defaid

Looking out at the clouds from above and discovering what they looked like in moonlight. The earliest flight I remember was on a BEA Trident. I think it was from the UK to Mallorca but the flight is more vivid than the rest of the holiday. Hovering around UFOs, shooting them down and repelling an alien invasion. It didn't occur to me that they might shoot back. Noseing around forest canopies looking into birds' nests and hunting for monkeys. Equally naive... Rescuing stranded fishermen. Even back then I had some idea that a big jet wouldn't fit onto a gravel bar. Crossing the desert to land on a high plateau filled with dinosaurs. Crossing the impassable mountain range to find cities with glittering palaces. And turkish delight. Following the river to its source without running the risk of being eaten by cannibals. Crashing and escaping from the cannibals. Unless that day the cannibal was that very pretty girl I had a crush on. D

Don't let bad people turn you into a bad person, particularly as I'd already indicated that the patch has a use. You could convince me of its wider application by posting a genuine screenshot of your FS9.exe using more than 2 GB of your RAM. Otherwise, I stand by what I wrote and by what Jim implied. I don't agree with the way he wrote it but if you remember his Avsim days then you ought by now to be able to take his approach with a little salt. D

To be honest, there are very few circumstances in FS9 where that specific comment from Jim is going to be wrong. Here's UK2000 Extreme EGLL with 407 AI mostly with 32 bit textures, dusk lighting, thunderstorms and FS9 sliders at max. 1.6 GB working set. There's still plenty of overhead for anything else that may crop up. The large address aware patch is nice to have but it's very rarely going to be necessary - perhaps if you leave long haul flights running while you're at work and have a memory leak, but that's about all. D

Reading back, I think I should apologise to both Jim and Tom...

Hi. I use 888-8 for all player and AI aircraft, but then my SSD is about the size of the warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. I'm not zealous about it - any new downloads or creations are converted to 888-8 but I have many that are untouched. If I don't intend to edit, then DXT3 is fine. As Tom has pointed out, the drawback with 888-8 is file size. The main drawback with DXTx is that the compression is lossy, which is to say every time you save & exit, the image is dithered and detail is lost. The dithering is cumulative and over the course of several edits you end up with rather sh**ty textures. 32-bit (or 888-8) is an uncompressed format so save & exit has no detrimental effect on the crispness. Also, saving in that format automatically adds an alpha channel if none previously existed (the -8 part). I've not yet had need to edit any other textures (terrain, scenery et c.) so they are still in their original DXT1 or DXT3 formats. If you have the storage, choose 888-8 but keep a copy of the original - I did once convert a bunch of addon airport textures (LICJ) and found that for some reason overhead streetlights on the apron got messed up. D

Dave Maltby's BAC 1-11? My favourite jet. It's also the only FS9 plane I've seen with a VC that can be panned by dragging with the mouse. Broadly though, I prefer props. I have 3 favourites: Captain Sim's C-130 (complex, functional & great for Air Hauler), Carenado's PA-34 (for when I want to feel coccooned on long sightseeing tours) and RealAir's SF.260 (light, fast, amazing visibility and, as with their C172, very good flight characteristics). I'd be hard pressed to choose one for free because I wouldn't be able to afford the other two. Or, in fact, to fly any of them...

Hi. As you found, out over the ocean and staring at a cloudless sky is the best way to find your maximum FPS. Comparing it then with a busy & detailed airport with weather will give a good look at the limitation of FS9, probably more so than at the limit of your hardware. I'm not sure of the details of your mobo but, given that it's running a P4 and that it was released in 2005 (?), I guess that north/south chipset or bus speed is the limit rather than processor, memory or graphics card. D

The extra parking spots may have been there but not visible. KSFO has photoscenery, which may have obscured them. If FS9 recognised them then they would have shown up in the start location drop-down list on the 'Create a Flight' tab. I believe either there's a duplicate KSFO somewhere in your installation (most likely) or there's a scenery object bgl somewhere that contains all the original objects but has no AFD file in it so is not suppressed by your mod. It's a pity you've deleted your mod -- disabling all the non-essential layers would have been the best place to start. D

