My Second Impressions (10 pix)

[kbr]

After playing around with the settings and textures in the FSX demo, I’ve been getting much better results on my computer, so I felt it only fair to give my second impressions of this demo.

In the demo itself, I replaced the water textures with smaller textures. I’ve also replaced the cloud textures with the ones that I have installed in FS9, which though 32bit are considerably smaller than the default ones.

Also I tried installing some other planes into the demo. I found that most planes appeared to be transparent in the FSX demo. Removing the alphas from the exterior textures and running model shine on the planes seemed to provide a reasonable fix. Most gauges would not work, but I think this is because of the lack of FSUIPC.

Though I have turned up many of the sliders in the demo, I did leave the autogen set to normal. Though I do like having more autogen, smooth flight is more important to me. Also I did a comparison flight of the same area in FS9. And while I was getting better fps in FS9, fluid flight performance is more important to me than fps. I was able to get pretty fluid flight in both simulators.

Also as lifejogger said, the area is also not very fps friendly in FS9 either, so this should be taken in to consideration. Though I do have a lot of scenery installed in FS9, the area of the demo is not a place I commonly fly, so I cannot say if my addons effect this area. Below I am including some comparison pictures of the two flights. I tried to get each picture in the same area, but the mesh was different enough to make this hard to do.

In the end, outside of the graphics, I do feel that there is not that much of an improvement in the overall flight experience over FS9. I do think eye candy addicts will be pleased with this version (and I do admit to being a little bit of an eye candy addict myself), but for stuff like atc, weather, flight handling, there just isn’t that much difference. If it weren’t for the water, I don’t know if I’d be able to tell the difference between the two sims. I will probably get FSX when it’s released to play around with, but FS9 will probably be my main sim for a long time yet.

Here are the comparison pictures I took;

FS9

FSX


FS9

FSX


FS9

FSX


FS9

FSX


FS9

FSX


Sorry for the large number of pictures. I thought it might be helpful for those who do not have the demo to be able to see a comparison.

[scubakobe]

Very nice pictures. I think I am going to take the water textures from FS9 and put them in FSX, then set water effects to highest and you won't even notice that they are FS9 textures.
The water in the first screenshot almost looks better then the same FSX shot.

[Admin]

There's a way to fix the transparent planes. I'll try to find it and post it here. FS98 style gauges will not work in FSX. You may need to edit your panel cfg to call newer gauges as replacements

[reddog]

go to the FS9 main texure folder, copy the envmap.bmp past it in the FSX main texture folder. That will get rid of the see thru in the addon a/c. One of the forums said that was forgotten in the demo.

[scubakobe]

Now I just don't know what textures to replace in FS-X for the water, they aren't named the same as in FS9.
What textures did you replace, kbr?

[Admin]

reddog said:

go to the FS9 main texure folder, copy the envmap.bmp past it in the FSX main texture folder. That will get rid of the see thru in the addon a/c. One of the forums said that was forgotten in the demo.

Thanks Reddog. Advanced age is getting to me That was the solution I couldn't find

[kbr]

Thanks Tom and Reddog, that solved the problem. The high level of compatibility between FSX and FS9 is a great sign. Hopefully a lot of designers will make their planes compatible with both sims so that those who aren't ready to move on to FSX will still have new add ons to look forward to. It certainly would make since from both the designer and consumer ends.

Here is a picture of Milton's AC520 in the FSX Demo.


Scubakobbe, the files you need to replace are in the ..\world\textures and all start with evn_ , also in the root texture folder you need to replace OceanHeightField.bmp. Check out Bill Lyons' lakewater.zip that comes with his Luscombe. It is what I used and contains all the files you need to replace.