Mac6737

Turns out it is! Thank you. (I am pretty sure I tried that before, to no effect, but I could not so testify under oath.)

Does anyone know how to get out of the menu pulled down on the lefthand screen of this CJ4? Since there's NO MANUAL (have I mentioned this before??) I try to learn by doing. I was able to cycle through menu items with the knob, but when I got to the bottom one, and pushed the knob to select, I was stuck. No way out?

Yes, we're talking about the same thing, only my copy has 258 pp. Time to update! Please read my sentence again. Page 57 is the one page devoted to "Showcase Mode," which I used as an example of treatment so cursory as to be useless. While we're at it, please tell me what the single sentence under "Drone Follow and Lock Mode" means. If it's locked, how do you move it? Oh, never mind.

1. Right. I had found those later. Can't imagine why you can't get there through Control Panel, but I couldn't. 2. I bought the SoFly effort right away. IMO, bad deal, as stated in my OP. One page on Showcase mode is less than a "trove."

I don't think so. I have 2 pauses in my sim: 1. I have set the P key (as in FSX) to freeze the plane where it is. But the sound persists (as I said in the OP, no Quiet key!), and time still marches on. 2. ESC brings up the home screen, while the flight is paused in the background. But time still marches on. So I agree with the post that said they are the same thing -- except for the sound. I often use ESC, go to Windows mode, minimize -- and do something else.

Thanks. These tidbits are certainly news to me. As far as I knew (after watching a tutorial on cameras) the only drone mode was what you apparently call "follow mode." I'll experiment some more. But my print-screen key takes a screenshot, as it has since the dawn of time; I didn't know it had another function. Where the heck are the "Nvidia settings," and the option to enable/disable them in-game? Not in my Invidia device on my Control Panel, and surely not in MSFS.

Thanks for the constructive comment. As to this excerpt: 1. Not sure about the "camera system," but I already make screenshots free of clutter: I disable the onscreen flight parameters in Settings. The screenshot in my post, of course, has no clutter. I was just saying it would be nice if I could have the data in tiny letters at top of screen. 2. I don't understand the second sentence. At all. 3. Adjustable? As I indicated, I know about the in-sim tweaks in Accessibility (for the color-blind and perhaps for the cranky) but I didn't find any of the settings helped. Is there some adjustment of which I am unaware? Could be. 4. It's true in real-life driving, too. I just think there is general overexposure in MSFS, and therefore lack of color saturation. That's my position, and I'm stickin' to it.