Hi. My initial suspicion is that you have multiple versions of those two airports. If you used the stock airport as the starting point for your mod then, provided you haven't changed the airport ident, it should automatically suppress the stock version. If you started with a third-party addon then, depending on how it was created, it's possible for the stock to show through. I have never looked into the details but I think that's why many 3-p addons have so many tiny excludes. You could either temporarily disable all optional scenery layers and have another look at the modded version from withing a flight, or you could download a bgl scanner. I think Owl Tools' Simple Airport Scanner is bundled with ADE. If not, here's a link here to a version that ought to do FS9 as well as P3d: https://www.fsdeveloper.com/forum/threads/simple-airport-scanner-1-70-beta.440300/ Cheers, Dave

Hi. Spurred by a thread in the FS9 forum, I've come here in the hope that someone can help my memory. The thread concerns permanent (for a certain value of permanent) blurry ground textures but I'm curious about blurred aircraft textures. Not knowing anything about painting or designing aircraft, I may well use the wrong words but I recall learning some years ago that a problem in mapping an incorrectly sized texture to part of an aircraft can cause that part of the aircraft's paint to blur. (or possibly incorrectly mip mapped, or saved in the wrong format, or, or...) It's an effect I have seen (tail logo/flag on Just Flight's C-130K comes to mind but elsewhere too) and, as I recall, zooming right in and out sharpened the texture again. I'm not sure because the texture doesn't always blur, rather as though it's triggered by something else like an AI plane or scenery object. If anyone here still models and paints for FS9, do you know what I'm writing about (because I surely don't...) and can you explain it to me in baby language please? D

Hi Hans. Did you find all the updates? If not, that may be why your blurries are still there. There are three downloads: see post #30. D edit: the links don't work... I guess you'll have to search; the downloads are called ss_textures_update_1.zip sstexturesupdate2.zip sstexturesupdate3.zip

Thank you Dorian. That's very useful. I have a lot of Sidney Schwartz' stuff scattered around the world and I don't believe I've applied any updates though I suppose they may have been included in whatever I downloaded. I'll be applying three updates later anyway: FS2004 Texture Update 1 For SS Scenery https://www.flightsim.com/vbfs/fslib.php?searchid=94149454 FS2004 Texture Update 2 For SS Scenery https://www.flightsim.com/vbfs/fslib.php?searchid=94149446 FS2004 Texture Update 3 For SS Scenery https://www.flightsim.com/vbfs/fslib.php?searchid=94149457 D

Best laugh I've had today! Seriously though, the incompatibility of addons with each other is beyond frustrating. Like so many others, I'd nearly stopped flying for a long while: debugging mods is a full-time passtime. All the same, I've kept some. Mostly strange mesh artifacts and lurid textures but also one airport with runways the dev had 'disabled' by dragging them into a different country and onto terrain with a different elevation. That took some time to identify...

Forty years. oO

Could that apply to aircraft textures as well? For me at least, the mega blurry doesn't always happen at a given location so I guessed it's not caused by any fixed objects. Unless I'm unaware (extremely likely) of another LC effect, problems only crop up if a local /Texture folder exists but the required texture file is stored elsewhere. LC, texture files and memory leaks have been covered here: https://www.flightsim.com/vbfs/showthread.php?333995-Out-oF-Memory-surprise&highlight=memory+surprise A little application called DXTbmp is probably what you need. That and an adequate image editing application; at a push MS Paint will serve. Download link is at the bottom of the developer's page here: http://www.mwgfx.co.uk/programs/dxtbmp.htm *** In danger of hijacking, I'm going to shut up now. D

It was, because it's always happend to me at or near an airport, but not every time I'm there. JSMR's suggestion is also a distinct possibility: D

I'll throw in my penn'orth here. I don't think it's your config settings or slow texture load times. Does it persist if you force a texture reload? There's a keyboard assignment available called Reload Scenery Textures or something similar. I notice that your autogen building textures are also blurred. Mega blurry ground textures happen to me too and I don't believe it's entirely random; I suspect it's triggerd by a bad texture on some object but it happens so infrequently I haven't bothered to investigate any further. Though it could be an airport building, or rather more likely some AI, my prime suspect at present is one or other of my user aircraft. If you can get a mega blurry to occur consistently at one place and under a specific set of circumstances, save the flight then return to it with AI switched off... then scenery objects all off... then user aircraft changed for another one. (On a tangent, when changing the user a/c, choose a different aircraft and not just a different repaint. I recall some badly sized/mapped aircraft textures -- often just one piece -- appear blurry until you zoom right out & back in so if the mapping is bad then changing the repaint won't eliminate it.) If nothing else, you'll clear something up for me! D

