K5083

This morning I had an enjoyable, but rather heavily researched, outing in GW3. I was searching for real-life vintage airline routes to fly and ran across the archive of old airline timetables at http://www.timetableimages.com, many of you know of this site I'm sure, but wow what a time suck, you can easily spend all the time you set aside for flying the sim looking through those old schedules. Most of them have not only routes, but departure/arrival times and even pricing! Anyway I selected a 1929 Canadian Colonial Airlines New York to Montreal flight (click here) for this morning's flight. Who wouldn't want to do this trip? I fired up the Fairchild 71, departed at the appointed 7:00 am time from Newark, and enjoyed a scenic trip that almost lived up to the airline's 1929 brochure. I did wander off and do a little sightseeing, so I was running 20 minutes behind by the time we landed at Albany, but I didn't hear any complaints from the cabin. I saved both the flight plan and the flight, and it occurred to me, someone else must have done this years ago, and maybe even compiled a lot of the old routes. I was looking through the great reference book, "Airlines of the United States since 1914" by R.E.G. Davies, and it also has a wealth of information about routes, operators and aircraft types, though not usually at the level of departure and arrival times. So does anyone know of a compilaton of these, or at least an old forum thread where people shared them? August

I'm not sure what peoples' Win10 problems are. I just recently installed FS9 on a standard Win10 box after several years of not playing it. Absolutely no problems with the installation and it is less crashy than either FSX or P3Dv4 which are supposed to work on Win10. The only real issue I have is that sometimes when I end a flight, it quits and reloads the whole sim. Minor annoyance since it loads back up so quickly. P3D takes 10 minutes to load on my system (not kidding, I timed it) so that would get old fast if that happened there. August

Under 60 is "young" here?? Cool! I'm not often made to feel young at 53. Even on my best days, I'd call myself middle aged. August

Thank you for the tips, Bernard and Robin. I had already tried Robin's method of copying an original FS9.exe into GW. That was necessary in order to get Plan-G to build its scenery libraries. It needs to see an FS9.exe in the folder you point to in order to accept it as a FS2004 location. However, that did not help with the connection issue. I was wrong about the source of the connection issue though. It turned out the problem was that some of my FS9 installs did not have a copy of fsuipc.dll in their modules folders. I have never actually purchased fsuipc, it just sort of came along with some of the other addons I have installed - but I haven't installed all of those addons in all of my FS9 versions. Once I copied fsuipc.dll into the modules folders of my installs, Plan-G connected with no problem. August

Hi guys, I'm trying out the Plan-G flight planner for FS9 and I really like it. But I've hit a problem. Like many of you, I have multiple FS9 installs for different add-on packages such as Golden Wings. As per the install instructions, I rename the exe files for each install from, say, fs9.exe to fsgw3.exe so that the config files don't get mixed up. But Plan-G will not connect with anything except my vanilla FS9 install. My hunch is that this is because it will only connect when a file named fs9.exe is running. Is this right? If it is, does anyone know a workaround to enable it to also connect when you have renamed your fs9.exe? Thanks, August

I for one, as a recent returnee to the program, found this thread really helpful until it went south, and learned about a lot of resources from it. I would welcome a resumed discussion on the original topic without the flaming. August

I get about the same amount of shimmering in full screen vs. windowed mode in Win10, and don't see any difference in frame rates. The AA in full screen mode is noticeably better for me. It is most apparent if, say, I'm flying a biplane in the VC so there is an upper wing right in front of me with a straight edge. In windowed mode, I can see the little steps in the edge slide and shimmer. In FS mode that effect is gone. August

The brilliance of the basic GW3 package, at least on my first impression as a newcomer to it, is that the global landclass revisions and the AI traffic give the entire world a basic vintage look-and-feel. Combined with an environment upgrade such as the converted orbx textures, this makes a typical vintage flying experience - let's say, ferrying a Stuart Green Fokker D.VII from my local airport at White Plains up the Hudson to Old Rhinebeck around sunset - about as nice and visually rich an experience as can be had in any sim. The airports are enjoyable and quirky and it would always be nicer to see more of them, but there are plenty. Even the cars are fun to drive around, although I have no immediate plans to uninstall GTA-5. One can always collect other third-party airports, some that are explicitly historic and others that are just of small fields that haven't changed much over the decades.

