Jump to content

tatest

Registered Users
  • Posts

    10
  • Joined

About tatest

  • Birthday 10/30/1945

Personal Information

  • Location
    Oklahoma
  • Occupation
    Retired Geologist

Interest

  • Interests
    Travel, Camping, RVing

tatest's Achievements

Advanced  Simmer

Advanced Simmer (2/7)

  • First Post Rare
  • Collaborator Rare
  • Conversation Starter Rare
  • Week One Done
  • One Month Later

Recent Badges

10

Reputation

  1. Thinking now about a mission I’ve not yet tried. In 1930 Amy Johnson flew a Gipsy Moth from England to Australia, and back. That likey involved filling the front cockpit with fuel, extra oil, and spare parts. A special aircraft model might be required, along the lines of the Lockheed Vegas in FS9 that had the passenger space filled with fuel tanks.
  2. FWIW, one of my challenges was to fly out of every airfield in the database, to some other little field nearby, or someplace more distant. I am aboout 100 airfields in to the 20,000 so. Then I started rereading Rinker Buck’s “Flight of Passage” about two teenagers who flew a Cub Cruiser from New Jersey to Southern California with no radio or navaids, pure pilotage, so I did that, pretending all that controlled airspace does not exist. On of the nice things about FS9 was the existence of scenery packages that turned back the clock to 1920s, or early 1950s. I’ve not found equivalents for FSX. But in general, to keep the simulator interesting for me has meant getting back to basic flying, not programming flight management systems in jetliners and going along for the ride.
  3. Inventing missions. Starting out from the middle of nowhere in the Piper Cub finding my way to another airfield using only the scenery depicted on VFR sectionals (displayed from sky vector on a second computer or tablet screen). Digging up old airline schedules (I like late 1930s) and trying to keep the schedules with modern aircraft of similar performance. VFR, for 1930s up navigation by NDBs and the small set of VORs that sit on the old directional beacon stations. This is where I really miss my FS9 computer (it diedin 2012) because I had a 1930s world with 1930s aircraft, and a 1950s world with propliners. Most of this does not port to FSX, haven’t even tried porting to a recent Steam Edition install. I anticipate inventing some adventures for the Grumman Goose, which is close to 1930s airliner performance, but can be tricky on approach to water landings. If I run out of ideas, I can install a few propliners and pretend the ATC environment does not exist.
  4. I have also found the simulation of ATC to occasionally forgetful and from time erroneous when dealing with AI traffic. When the seem to have forgotten me, I will initiate a contact, usually asking for an alternative approach. My most frequent problem once on final is that ATC will vector a faster aircraft to follow me in, and that aircraft will fly through me before getting instructions to go around. Sometimes, also, I encounter deadlocks with AI ground traffic, being permanently in “hold position” with the conflicting traffic also holding. These problems ate pretty much the same as they were in FS9, so I suspect not a lot of work was done on ATC between versions. Sometimes you just have to ignore an instruction
  5. I’ve been flight simming since SubLogic built a simulator for the Atari 400/800, so maybe approaching 40 years. Most of my hours, probably several thousand across at least a dozen installations of FS9 on four different machines, have been a struggle back and forth with approaches and landings. In FS9 and FSX, when I find my approaches getting sloppy, I hop in the Piper Cub and start doing visual approaches, touch and go and around the pattern. Back to basics, the way my father learned flying Cubs, Taylorcrafts and Ryan’s for primary in WW2, thus the way he taught me to fly the earliest simulators. Fix a visual touchdown point, don’t let it move, for glide slope. Fix on far end of runway aligned with touch down point for alignment of your approach (rather than some center point on your windscreen, as your approach may need to be crabbed for crosswinds, unless you are skilled at side slipping, something the simulation does not very well simulate, even if you have rudder pedals. A few (or many) good approaches and landings in a slow, primitive aircraft will help develop coordination of visuals with control actions that apply as well to aircraft that move faster and require faster assessments of the situation and quicker reactions. If flying only high performance aircraft with 120 knot approach speeds, you may never work out smooth landing approaches. These skills are usually first developed at 1/3 to 1/2 the speed, then scaled up.
  6. I have never succeeded in a reinstall of FSX Gold, on the same (Windows 7) system where first installed, once I installed the download for Microsoft Flight. Authentication is the issue, FSX starts up in trial mode, asks me to go to authentication, where it fails. Ultimately I went to FSX Steam Edition, which has its own quirks, but installs on Windows 10, with few troubles, at least for me. My first experience with FSX was Widows 7, never tried it on XP. On XP (and my first Windows 7 machines) FS9 was my flight simulator choice.
  7. I have about 150 hours now in FSX, about a third of this flying in contact with ATC, either IFR or VFR with flight following. I have AI traffic turned on for GA and airlines at moderate levels. Tags are turned on, and I see some AI traffic, enroute and around busy airports. However, ATC calls out a lot of traffic I simply cannot find. Is there more I need to do to make the traffic visible? Or does ATC in FSX call out phantom traffic in addition to what the traffic algorithms actually put out there to see. I don’t remember this in FS9. If ATC warned of traffic, it was visible.