I’ll probably get flamed for this, but after seven months, I am moved to record one person’s opinion of the good and the bad about MSFS. I do this not to whine, but to receive serious feedback and, I hope, stimulate some highly desirable changes. My basis for comparison is P3D v. 4.5, with a full suite of Orbx scenery, plus Rex SkyForce and TextureDirect. Actually, I was pretty content back in August, before someone gave me MSFS for my birthday. I would have preferred to wait until the bugs were out. I think I was right. But I was stuck with it. THE GOOD: First and foremost, the scenery, the Bitch Goddess that draws me back every night. Cityscapes are particularly impressive, considering how much data must be involved in rendering all those buildings. New York (my hometown) with photogrammetry enabled is a knockout. (I could find the apartment building I grew up in!) Mountains and forests are also splendid. (My favorite: pine forests in snow.) Loads pretty fast, compared to my P3D setup. Not many performance issues. Some CTDs, but this has greatly improved over time. I guess they work on it. Easy weather changes. A great improvement over FSX/P3D, where you had to reload the scenario to change the flight conditions. In MSFS, you can adjust the clouds, time of day, etc., in a heartbeat. Aircraft textures. These were pretty good in P3D, but they are now astonishing. Looking out over the wings, you can see normal unevenness and dimpling in the skin, etc. How the heck do they do that?! Interiors are also improved. VFR Map: Cool! Toggles on and off in a second. In FSX/P3D you had to pause the flight, go to World/Map, etc. THE NOT SO GOOD (in no particular order): The flight parameters display in external view is absurdly large, making screen shots useless. In FSX/P3D, you had SHIFT + Z to give you readouts (including FPS) in small letters at top of screen. Why not in MSFS? Info on nearby airports (runways, ILS, elevation) is hard to come by. I believe it’s unavailable within the sim unless it’s your set destination, and you noted it before takeoff. Cameras are needlessly complex, especially the drone (which is somehow a subset of “Showcase”). Yeah, I know – there was no drone in FSX. But you can’t control the plane when you’re in drone view. So I find I hardly ever use the drone. I guess this is a matter of individual taste. Speaking of cameras: you can’t preset a view in External view, like you can in Cockpit mode. Why the heck not? You can’t change your plane, or even your livery, after you load a scenario. You have to go back to Main Menu, which takes a couple minutes. (Yes, I know about Dev mode, but that hasn’t worked for me, and in any case it doesn’t address liveries.) Pause, including a hard pause with ESC key, does not pause the time! Okay, we can deal with this by resetting the time when we return to the flight. But why is this necessary? The seasons don’t change in MSFS-World. In FSX/P3D, the autumnal equinox brought us glorious fall foliage in New England, and after the solstice, snow on the ground. But no more, alas. GPS: very cumbersome to enter waypoints. With the exception of some planes, there’s no keyboard input, and you have to monkey with the inner and outer knobs to move the cursor and then scroll through the whole damn alphabet, plus numbers, four times! In FSX/P3D, you could just key in the codes. Maybe this is the way you do it IRL, but IRL I have real fingers and real thumbs. No Quiet key. OK, you can turn your speaker volume all the way down, but gee . . . . say you’ve got Joe Biden holding on Line 1 and the Pope on Line 2, and you want to cut the background noise fast, right? Clouds are terrible in comparison with P3D plus Rex SkyForce. In P3D I could establish half a dozen different cloud types in different layers, and they looked really real. (Of course, there may be a performance trade-off.) THE AWFUL Water textures (a subject of separate threads). The consensus, I think, is that you have to turn the winds unreasonably high – at least 20 knots – in order to see any real wave action. This was particularly disappointing in view of the Trailer’s depiction of waves and whitecaps. With Rex textures, you had much more realistic water (OK, but no whitecaps), and even got bathymetry, like on the Great Barrier Reef! Someone on this forum has suggested that Asobo could easily tweak this. I hope they do. No Manual! Not even the old FSX Learning Center! The SoFly “Manual” is next to useless; a lot of pretty pictures of FS history, but it doesn’t even cover the MSFS pull-down menus in any detail. I understand there are a lot of tutorials on YouTube, but they are of highly uneven quality, and software of this complexity should have its own publisher’s guide. And it should cover the aircraft. Where are the operative knobs, and what do they do? To this day, I have not learned how to use the flight planning console in the CJ4 or Airbus. And I’ve spent time on it. Last but not least, my bugaboo: the Palette (also a subject of separate threads). I find many situations so washed out it’s just not worth it. I attach a typical screenshot in full daylight with little cloud cover. I’d say the ground looks like it was shot at f/5.6 when it should be at f/8 or even f/11 (but the sky's fine). I’m not saying the world can never look like this; just that it doesn’t usually, and certainly not on a pretty day with clear air. (For that matter, look at some of the screenshots when your flight is loading: wan, pallid.) And the color options in Accessibility don’t help with this. Okay, so there’s a fix of sorts: change the time to very early or late in the day and throw in more clouds, and you’ll get more realistic color saturation. But I can’t believe Asobo couldn’t tweak this. Check back with me in another seven months!

Thanks everyone. To sum up: The additional 16 GB won't make much difference. GPUs are scarce as hen's teeth. I should get into overclocking after downloading two additional utilities, at risk of overheating my CPU. Nah.

Not always one to leave the well enough alone, I am wondering whether I would be appreciably better off with 32 MB of RAM. MSFS is running better these days (unlike back in September, soon after I received it as a birthday present) and my CTDs are few and almost predictable (e.g., loading a saved flight crashes the sim about half the time). I have most sliders on High, but would like to see what Ultra is like. My specs are below. What about replacing the graphics card? With the same CPU, would it matter much? i7-8700 3.7 GHz GeForce GTX 1070 Ti; 8GB onboard AORUS Z370 Gaming 5 LGA 1151 ATX motherboard 16GB RAM 2 TB hard drive 27” MSI gaming monitor

I have my target FPS set to 40 (as I did in P3D). But how do you know what your FPS is during flight? In FSX/P3D, you could get a reading in tiny red letters at the upper left of the screen. But not in MSFS.

Indeed.

