Since we heard the bad news about Philipp’s office being flooded out (yeah sure, no competitors were involved in that mishap!) and figure the imminent release of the bird might be delayed for a few days, I spent the afternoon flying her and marvelling at the wing components and that landing gear bogey assembly. An absolute dream to fly, and like most modern airliners, quite easy to perform a smooth, ‘skilled’ looking approach.
For some reason the replay feature is nerfed in my beta of x-plane, so all this footage was filmed live. If I’m outside the aircraft, I’m flying from that perspective. If the camera’s looking back, so am I while flying! That’s for you purists who’ll no doubt pick apart every second of this movie, criticising my technique. This is just a demo of her best assets.
Enjoy! Hopefully it’ll make your heart flutter like it did mine. The guys are doing a great job with an extremely complex aircraft, so if it’s not released on time, don’t fret, as it will be well worth the wait.
Here’s a video of one of the beautiful coastal ‘resort’ towns that we’ve holidayed at in my younger years, in Southern New South Wales, Australia. I say ‘resort’ because in typical Aussie fashion, it’s very laid back and hardly a 5 star resort by official standards. But for fun, sun and safe enjoyment by the kids, as well as good holiday food and a magnificent rural backdrop, it’s 6 star in my book! It’s nice and close to Merimbula, my favourite childhood holiday spot, oh we spent so many years going there in our summer hols. We even went recently with friends, discovering that the Pambula Holiday Village had the biggest ‘kids’ jumping balloon/bladder in the world. Bladder? Have a few beers and try to hold THEM in after getting on this, with a stomach full of oysters. Yes that’s my son, a little younger though. Not a happy chappy?:
Some real life piccies, to compare to what you see in the video -
Is there anyone in this plane? Are the drones out already?
I think you’ll agree that the YMRA Airfield produced by my favourite chaps at Aussie X, especially “kman”, is very special, a work of art and frankly, of payware quality. Its blending with the Orbx AU Region is top notch. I found the whole spot quite emotional, bringing back fun memories - of getting sunstroke and blisters after being in the water and sun for 3 hours too long. My fair ‘English Rose’-like skin just wasn’t built for it. But 10 year olds don’t care! You haven’t lived until you’re shivering uncontrollably at 9Pm on a hot night, from the after effects sunburn. Then drifting off to sleep with the lilting sensation of riding the waves. Such beautiful sim scenery brings back these memories, so powerful. Sometimes our computers are not just for seeing an ultra-perfect simulation of prop-wash or marvelling at the artistry in an aircraft’s altimeter.
The Ant’s Airplanes Drifter was one of the first addons I bought for FSX, it’s still one of the best available for the sim, such good detail and probably the best animated and crafted pilot/passenger combos around. Compulsory buy. I love that he’s modelled (I assume!) himself and his little paunch, such a realistic chap.
Music in the video is by Abbie Cardwell, I’ve featured her beautiful voice and her ‘band of leading men’ before, and will endeavour to do so when the music fits. I can’t see this song ‘Come Pick Me Up’, from her great album ‘The bare bones sessions’ in the web version of iTunes.
Surprisingly there is still a reasonable amount of ‘tweaking’ required to get FSX running sweet on this new core i7 3770k/GTX670 combo, but not too taxing and once done, it’s excellent. I apologise for the guttural sounds I make in the last 2 mins of this. I got carried away as usual.
It’s nice to actually use the PC again, rather than just install or troubleshoot!
Here’s the evidence of how it handles Xplane 10 with extremely high settings. Very pleased, in most respects. Those clouds can still plummet the fps, but it’s at different scales now. I could run them at 80% with bearable results, but since xplane needs high 20′s to feel fluid, I pulled them back to 40. Ha, I couldn’t run them above 11 for quite awhile with the trusty old 920.
We just received the alert and feel that it’s important enough to call for this urgent notice.
Haven’t watched it yet myself, will look forward to it. As an added bonus, they’re also chatting with the charming Kevin Miller, a well-known developer in AVSIM land who built some of the MS Flight aircraft like the beautiful Maule that I enjoyed so much. Will be nice to hear his thoughts about that disaster and what could have been!
FS Break is a great podcast/live feed service, plenty of news coverage and witty banter. I do long for the old days with Mark though, he was a real character!
Oh, just a little extra news while I’m at it, in between moving disk images to my new Mabus. A2A have finally announced what I’ve longed for ages, the development of more GA aircraft using their excellent accusim. Get this, their next GAs will be the C172 and Piper Cherokee!
My, hear how the winds down in Melbourne are howling along, with sleets of rain. Kinda like the Warning Wind of sim-land. Bitter changes always around the corner, of unexpected intensity.
Ugh, enough of that, let’s get to the point – Despite my new re-re-discovery of the beauty of FSX, I was still pretty annoyed at the too-stable feeling of flight in some of the default planes. Yes, the A2A beasts are ‘alive’ and the PMDG 737 NGX has a very satisfying flight feel, but there was something ‘missing’. A little more ‘oomph’ needed in the winds, some variety, a little pucker factor to offset the safe feeling I get sitting in my giant armchair with its 4 cupholders and ‘personal massager’ here in my man-hole.
