K5083

You might consider two modestly priced products by Lorby which sort of do what you want. One is "Where Are My Aircraft" https://secure.simmarket.com/lorby-si-where-are-my-aircraft-wama_fsx-p3d.phtml which takes any aircraft that you have installed in FSX, in whatever skin you want, and parks it wherever you want. You can create multiple copies of any plane and scatter them around whatever airports you want. The mod keeps track of them and you can jump in and fly them, or else just leave them sitting there to look at when you visit the airport in another plane. It works very well, the only drawback is that you have to have the plane installed in your game, but I'm sure there are freeware examples of the planes you would want. Taking it a step further, Lorby's AI Tracker X, https://aitrackerx.weebly.com/, allows you not only to put any of the planes in your hangar into the sim, but to program routes for them to fly as AI, or have them fly information with you or with each other. It is fun to have an AI wingman sometimes. August

Users have been importing planes into MSFS from FSX since release, and we still are, but it is getting harder all the time. Each successive update to MSFS introduces new barriers, and MSFS Legacy Importer has not kept up, so at this point, there are many things you have to do to get a plane working besides running it through Legacy Importer. I have had to teach myself a little XML for fixing gauges, new graphics software for adjusting textures, and have had to learn quite a lot about the structure of the old 3D model and flight model files, sometimes editing them a byte at a time with a hex editor to fix some glitch. Luckily I somewhat enjoy this, and I have a solid 50 or so planes that look, work, and fly almost as well as many native planes in MSFS, and that greatly enhance the diversity of my flying experiences. I don't know how many folks are still doing this, though, as the last update broke a lot of legacy planes that had been working fine, and I'm not sure how many users have learned the workarounds. That said, Throttle_UP is absolutely right about keeping both games. The truth is that there are some things MSFS still does very badly as a flight simulator. Yes, it looks great, but the flight models are not very good yet even for native-built planes, and the ATC, the IFR navigation, autopilots, and a bunch of other stuff is either broken or unfinished, such that it is not even as good as FS2004. For when I want a realistic experience in those respects I still go to P3D, FSX, and even FS2004, not to mention shooty sims like DCS, IL-2, and Rise of Flight which in many ways are better flight sims than MSFS if you just turn off the shooty parts. August

I have a Radeon card and the two things that have helped me reduce CTDs to an acceptable level are (1) close all windows other than MSFS, especially on the same monitor, and resist the temptation ever to alt-tab to some other window while playing the sim, and (2) exit the Radeon Software that runs resident behind the game (I think NVidia has a similar one). The idea behind both is to reduce the load on the GPU and the number of different things talking to the GPU. Removing mods didn't help at all, and I think this is only rarely the cause of CTDs, especially ones that occur after many minutes of play. August

Some of these reactions are maybe a little extreme! That trim wheel can be quite useful. The first thing I did when I got my yoke was to center that trim wheel, then get some white paint and paint the first little depression between the ribs on the rim that shows below the top of the slot when the wheel is centered. So I can very quickly center that wheel any time, just by turning it so the white spot almost, but not quite, disappears into the top of the slot. Having done that, the wheel is quite useful for, as stated above, quick, coarse trim adjustments. In addition, the only way to use the full up/down range of your yoke is to use that wheel in conjunction with it, at least the way mine is calibrated. August

I thought of this also. It wasn't really an option for me since I already had a finely tuned GW3 installation that would be difficult to reproduce from scratch, but my sense is that TNW should go first. I don't think that would be ideal either, though. What would be ideal is to learn how both mods work and combine my favorite elements of each. Maybe one has better textures, the other has better buildings, one has better trees, the other has better airports, one has better water, the other has better ... but this is more effort than I'm likely to put in. TNW works fine in my vanilla and Cal Classic FS9 installs. GW3 looks good enough on its own. Thanks all for the help and advice. August

Yep. Terrific program, continues to surprise and impress me almost daily. I'm an old gamer with currently a couple of hundred unplayed titles from Epic and GOG on my virtual shelf, and when I sit down at the PC I don't want to play any of them, I just want to see someplace new or perfect my landings a little better in MSFS. August

I can't find it. There's no TNWRTO file or folder in C:\. There's also none on E:\, the drive I installed FS9 and TNW on. I searched my entire drives for anything starting with TNW* and didn't find the backup. If it really tried to write to my root C:\ folder, maybe my PC blocked it. Not great etiquette to try to save things there! August

