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My point concerning 60 Hz refresh rate and 30 FPS was that locking a game's framerate to a factor of the refresh rate will ensure that the game frame changes at the same moment as the monitor updates. It reduces tearing of images when panning. It can also reduce the flicker that is more easily perceived by peripheral vision. If vertical sync is turned on (or whatever identical function other graphics software implements) then the game's fps should automatically switch between various factors of ther monitor's refresh rate. Although at that rate and with a good game FPS it probably won't make any difference, your 144 Hz monitor might give a better image if you lock to 36 FPS (i. e.144 / 4) or 24 (144 / 6). I suspect that the vertical sync equivalent won't be noticed as it's likely to drop the FPS to 28.8 (144 / 5). I also think that 24 fps is very flickery in peripheral vision and a bit laggy on approaches et c. It is hopeless in first person shooters. If you are in a complex scene where the game could only manage 27 FPS then vsync would drop the game FPS to 24 (next lowest factor of 144). I wonder what Logie Baird would make of today's monitor refresh rates... D

Thank you! to both of you. I really appreciate the responses. The model is Iris's freeware FS9 version of the PC-9 that is bundled in with the retail FSX version. I have leading edges, wings. horizontal stabilisers and errors and omissions left to do, and then learning how to fly it... The wording will be much too small to be clear but not knowing is frustrating, especially as everything else in the reference photos is perfectly clear. D

It never occurred to me to consider the ac supply frequency: the monitor runs on a low voltage dc supply. Here are my monitor's native settings: 2560 × 1440 at 60 Hz (though Windows 10 insists that it's 59 Hz). I'm not sure about TVs, though I believe the old tubes were tied to the ac frequency. If your TV refresh rate is 60 Hz then locking your framerate to 30 should work well, reducing flicker and reducing tearing when you pan your view, because frame and screen will always change at the same moment. D

Catchy title, huh? I've found some free time and am busy priddying the new acquisition. I guess there'll be more on that when it's fully priddied. Meanwhile, do any of you real aviators (I know you're here) know what is surrounded by the yellow ring in this photo of a Texan ii. There are two on the left of the fuselage and one on each upper & lower wing surface. Six total but none on the right of the fuselage. Here's a bonus question for a fudge sundae. Any idea what the legend might say below the two white circles between Z and M? There's a matching pair on the right side and they all seem to have the same words. And for a candle on the dessert, any Beechcraft pilots know what info is on the riveted plate over on the right? It's just under the leading edge of the horizontal stabiliser. Is it manufacturer's serial number etc? Snip of a photo by Taffevans, who has taken some outstanding reference photos.

Hi Hans. I fully agree with your decision to keep some processing power in reserve. I have my framerate locked at 60 fps to match my monitor. FS9 usually runs at 60 but at complex airports with lots of AI it can drop as low as 30 so my PC could be regarded as 'struggling'. On the other hand, I'm happy with anything down to around 30 fps so I don't regard it as an issue. I have a lot of un-mipped 32-bit textures in my aircraft folder. I may make a copy of the folder and compress & mip all the textures. Then I can compare framerates to satisfy my curiosity. Whatever, as you wrote, spare processing power is always a good thing. D