Hi Col. Wacatac is a trojan that will deploy a selection of other malicious tools on your PC, mostly aimed at data theft but I guess ransom is also a possiblilty. Concerning Raccoon, this is from esentire.com: "The original version also included multiple capabilities such as grabbing FileZilla sessions, acting as a dropper, grabbing system information, passwords, and cookies from browsers, stealing cryptocurrency wallets." Whether either ran on your PC is moot. That you had trouble with at least your mouse tells me that at least one malware was running. !!!!!!!!!! "Would you like Chrome to remember this password?" If you've ever clicked Yes then that stored info is what Raccoon was after. !!!!!!!!!! If you haven't already done it, change all your passwords Col and do it now. D

Generally, crashes when flying around Canada & USA flag Flight1's Ultimate Terrain. If you don't have UT USA and UT Canada installed, have you recently made any changes to scenery (including additions or deletions)? In the event that you have corrupt or missing stock scenery files, it is possible to extract manually from the cab files on the original discs but, from first-hand experience, trawling through them all for the stuff you want to reload is a time-consuming nuisance. Concerning your comment that you 'have tried removing all AI form MSFS', do you mean all non-player aircraft? If so then your statement implies that you've recently made changes to aircraft and I agree with Hans that you should disable all addon scenery layers instead. If you do mean addon sceneries, just say 'addon scenery' or 'scenery layers' as AI indicates non-player aircraft. If you're not connected to the internet while you fly, I'm inclined to suggest you recreate a crash flight with your anti-malware turned off but that is very much your decision -- there may be malware already resident so at the very least do a full scan before you try it. Also... do you have any other applications (weather, flight planners, external ATC or whatever) open when you run FS9? Which brings me to another 'also'... MSFS is universally taken to mean MSFS 2020. Flight Simulator 2004 A Century of Flight is just FS9 or FS2004 or rarely ACOF. If you've found the fault and the solution without the help of our silly comments, please let us know what it was. You may be helping someone else in the future. D

I guess I'm not the only one who struggles to get a useful result out of Avsim's library search engine...

Regarding the ending s... Yes. Sorry -- it's one drawback of replying to posts during teabreaks at work. Concerning the parking type, this is from Microsoft, through FSDeveloper. What I found online was written for FSX / ESP but it is the same as the list given in the doc that ships with the Aircraft Container SDK for FS2004 (another image added). The same list is found in aircraft editing tools: "The valid values may be one or more of the following: RAMP, CARGO, GATE, DOCK, MIL_CARGO, MIL_COMBAT." I'd be interested in learning where you found reference to RAMP_CARGO. It's a parking type that I haven't seen before in an aircraft.cfg, only ever in airport editing software. D . .

As I wrote above, "something like..." D

The spots all look ok in the airport. Take a look in their aircraft.cfg files to check whether or not those particular [fltsim.XX] entries have lines saying something like atc_parking_type = CARGO atc_parking_code = FDX D

I wouldn't say the plans are complicated but AIFP is certainly a very good alternative and definitely preferable when dealing with very long plans or when you want to create a lot of AI traffic with minimal stress. Beau originally asked for an explanation of the structure of text flightplans, and for information on how to edit them. D

It's good to know it's working. All you need are enough parking spots and of an adequate size to accommodate your AI aircraft. The 'Gate' and 'Parking' spots in your screenshot all have specific parking codes and the only spots that are free for all may be too small. If there are no suitable spots (too small, already taken or simply don't exist) then newly planned AI will approach and land, then probably disappear when exiting the runway. If the AI taxi to the gate and park then there's no need to modify the airport. In the aircraft text file that was created when you decompiled, what were AC#1001 and AC#1004? That will give you some idea of the required spot size. Alternatively, Martin Gossmann's utility - AI-Aircraft Editor - displays the nominal radius for each aircraft and allows you to change it. D