Hi Paul, Well, I didn't grab screen shots and now I've deleted TNW so it's too late. But I know that it restored the hard airport taxiways where GW3 had replaced them with turf, and I believe that it replaced the hangars with more modern buildings. That was pretty much all I needed to see, since I like the primitive GW3 airports. I had the sense, from flying around a little, that TNW restored the spread of urban areas that had been scaled back to rural areas in GW3, but I can't be certain about that. August

Thank you Howard. Can I trouble you to tell me where, exactly, this backup of the folders is created? I generally like your mod, but I recently decided to uninstall TNW from my FS9 Golden Wings installation, because it re-modernized too many elements of GW. I could not find the backup or any way to restore the original folders. Running TNWRTO did nothing. I eventually just deleted the entire FS9 install and replaced it with the backup I had made before installing TNW. A backup that the user can neither locate nor access is just a waste of disk space. I would now like to delete the backup files that were created, so would like to know where they are. Thanks, August

Hi Howard, Thanks for the reply and for the fine add-on. It probably is better if the installer does not create a "Flight Simulator 9" root directory since so many users nowadays have multiple installs with different names or are calling their install folder something else for whatever reason. That said, the remaining FS2004 user base seems to be a pretty sophisticated crowd, who know their way around the folder structure and know to ask here for help, so this kind of issue is not a big problem. I have been flying your mod head-to-head against my existing scenery for a few days. I can't test it against the FS2004 stock scenery because who still uses that these days? but relative to the hodgepodge of degraded orbx and other stuff I had going on, I find your colors less garish and the different landclasses better integrated, and there is also less shimmering on my 1440p display. It could be my imagination, but it also seems to me there is less of an obvious grid/checkerboard texture repetition effect in large areas of the same landclass. The idea of overcoming FS2004 texture limitations by borrowing textures from other biomes and swapping them in/out was clever. Last night I just finished installing TNW into the rest of my FS2004 installs, and in a few days I'll consign my backups of them to some archive that I will never be able to find when I need it. So it has become my default scenery and it really does make FS2004 less jarringly visually inferior even if I load it right after playing FS2020. I would still appreciate confirmation of my guess that the TNWRTO.exe that it installs in the root directory is for restoring the preexisting FS2004 textures. The documentation says you can do this but is never quite explicit that this is how. Thanks again, August

Thank you Bernard. I understand. I think I like the textures, but still need to try more regions/seasons. Was I correct about TNWrto being the tool to swap the old textures back in? August

Thanks Bernard. I did do that backup. I have installed this, but I have a couple questions. (1) when I install it, browsing to my FS9 install folder as the installer requests, it creates a new "Flight Simulator 9" folder within my existing one. So if my game was installed in E:\Games\Flight Simulator 9\, I now have an E:\Games\Flight Simulator 9\Flight Simulator 9\ folder. That folder has a new copy of fs9.exe, and folders for Aircraft (containing only the Baron), Effects, Scenery, Modules, etc. with the TNW stuff in it. Is it supposed to be this way? I'm thinking not, because the desktop shortcuts to the area swappers don't work. In that case, the installer is broken. (2) the documentation says that there is a way to restore your previous textures for when you want to fly between green/arid/semi-arid regions, but there's nothing for that in the Modules\FS2004 Texture Swap folder. Is it the TNWrto.exe file that it puts in the (newly created) root Flight Simulator 9 folder? Thanks August

It is a bug, I think. And for me it definitely happens on modern, not just legacy. But I found that it does not happen if I set the heading bug, then manually turn the plane as close as possible to the desired heading, and only then engage the heading hold. If you just set the bug, click HDG and let the plane do the turning, you get this problem. I think the AP gets confused between whether HDG means "hold current heading" or "hold the heading set on the heading bug." August

Thank you for the heads-up, Paul. I had not used TNW or any of its predecessors in the past. Just installed it into a vanilla FS9 install, and I like it so far. I will publish feedback in the other thread after I've looked around a bit more. Question for the community. I have an FS9 Golden Wings 3 install with a lot of options and extras. I see some people have used TNW and GW3 together. To what extent do they step on each other, and which should be installed first? Assume that I generally prefer the TNW textures to GW3s, but I don't want to mess up GW3's landclass distribution etc. I hope the answer is that it is okay to install TNW on top of GW3, because it would be real pain to try to recreate my GW3 setup on top of a fresh TNW install, and it seems to me GW3 would overwrite some of the nice TNW textures? Thanks, August

