Xsimreviews

Being a man of very few words and garbled at that, I just loaded up a YouTube vid of the latest results and weird fps issues. The start shows the good bits, silky smooth and full ‘o Tom’s Oats/scenery detail.

I’ve complained about getting 10 fps recently in my ‘nightmare HDR’ test, being the United 747 at Seattle. This video shows, towards the end at 1:39 (I didn’t want to make the start ultra-boring!), how I can go from 8 fps to 25 in the behemoth.

Even in a smaller default plane like the Avanti, I can get very low fps. But if I wiggle my view to the rear, I can gain 50-100% of my frames!? Reducing the screen window size CAN result in massive gains, which from what Ben has said in the past, may indicate my GPU is the bottleneck. In the last section of the vid, you’ll see the resolution/ratio change, as I reduce the size of the window to gain fps. I found a trigger spot, at about 4/5ths of full screen size, where a tiny increase in the window would change fps from 10 to 25!! NOW MY WRITING LOOKS LIKE AUSTIN’S! I DON’T CARE, AS I FEEL WE ARE VERY CLOSE TO NIRVANA!

Bug report will be posted, linked to this highly technical report

Oh, and just in case you haven’t seen it, here’s Austin’s latest adventures with his sick-ass Evo I’m actually really excited to see some of our hard-earned cash going towards such an amazing machine and test-bed. Corrr she looks gorgeous too! I just wanna hear/see the top speed of the thing. Could it be so light that in ‘sane’ mode it might make it to Oz? Not with me in it wouldn’t, I’d kill myself pronto in it.

As he says, you NEED to refresh his  page to update your cache to see the latest info on the page.

For those too daunted by the size of his post, here’s my favourite bit, fascinating, scary:

“Well, if you are like me and Vertical Power, you sit in a tiny, hot, sweaty office while techs scramble around the airplane outside and have the following conversation:
“All right so what is the gear indicator supposed to do? I just need 3 lights that are red or green on the display, right?” “Well, you need green for down, and I don’t know what red means.” “Broken?” “But how will the system KNOW that it is broken?” “If the gear is not where it is supposed to be?” “That is called ‘in transit’” “OK” “That should be indicated by some sort of in transit indication, like maybe yellow… or maybe a yellow and black barber pole.” “Now how do we know if we are in transit?” “The handle should say one thing, and the contact-switches in the gear system should say something else” “But what if the gear hydraulic PUMP is running? Shouldn’t THAT indicate that we are in transit?” “Maybe, or maybe not.. .what if there is a hydraulic leak? Then, the pump could run even if the gear is not in transit” “But that only happens a little bit, right, to re-build pressure?” “It depends on how fast the leak is” “But what if the solenoid fails, so that the pump is working fine, but the gear won’t move? What is the indication there?” “Can we even TELL if the solenoid has failed?” (pause) “And what if the pilot has commanded gear down, but the gear has NOT GONE DOWN BECAUSE HE IS ABOVE V-LE?” “Wait, you mean V-le or V-o?” “V-e is is landing gear extension… how fast you can lower your gear…” “NO! V-le is landing gear EXTENDED… how fast you can go with the gear EXTENDED, even if that is FASTER than V-lo, which is how fast you can OPERATE the gear.” “Ok so we do not let them OPERATE the gear above V-lo, but there has to be an over-ride in case the airspeed sensor fails… we don’t want that to keep the pilot from lowering the gear!” “Yah there needs to be an over-ride, but if the handle is set above V-lo and the over-ride is not engaged and the plane cannot lower the gear, how do we color the indicators?” “Wait, don’t we need to to INDICATE to the pilot somehow that he is going too fast to lower the gear? How do we SHOW that?” (pause) “How about each indicator looks like a little up and down arrow if he can raise or lower the gear, and a square if he cannot?” “No! Too busy! You will have SIX arrows for THREE indicators! We always had a little circle around the gear lights that was white to indicate that the gear could not move, and green to say that it can.” “HUH? NO WAY! That is too many colors! It won’t look good and the green circle will be confused with a green gear light!” “We never had any complaints…” “What about some lines above or below the gear lites to indicate that the lites cannot move?” “But they DON’T move. They change color.” “Maybe if we put a hashed background of diagonal warning stripes behind the gear, then that will make it clear that the gear cannot be moved.” “What does RDD say about all this?” “We have noticed that sometimes the pump runs when there is a leak or something… you can NOT hear it in flight, an indication that the pump is running would be good…” “How do we SHOW that?” “An annunciator?” “No way… too busy.. too many annunciators.. it will look like something is WRONG” “Well, maybe something is… he said it can be caused by a LEAK” “How about the gear lites PULSE to show that the pump is running, so you see some motion there?” (pause) “Well, you could TRY it…”

And on and on and on it goes, for hour and hours, talking through every possible failure and interface and fallback and backup and over-ride… for HOURS, just for the landing gear activation and indication!”

As I said, fascinating, scary. Not the least because this is just a teensy excerpt from Austin’s updates!

Seeya

S