Maybe it is because FS2004 Century of Flight was the only major sim edition ever released with a historical focus in its stock form, that it has become a persistent favorite with vintage buffs. My new GW3 install is starting to get swollen with planes and scenery, and there have been some headaches. You can see that these add-ons evolved through a community that kept up with everything new. It's hard to reconstruct years later, from scratch. You download a package that seems cool, the readme tells you it requires you have installed 8 previous add-ons you don't want, half of those are from defunct sites and now cannot be found, several of them in turn each require 6 more add-ons you don't want, and it frankly admits there might be more required files that the author has had so long that he has forgotten that not everyone has them. I have contented myself with getting most of the add-ons mostly working. It's not exactly clear what-all scenery each mod adds, so it's a fun easter egg hunt flying around looking for built-out airports. I find that Flight Ontario's scenery for 160 Canadian WWII training bases fits nicely into GW3. It isn't strictly within the time period, but it works well with the ruralized countryside and doesn't step on GW3 or the major mods, which don't do too much with Canada. The bases are beautifully built and many are populated with 100+ static airplanes, which is a frame rate killer on FSX but doesn't slow down FS9 at all on a decent rig. The most amazing thing for me is how new stuff continues to come out for this old sim. These new Austers that just showed up on SOH are dandy planes, and the J-2 Arrow is near enough as never mind to a Taylorcraft BC-12D, a type that I've always liked but that nobody has seemed interested in doing for a flight sim. August

I used to have it installed from disc, bought it from steam on one of their periodic sales for like $7 or something, and never looked back. There are no login or update delays, I have never had a problem with mods, and if I corrupt something by copying a mod to the wrong place, it is a one-click repair of my original game files. I recommend it without reservations. August

I have long been a tri-motor site fan, and it is said it will be going. It is so quirky and fun to browse that it reminds of when the internet was a more enjoyable place. Time for a final visit/scrape before saying good bye. I think I will just drop a few bits of tri-motor scenery into Golden Wings, with any other good 20s-30s things I find. A lot of the better vintage airplanes come with an airfield or two.

Well, on Day 3 after reinstalling FS9 I'm up to 3 installations already, set up for modern (stock with enhancements), 1930s (Golden Wings 3) and 1960 (Cal Classics). I have had some of the Cal Classics airports installed in FSX, but they do not seem to be optimized for that sim and they really break the frame rates, especially if you're over Queens where you can see 2 of their airports at once. In FS9, they still permit frame rates as high as 150 fps if I don't set a limit. I'm currently refamiliarizing myself with David Copley's P-38s which are a good example of a very fine aircraft built only for FS9. From the standpoint of using addons, I can see the perspective that it's FSX that's dead, provided you have both FS9 and P3Dv4/5. Almost everything that works in FSX is either a warmed-over FS9 product that works better in FS9, or if it's "native" FSX, it works better in P3D. August

Yes, I imagine even before getting to that, most of us have "content" consuming space on our drives that we are better off without. Just tweaking my original install first, to get it looking the way I like. Almost done. One thing, do you guys know where is the equivalent of the FSX cameras.cfg that defines the default views? If I can, I want to set it so that I never see a 2D panel view or a control tower when I am cycling through the views. August

Hmmm, multiple installs. I hadn't thought of that but -- yes, of course. The space requirements are so low that it's feasible. I have multiple installs of IL2:1946 and the various CFSs with different mods, but this would be my first "whole world" multi install sim. I've looked up the tutorials and past posts on this, seems straightforward. Good times. August

Thank you for the suggestions, guys. Installed FS9 last night. I figured, why not, the whole thing takes less space than some individual airplanes I have for P3D. Installation and setup for my current Win10 box was no problem. Of course I used FS9 a lot when it came out, but viewed from the present, with fresh eyes, initial reactions: - The landscape was as horrendous as I feared. It is better after I copied the building and tree textures over from Orbx. I still need better ground textures. In your view, what is the best free option for an overall terrain upgrade for VFR flying? I see several on the usual sites that look promising. - It is nice to have EVERYTHING dialed to max and still get whatever frame rate I want. Can't even do that with FSX. Maxing the autogen helps conceal the bad ground textures. - I think FS9 might be the best option for long, high, IFR flights. The clouds and weather aren't bad, the ground looks fine from 10,000 feet and higher, and the navaids seem to work as well as in FSX and P3D and, from what I hear, maybe better than FS20 so far. And to add challenge, you can max out the air traffic without a performance hit. Once I have the basic sim looking decent, I will try out that Schneider contest. August

I do like the vintage and am a fan of the ford-tri-motor site, but almost all aircraft on there have been ported to FSX and even P3Dv4, including all of the FS2004 historic stock aircraft, so I'm already flying them in a better looking sim. You have to reach for the obscure to find a type that you have to go back to FS9 to fly, but there are a few. August

Huh. Interesting. I just ran across my old FS9 CDs when looking for something else. I have FSX:Steam, P3Dv4, and will be getting FS20 in a couple of months. I don't agree with most of the criticisms of them on this thread, but still, I've been wondering if I want to install FS9 again. There are some nice aircraft available only for FS9, for sure. I recall them fondly. I just wonder will it look too ugly compared with the newer sims. I already keep FSX around only for a few dozen planes that haven't been updated, and even with addon scenery, it's looking pretty dated. Hmm. Maybe will look through the upload library again and see if I can talk myself into it. August

I expect to be enjoying 4.5 for a few years. I'll buy FS2020 in a few weeks or months, but it will be a long time, if ever, before FS has the selection of aircraft available for P3D. Also, for now, many of the small airports I like to fly into are better rendered in 3rd-party P3D scenery than in FS2020. August