So I arranged to be gifted FS2020 (I refuse to call it MSFS, as some would like, as if there was never an MSFS before) for Xmas and, it being the New Toy, have been playing it almost exclusively, with occasional hops in FSX and P3D to compare the handling and performance of planes. Having logged about 45 hours total, in the last couple of days, I'm back to mixing in FS2004, which I had only rediscovered through this forum a couple of months ago. Is there any reason to go back? Is there any reason not to go back completely and ignore FS2020? These are the questions I asked myself. This will not be an FS2020 bashing post. I can't help it if there are ignorant FS2020 bashing replies, but the fact is that FS2020 is an excellent consumer flight simulator and a substantial, though uneven, advance over anything marketed previously. FS2020 is best at what some of us still value Golden Wings for: low and slow VFR sightseeing. The visuals are truly impressive. I'm not going to say the representation of the terrain is unmatched or unparalleled, because it is, in fact, matched and paralleled by the best scenery addons for P3D, and by the maps in IL-2 Great Battles and DCS. But those are for limited areas. If you want to cruise around Wichita or Oklahoma City or Chichen Itza, FS2020 is the best you can do, by far. The best fun you can have in stock FS2020, IMO, is to do this in one of the Super Cub knockoffs provided with the game. Better yet, as of this week, Carenado is selling an FS2020 version of its Waco YMF-5. If, like me, you bought the cheapest $60 version of the game knowing that you'd rather spend further money on airplanes you really want rather than a (poorly modeled) 787 or Cirrus in the deluxe game, this is the first offering that makes you feel smart for that strategy. Above about 5000 feet, the differences in the scenery quality get much smaller. If you have Orbx global textures for FSX or P3D, once you're high enough for individual landmarks not to be so evident, those sims look good enough that you might easily feel justified in choosing them over FS2020 for the sake of better frame rates and wider aircraft selection. What about FS2004 though? Well, that is really a step down. No matter what addon you have installed, the limitations on texture size, the checkerboarding of texture tiles, the crude light-handling, and the poor integration of scenery objects with textures jump out at you after a few hours on FS2020. As a caveat, some of the scenery in FS2004 is better than FS2020, even at low level. That's true of even the bone stock FS2004 scenery. If you visit Pisa, Italy, in the current version of FS2020, you get to see the Non-Leaning Grain Silo of Pisa, because FS's autogen couldn't figure out the Leaning Tower and they haven't hand-done that area yet. FS2020 is also bad at large bridges, which it tends to interpret as dam-like walls. FS2004, FSX and P3D often have terrible bridges but at least they're bridges. There are also glitches in FS2020's elevation data that result in odd elevated terrain features. They resolve as you get closer, but are immersion breaking. Above 10000 feet, FS2004 still puts up a pretty good showing visually, especially with replacement textures. If you are doing a long, high flight, mostly looking down at general types of terrain or the tops of clouds, you don't gain much going from FS2004 to FS2020. At any altitude, the thing closest to you - your own plane - looks progressively better in each generation of sim, mainly because of the light and shadow modeling. Partly, aircraft made for the newer sims are just better and more detailed than ones made for the old, because they were made to take advantage of that better modeling and also have more polygons and larger textures to support higher monitor resolutions. But some of the community addons for FS2020 are FSX models that, themselves, trace their ancestry back to FS2004 or even earlier products - you're almost flying the same product in FS2020 as in FS2004. In those cases, it is really surprising how good FS2020's modeling can make a hoary old aircraft look, even relative to P3D. This applies both to external views and to the virtual cockpit. Next, there's the flight models. There has been a lot of commentary about FS2020's flight modeling, which is still clearly a work in progress, much to the annoyance of third-party aircraft developers who are still waiting for the sim's flight modeling to stabilize so that they can finish and release their planes. Still, real-world pilots and long-time simmers seem to agree that FS2020's modeling of the general aviation types is fine, maybe the best of any sim yet, but that as you climb the ladder of size and power it gets worse and worse, so that the big tubes are really badly modeled. No doubt this is a priority area for updates, but it seems likely the the stock FS2020 planes will never reach the fidelity of systems of, say, the Historic Jetliners Group planes for FS2004. That will have to be done by third party developers. I have heard aircraft developers say that FS2004's flight modeling is too crude to be worth developing for nowadays, and that FSX was the first product in the line that deserves to be called a flight simulator. I think such claims may be overstated. We all know that there isn't that much difference between and FSX and and FS2004 .air file and the sim engines weren't all that different. If you constantly hop from FS2004 to FSX to P3Dv4 like I do, you don't feel radical changes in the way similar planes