This will be long and wordy but first... @hjwalter Hans, to answer your original question, the only inbuilt mechanism for specifically an image is the computer's graphics engine, which has constantly to resize every texture file in order to create the illusion of distance. BGLs are a different matter and I can imagine that someone has managed to compile one one that does create mips from base textures. Seems redundant though -- the processing power to create mips on the fly and then render them would be exactly the same as simply resizing and rendering the base image. I won't be at all offended if nobody reads this. I won't know unless some masochist points out a mistake... @jgf Thank you for adding that. I thought my explanation was reasonably clear but perhaps it wasn't. It could be a language barrier, I suppose. For anyone who just happens along and has the fortitude, I'll reiterate... First, image compression. DXT3 degrades image quality, right from the outset. And it gets worse with every hard save. I'll come back to that. All compression degrades image quality. Not just game textures and not just the DXT format. Every time you edit and save one of your photographs as a jpeg the image quality will diminish. Zoom right out from your newly compressed photo and it probably won't look so bad. Zoom in and you will see more of the degradation. The same thing happens with music (except for a few formats like .flac) though most of our ears can't hear the difference between a wav and an mp3. Decompressing a compressed image doesn't repair the damage. It is permanent. Converting DXT3 to 888-8 doesn't improve the image quality. I do it to downloads because 1) I'm likely to edit in the future and 2) I'll forget what format it is. I resave downloads as 888-8 to ensure that my future self doesn't mess up. There is some good news though. Image editing software doesn't actually save the file when you click 'Save'. What it does is make a temporary file of what's essentially metadata comprising the sum of all the editing that you've done. The compression part of the metadata is only applied to the image file itself when you 'Save As' or when you save and close. You can save as often as you like as long as you keep the image open, and only one compression will be done, right at the very end. DXT images are compressed. 32 bit are not. So, for the same number of pixels, DXT3 uses up much less disk space. They are arguably quicker to load into FS9 just because they are fewer MB in size but I've never noticed a difference, not even on my old XP machine. On a slight tangent, resizing is also a form of compression: 2048 × 2048 down to 512 × 512 means a file 1/16 of the kB size but the different compression formats we have been discussing don't alter the image dimensions, only the quality. Second, mip mapping. It's one of the more interesting aspects of mathematics that just as you can map a piece of a flat image to a point on the surface of an imaginary 3d model (atlas to globe), so you can map a different piece of the same image to the concept of 'further away'. Referring to the ISS images in my earlier post (which as usual came from Wikipedia), mips don't affect near objects because for close-ups, the highest-res base image is always used. The explanation for mips being necessary dates back to the 20th century. The size of a building, a tree, an aircraft on your monitor is not 30 metres wide by 40 metres long. Its real size changes as it seems to move closer or further from your virtual viewpoint. Sometimes the object may be 1000 pixels wide. A few minutes later it could be 30 pixels. Graphics hardware and software have to edit textures to create the illulsion of distance and perspective. Imagine an FS9 building falling behind you as you taxi past it. As you go by, looking out of your cockpit window, it is a rectangle covering 500 × 500 pixels of your monitor. Taxi onward and look back over your virtual shoulder. The object is now a trapezium 50 pixels tall and 10 pixels wide. The graphics stuff has to shrink the texture to make it look further away and has to skew it to account for perspective. Shrinking has to be done on a per-pixel basis so that's 262 000 pixels that have to be processed for a 512 × 512 texture. It has to be done for every texture in every frame of your fps. For a 2048 × 2048 it's nearly 4.2 million. However, if the texture has mips, then much of the work has already been done. While you are near the virtual building, the graphics engine will still select the high-res, unmipped base image in the texture file. As you taxi onward, the graphics engine will select one of the pre-shrunk images from a different piece of the texture file and then only has perhaps 64 × 64 pixels to process. This is the purpose of mip mapping: reducing the load. Fifteen or more years ago this was absolutely essential: small ram, weak processors, onboard graphics... Nowadays, small textures like those in FS9 -- a maximum of 2048 × 2048 -- are no trouble for modern equipment and mip mapping is not necessary. If you have an old PC and you find your framerate dropping then mip mapping textures may help. It's worth being aware that it may not: the framerate could be affected by the number of polygons in the frame, online weather or even by complex systems in the player aircraft. Lots of things affect it. But... modern PCs don't struggle with unmipped textures in FS9. D