  8. Hi, I’m Tom, have been on this forum (and many others) since I got more deeply involved in flight simulation, I don’t remember how long ago. The forum will have kept track, I get birthday greetings every year. My flight dimming goes back to SubLogic’s release of the Atari version of their original simulator, tracks through Microsoft’s release of an Amiga version for what may have been FS2 or FS3 (something that worked a whole lot better than FS2 on the PC, because of limited PC graphics). While buying and trying various MSFS versions (Amiga got only the one) I got distracted into Air Warrior, a multiplayer game then running on the Genie dial up service, at first on Amiga, later on PC, as early Pentium and SVGA got that platform for usable. On retirement, I came home from Asia with a fast Pentium 4 PC, 500 MB of fast RAM, and NVidia’s GeForce 256 (a first of its kind). When FS 2004 came out, I bought it, installed it, and quickly started building hours. Now on the Internet, I started following the flight simulator forums, learned about having multiple versions on the simulator, and built a Golden Wings environment because I was most enjoying the antique aircraft and wanted an antique world. From there, Silver Wings for flying things somewhat more modern, and then I got interested in propliners and built another world for late 1950s from CalClassics resources. I kept a modern environment of course, flying Skylanes and Barons to visit my scattered family. I duplicated this partly on laptops, e.g. putting the basic FS9 and Golden Wings on a Pentium M machine with Intel 3D graphics, and succeeding laptops. I have been pleasantly surprised at how well FS9 performs on modest PC hardware. When FSX first came out, I tried a demonstration release on my “entertainment” laptop (4th Gen i5, 2 cores/4 threads, Intel 3D graphics) but this was just too sluggish, although the machine was a real master of video processing or photo editing. So I bought myself a box I would dedicate to flight simulation (5th Gen i7, 4 cores, 8 threads, Radeon 5770 graphics). FSX (I bought Gold) installed OK, authenticated, but ran sluggishly, about like FS9 running on the Pentium M laptop. FS9 would run with almost everything maxed out, processor turbo speed was about the same as the Pentium 4, but most of the data movement paths were much faster. So what was supposed to become my FSX machine became my new multiple environment FS9 machine. Until Microsoft decided that the “check for CD” authentication mechanism was a security flaw, and patched Widows 7 to disable the function. I identified the patch, removed it, kept flying, could see where Microsoft was going, started flying some FSX. Then Microsoft released Flight, I loaded the interface and tried it. Guess what? After installation Flight, my authentication of FSX became invalid. So back to FS9. Until another Windows security update killed the drive on that machine: multiple runs of a “repair the boot block” routine on the premise that altered boot locks were security flaws, and I had set up multi-boot for a couple of different Linux implementations. That made me so angry that I put the machine in a closet and replaced it with an iMac. Many years as a Unix administrator, I trust anyone’s Unix implementation more than anything from Microsoft. That meant my flight simulation was down to X-Plane, which I bought and tried, but the computer was not really powerful enough and I had all new controls to learn, so that got me out of flight simulation for almost a decade. I had many other projects: genealogy, tens of thousands of photos to scan, tens of hours of video to edit, and more. When I wanted to fly, I had FS9 on the old laptop. I slight limitation eventually discovered, the laptop would overheat and shut down after an hour or two. It wasn’t just flight simulation creating this challenge, image recognition (built into photo library management software) or video processing would also work the CPU hard enough to trigger thermal shutdown. Most of my video was short enough to finish. Digressions. I came back to flight simulation with purchase of a high performance Windows 10 laptop, 7th generation i7, GTX 950M, huge storage for my photo projects. Bought and installed FSX Steam, which ran moderately well. Installed a basic FS9.1 with the NoCD fix, ran like the blazes. Then I discovered that anything using the GPU, with CPU near max, overheated the laptop. Motherboard forming the keyboard part of the case started warping, eventually enough to separate the keyboard from the bottom part of the case. While flying in FSX: what’s that pop? It’s a fragile plastic fastener breaking. That one backed up and set aside, I looked for a serious gaming laptop, the design of cooling systems foremost in mind. And maybe it will run FS2020. 10th Generation i7 (4 cores 8 threads) and Mobile RTX 2070 GPU, three variable speed high tech cooling fans and almost a foot and a half of air outlet vents. First bought and installed FS2020, probably more deluxe than I need but there were certain aircraft I wanted. FS2020 loads and runs, drawing hard in resources without doing anything. I need to sort out my controllers. Then I loaded FSX Steam Edition, and realized this I the first computer I’ve owned that can actually handle FSX. So now I am moving from FS9 community to FSX community. I come with thousands of hours in FS9, too many installations producing logs on too many machines, logs lost, so starting over with FSX. I still love flying close over the scenery in primitive aircraft, the Cub is the most primitive I can find. Most of my FS9 hours were in 1930s classics and 1950s propliners. I like planning and executing long flights, following old airline schedules. I’ve been around the world at least five times, starting with Wiley Post’s flight in the Vega, the return to North America of the M130 Clipper that got caught in Asia after Pearl Harbor, PanAm’s first “round the world” Constellation flight (actually coast to coast the long way because they could not fly domestically), and Amelia Earhart’s last flight. Using period navigation techniques, I got lost in the same places. Most of my simulated flying was enabled by the flexibility of FS9, the worlds I could create, the accurate models I could find. I will learn what I can do in FSX, maybe fall back on FS9, maybe just pretend that any facility, any rule, since 1960 just does not exist. I tend to fly with Skyvector playing VFR sectional and terminal area maps showing on another machine, and I don’t like the world they show me. My real world flying experiences go back to late 1950s, small rural airfields that would get swallowed up by suburban development before the end of the century. I would prefer to simulate that earlier world.
×
×
  • Create New...