isn't waterproof.:rolleyes: I just started a new adventure.

 

I am a huge fan of ORBX and have several of their buy-ware products. However I recently downloaded all their freeware airports I could find. Now I'm low and slowing through many of them. Of course that means I do have to often switch planes to suit conditions at that specific airport.

 

See that's yet another adventure. I get to learn to fly the new plane as well!! ;)

 

ADAM!! Please tell the folks at ORBX to keep the scenery coming!!

 

Michael

Something I found really interesting is that I use the autopilot all the time, even on tiny aircraft. The problem with that is that it does get boring. Two days ago, I tried doing a tiny flight (Gatwick (EGKK) to Redhill (EGKR)), about five miles without the autopilot at all, and found that I got really tired very quickly - it is much more stressful! Though that is probably due to my inexperience and lack of skill, so...

 

Hey Bert, funny you'd say that!!

 

I live near the KSDF UPS World Hub as well as the DHL KCVG hub and the soon to be Amazon KCVG hub. So I happen to know several long time commercial pilots who fly for those carriers. What do talk about regretting in their career? To quote you, "I tried doing a tiny flight (Gatwick (EGKK) to Redhill (EGKR)), about five miles without the autopilot at all, and found that I got really tired very quickly - it is much more stressful!" .

 

Who buys or rents small Cessnas, etc. today? In my area it's often professional pilots who like to practice and recall their stick and rudder skills during their off time. There's even a "fly-in community" near here where pilots commute to and from work in small GA aircraft for that very reason.

 

Sadly, as Cpt. Sullenburger and others often point out. Many if not most professional pilots don't get to "fly" while on the job. Manually flying their aircraft is apparently too time and space wasteful to suit their employers and/or the FAA!:o:o

Hi All! On the subject of actually flying an aircraft. I spoke with a long time friend who recently retired from flying big cargo jets in and out of Iraq and many other trouble spots throughout the world for DHL. He and his wife were both PICS for DHL for many years.

 

I asked Jens how often in his multi-year career with DHL that he actually got to hand fly a DHL plane?

 

He replied only once other than in a simulator, when his autopilot didn't properly engage! And no, I can't even remember where in the world it was he said that happened.

 

My next question was. How did you manage to safely fly and land your plane that day without autopilot? His reply. I flew a Mooney to and from KCVG whenever I went on or off duty.

 

Nuff Said!!!:mad::mad::mad:

 

Michael

I used to use FSPassengers until it started giving me some bugs when I installed some more addons (like SP1&SP2, and others).

So right now I just fly for a VA, use vatsim, and chat with other pilots from other VAs who are flying at the same time as me (using the SmartCARs live flight tracking software for FSX/P3D/etc)

Here's an idea. Get these three sceneries.

 

https://flyawaysimulation.com/downloads/files/9068/fsx-scenery-and-landclass-for-molokai/

 

https://flyawaysimulation.com/downloads/files/8821/fsx-scenery-and-landclass-for-maui/

 

https://flyawaysimulation.com/downloads/files/8455/fsx-landclass-scenery-for-lanai-and-kahoolawe/

 

Grab the 'ol 172 (Or whatever GA plane you like), throw out the GPS and navigate between the islands by ded reckoning and memory.

 

 

Those three sceneries cover this area, so its not a huge area to get lost in. It's quite a departure for not being able to fly without the autoplilot.