Again, if anyone's still following this thread, I've figured out a lot of what TrafficPilotUK was getting at. There may be other ways, but I discovered the "Custom" choice under Flight Conditions. You can design your own preset, save it and name it; then it will show up in the Flight Conditions menu in the future. Also, when you click on a wind icon, you can slide it up to establish the upper boundary of the layer you are creating. And the bottom altitude of your layer is stated at the top of the window. (You might miss that, as I had, if you don't scroll up to see it.) I'm still experimenting. Not sure what happens above the upper boundary of the Ground Level if you haven't established a second layer. I've been able to get more realistic water, including some whitecaps, by upping ground level wind to 20+. Of course that makes it challenging in GA aircraft. Oh, have I mentioned THERE'S NO MANUAL!!!

Well, it's getting close to helping. 1. Do the wind layers have tops and bottoms? If so, how do you set them? 2. How do you save a preset? 3. What do you mean "the ground wind is set around 20-25kts." Am I supposed to set this? If so, where is the top of the "ground wind," and how do you establish that? Thanks for your help.

We are 7 months into this, and I have yet to blunder across means of discovering info about destination airports. Like runways, ILS frequencies, etc. It was easy in P3D. (You went to Map and clicked on the airport; all was revealed.) Thanks all, Mac6737

OK, I'll keep experimenting. But when I saw waves yesterday and they disappeared altogether as I flew higher, descending to as low as 500' did not bring them back. Another mystery. An underlying Q, though: Rex is supposedly a weather engine, not a wave engine. Why should winds generated in Rex produce waves, when winds of equal velocity in MSFS w/o Rex do not?

If anyone's still watching this thread, Steve is sorta right. I bought Rex Weather Force for MSFS. Using its "Dynamic Weather Preset" entitled "Breezy," I was indeed able to see water texture, including some whitecaps. But that disappeared at around 1000.' I hope Asobo sees Kapitan's suggestion.

I didn't know Rex was into MSFS 2020, so I looked at their site. Do you mean Rex Weather Source 2020? Do you mean I could have whitecaps? Oh, be still, my heart!

The answer to your question is No. Mine have always been set on HIGH. In the pic I posted, there was supposed to be some wind at the surface.

Right on. Good to know I am not an outlier.

Thanks. 1. I have started 2 threads on this and the other forum asking how you define the boundaries of the wind layers. Not a single response. This leads me to believe nobody really understands the wacky wind icons in the Flight Conditions window. So: How does one "add more surface wind"? (Oh, have mentioned THERE'S NO MANUAL!!!) 2. A while back, someone advised me to get wave action by upping the wind to 50 mph. Not really possible to fly in. I just want the world to look something like it does IRL. (Barring that, I'd settle for the way the waves and clouds look in P3d with Rex add-ons.)

This is between St. Maarten and Virgin Gorda. There is supposedly a light wind at the surface. I generally avoid flying around islands because it just doesn't look right. Can this be improved upon? Mac6737

Thanks, Steve. Yes, I found the window that displays the current plane, and (apparently) only one other. But I see no way to change the livery of the plane selected. In any case, it's clear I don't know how to navigate the menus in Dev Mode, and I fear messing something up. For the time being, I'll go back to Main Menu.

I have this problem with a particular plane, but only with certain liveries available for it. To take as an example one of the 2 planes I mentioned: The Beechcraft Bonanza. I DL'd a set of liveries from flightsim.to entitled "liveries-orvidius-g36-stripes . . . etc." It has about a dozen liveries, but I only installed the handful I wanted. ("Extract all" to Community, and then delete the texture files you don't want, is one way to do this.) When you load the Bonanza with some of those liveries, no avionics; others are fine. (I haven't tried all of them yet.) I thought these liveries were recent, but maybe not. In any case, they all come in the same package, so I don't think the problem can be age. I see that nobody has suggested a way to activate the avionics if they're not already on when you open the flight.

1. Can you change liveries when you are at the airport? Or, must you go back to Main Menu and start all over again? 2. On some planes I've had no troubles with (e.g., Bonanza, Socata), I've opened with new liveries I've installed in Community, and find I have no avionics. (To be clear, this does not happen with all new liveries.) I can't find any switch to turn on the avionics. As I recall, in FSX and P3d, the button at the upper left of the screen labeled "C" was the power switch, but it hasn't worked for me in MSFS. Is there a switch to activate avionics? If not, why do some liveries, in the same package from the same developer, disable avionics, and how can I fix this? Thanks all, Mac6737