Except possibly from the subjective perspective of personal preference, that's absolutely not the case. As I wrote above, mip mapping has no effect within a certain view distance because up to that point, the largest image will be used and not any of the mips. In that circumstance, mipped is exactly the same as unmipped.. Compressing to DXT-3 degrades the crispness by introducing dithering: blurring of edges and blending of colours as an artifact of the compression process. On top of that it seems also to reduce the bit depth of each channel, which alters the colours themselves. That happens at all draw distances and by the nature of textures, is most obvious at close range. Here's a snippet of a downloaded Shanghai livery for a Fruit Stand plane. I opened the 32-bit version (the repainter was farsighted enough to include it in the zip) and saved a couple of times as DXT3. Once was enough to introduce the artifacts but I made them more obvious by saving a couple more times. Whether or not one or the other looks better in game to any specific person is entirely subjective but compressed formats are lossy and degrade the crispness. D First the 32-bit original: Second, the DXT3 format:

I don't think that's how mips work. Each grade of mipmap is just a smaller, lower-resolution copy of the base texture in an image. Just as different areas of a single-file aircraft texture are mapped to different parts of a 3d model, so different areas of a mipped texture file are mapped to different distances. That is to say, each draw distance will use a different part of the mipped image. If there are no mips, the high-res base image is used at all draw distances so you effectively get full texture detail right out to the horizon. Image editing software such as DXTbmp doesn't show the whole set of mips in one image but mostly they would look like this: Unpipped texture used at all distances: Mipped texture. Larger file but easier on the graphics memory because for distant objects, the graphics hardware doesn't have to load the large hi-res image, just a small blurry version: I strip the mips from all my aircraft textures because high-resolution modern PCs, graphics hardware & drivers, and monitors don't really need them. (As an aside, I also convert them to 32-bit as I sometimes edit them and each hard save of a compressed image degrades it). Stripping them makes the file slightly smaller. (Decompressing them makes them bigger...) The fundamental resolution of a modern monitor is good enough that -- mostly -- the sparkling and the moiree pattern just don't happen. Modern processors and memory don't struggle with the high-res, unmipped textures even when handling hundreds of them at a complex airport with heavy AI. In the past I've also stripped them from other textures but occasionally came across problems so I leave those as the developer made them. D

This, combined with the jitter in your original post, suggests that you have a dirty or worn USB plug or socket. It could even be a broken solder joint in that port on the Acer. The supposition is lent weight by the fact that the joystick works ok when plugged into a different machine. I guess you've tried different ports on the same machine. If they all gave the same result then it's likely to be the USB plug on end of the joystick's lead. (If one machine has slightly tighter sockets then it wouldn't show the problem). Either that or a dirty pot but I'd expect that to give the same result on all machines. VP2's suggestion is good. Have you tried resetting the sensitivities in FS9 or even -- temporarily, so make a backup first -- creating a new cfg file? I didn't know W11 had a prefetch folder. In any case, it won't affect USB or joysticks. It's only a close-to-hand folder in which Windows can put copies of stuff it expects to need later in a hurry. D

Richie, if you know your way around PCs and still haven't had any success, try running FS9 again and, after it's failed to launch, take a look at the windows event log. There should be more info there. D

Just read the first investigation report in this month's AAIB bulletin and had flashbacks to flying into Billy Bishop in Toronto before Christmas, when I forgot I had a backup AI and magnetic compass. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6617eb186b4cf65594d1ea4b/AAIB_Bulletin_4-2024.pdf No 28V dc ess bus, no 28 V dc stby bus, no 28V dc emer bus. No option for Ctrl, Alt, Del... or even a pause to make a cup of tea.

This suggests the gear was still rolling despite the brakes being set. I've forgotten which sim you use but is it possible to alter the effectiveness of the brakes (for FS9 either aircraft.cfg or the air file)? It would allow you to restore the more cooperative wind when landing.

Who needs realism?

Hi Hans. The file in question is taxiway_marks.bmp in the folder ../fs2004/Texture/ If there is a fault with the file then it's probably in the alpha channel. Attached a zip with the original for you to compare. D Here's the zip: taxiway_marks.zip Here's the normal file: Here's a modified file with black transparency bottom left:

Can I just point out that if you're circumnavigating England and Scotland, you can't follow the coast all the way? D