behave across different sims. That's one of the nice things about them. You can let your choice of which sim to boot up be dictated by what you want to fly right now and what's in your virtual hangar for each sim. Critics would say they all share a characteristic "on rails" style, based on their use of the same basic MS sim engine. If so, that style is broken by FS2020, which feels less like FS2004, FSX, and P3D than they each feel like each other. I'm not sure that all of the differences are more realistic, or even intended, and online arguments are raging about this. FS2020 may start to feel more like the older sims as they refine the flight model, which right now is criticized for overly sensitive controls, excessive crosswind effects, pitch instability that makes some planes difficult for humans and impossible for their own autopilots to control, and other things. Impatient modders have addressed the lack of variety in aircraft types in the stock game by figuring out how to convert FSX planes. FS2020 has a semi-supported "legacy" flight model that allows these to be used without any comprehension of how the new flight modeling works, and the resulting planes often look great and fly surprisingly well. I have about 25 of these in my FS2020 hangar now, mostly vintage and warbirds, and would be playing the game less often if they weren't there, having taken the position from the outset that I don't care how good the landscape looks if I can't fly over it in a Travel Air or a P-51. That need has been met quite adequately, at least on an interim basis until fully developed FS2020 versions of these planes are developed. But these planes don't fly like they did in FSX/P3D, even using the legacy flight model, which means they don't fly the way the developers intended and in that sense aren't "right." So if you want the authentic feel of flying a plane currently covered only by legacy conversions, you are better off loading P3D, FSX, or even FS2004. To take an example, David Copley's P-38s in FS2004 are better than the legacy converted Milviz P-38 in FS2020. Probably the area of least advance, and maybe even some retreat, in FS2020 relative to FS2004/FSX/P3D is in ATC and navigation. Nav instruments and autopilots in FS2020 are still buggy, but that will eventually be worked out. The ATC controller bots in FS2020 are no smarter than the ones in FS2004, and it is not clear that there are plans to change that. It still gives you ridiculous IFR landing vectors, assigns you runways that greatly exceed the crosswind limits of your plane when more appropriate ones are available, and has the same limited menu of interactions. In terms of verbal communication, the one nice advance is that FS2020 now uses text-to-speech synthesis, so it will call you whatever you want - even using your own name - without being limited to a canned vocabulary, either stock or augmented by an add-on. But even that improvement comes with a stilted speech pattern and cadence that is noticeably worse than any of the previous sims, and that seems out of step with the quality of speech synthesis in other video games and productivity software. It also turns out that AI air traffic is a huge resource hog in FS2020, and many users, including me, have had to turn it way down or off to make the sim run without crashing. So the skies are pretty empty. If I were to summarize all the above in sort of a table, I would start by giving FS2004 a baseline score of 100 in each of the categories I've discussed, then rate each successive gen of sim on how it improved (or not!). And my scoring would go something like this. FS2004 (arbitrary baseline scores): Visuals: 100 Flight models: 100 Nav/ATC: 100 FSX: Visuals: 120 Flight models: 110 Nav/ATC: 100 P3Dv4: Visuals: 150 Flight models: 115 Nav/ATC: 100 FS2020: Visuals: 200 Flight models: Range from 130 for GA to 80 for jetliners Nav/ATC: 80 currently, may reach 100 with updates So how does this relate to my personal sim journey and continued use of FS2004? Well, as you can maybe infer from the above, I'll still be flying FS2004. But my focus may change. I'll probably fly Golden Wings less. For the Waco over Wichita scenario, FS2020 is just way better. On the other hand, my California Classics propliner and historic jetliners use will keep going strong. If I want to simulate any kind of commercial trip of more than an hour duration at high altitude, dealing with ATC and other traffic, FS2020 is just not the platform - which has to be a major issue for the new game, considering how many simmers are into exactly that. In between - let's say, King Air from LA to San Diego at 10000 feet - FS2004 isn't really a contender, but it's a toss-up between P3D and FS2020. FS2004 will also continue to be viable for planes I enjoy flying that aren't available in any other sim, like the F2G Corsair or the Schneider Cup addon planes. This is significant because people were saying, "FS2004 is so cartoon-like after flying FS2020 that you won't be able to go back, even for the sake of its unique planes." My personal experience is that this is not true. Wringing out an F2G in FS2004 is absolutely still fun. FS2004 and its addons were designed by guys just as smart and talented as the ones designing FS2020 and its addons - in some cases, the exact same people. Flying FS2004 is like playing any top-grade video game from that era - a fully satisfying experience, only a little diminished by the fact that it could use a few more polygons and bigger textures. Keep 'em flying, August