Fortunately I had REX from last year, so I was set, roight?
Nope. All combinations of weather settings didn’t work to my liking. Its weather engine is quite slow, so slow in fact that I sometimes wonder if it’s working at all. I really think they need to work not only on the speed of its update progress, but feedback to the user, to keep him or her confident that things really are changing behind the scenes.
Coincidentally, Active Sky 2012 went on sale recently, check it out here. So, as I say in the video, I ‘took one’ for you simmers out there and paid my approx $35 for yet another weather engine! For a sim I’m only just starting to look at! God my credit card is going to melt this month. You better donate once I rip myself off this sim and get around to adding that fat button to this site!
So the video above is my VERY BRIEF U.I. overview of this excellent addon. It demonstrates its speed of weather generation, a significant advantage over REX. I’m working on another video to show off some to the effects possible with AS2012, but for now I can say that the conclusion I make in the video definitely stays. I’ll be using AS2012 solely from now on, just keeping REX on the hard-drive in case they make some BIG improvements to the weather aspects.
And yes, I love the AS2012 cloud textures, as much as, if not more than the REX ones. REX produces stunning, dramatic views out the window. AS2012 isn’t far behind, but as a few in the forums have mentioned, it actually looks more realistic to me, more subtle. And the fog and low cloud editing features – all I can say is ‘wow’. I can’t wait to share the video with you! That’ll be tomorrow, ahead of doing some more flight testing of X-Plane’s upcoming 777. Ah it’s a tough life…
As Chip has mentioned, I’ll be picking up the new PC on Saturday most likely. Specs are:
Intel i7 3770k 3.5 – much research shows that there’s not much point in getting the more expensive chips, games just don’t use their features.
Kingston 8G DDR3 1600Mhz HyperX – ditto, apparently getting 2100mhz super memory is only worth a tiny percentage gain.
Motherboard Asus P8 z77-v (only $135, a little more upmarket than the one offered to me originally)
Cooler Noctua NH-D14 - Seems well regarded in the forums for overclocking the fairly hot Ivy Bridge CPUs.
Gigabyte GeForce GTX670 OC 2GB – Came up very well in the recent Tom’s Hardware review of GPUs. Amazing low price for such a card!
Seagate 1TB SATA3
Coolermaster case (can’t remember the model, it’s an overclocking special, but nice price)
Power – Coolermaster GX750, headroom for the more powerful GPU.
Same OS, Win 7 Home Premium 64bit.
I’ll be transferring over my 2 existing 120gig SSDs and Asus Xonar soundcard, as well as the Bluray burner. Still using my trusty LG 27 inch monitor, no need to replace until the Nvidia 3D ones get MUCH cheaper, or the consumer version of OCULUS RIFT is released. Then we’ll all be in nerd-heaven.
Wow, that burner was a great buy, around $100. In one afternoon I was able to backup ALL our digital videos and pics, as well as 90gigs of music. Great peace of mind knowing that we have a second backup, in a reasonably secure, physical medium.
Per the intentions of this site, I’ve spent more time back in FSX land to sample a few files and see how my PC is handling FSX compared to X-Plane, given recent frustations with FPS in high detailed locations (HDR On) like KSEA and KILM. Continue Reading
Kevin is an amazing composer/musician, check out his site that’s full of royalty free music, just like I’ve used here. Please donate if you use his music, it’s a great resource to all of us!
Oh, you don’t have to search long for this fantastic, FREE inclusion in Xplane 10. Just go to aircraft/situations and load it up.
Following on from Chip’s review here, I’ve managed to film an epic TWO PART review.
Feedback on this new style of video is welcome – I like the ‘live’ feel, even I don’t know what’s gonna happen next! It can be a bit disorganised (ain’t life so) and ‘Chaos’tic. If enough people say they like it, I’ll keep it up. If not, I’ll stop.
AN IMPORTANT QUALIFIER
You will see that my ‘setup’ is far from perfect. My windows install seems to be experiencing weird HDR artefact issues. The CRJ-200 that I have fallen back in love with again has a strange missing PFD issue that needs fixing (my fault I’m sure, as I recently dared to install some windows software that overwrote the C++ 2010 redistributables).
So in the first part, I show some horrid frame-rate issues, that most likely are NOT the scenery’s fault. It does push my PC quite a bit, but I can’t blame the talented Drawbridge Designs team. The second part has me flying a less hardware intensive plane, I experienced much better performance. With xp10′s beta run, we should all see improvements along the way, so I’ll keep revisiting. Either that or I’ll throw a 680 & Haswell at it next year!
Update - The devs have confirmed that the ‘misalignment’ of orthos that I report in the vid is not a misalignment, rather a bug in XP10.10 b4 that reveals the joins in the ortho. It looks distracting to me, but it’s not the dev’s fault, nor should it affect any decision to acquire. It’ll only get better.
Those with reasonable PCs should definitely buy this scenery. It is beautiful. It is at the leading edge of scenery design. The artistry is worth the price, just a few ‘opportunities for improvement’ that I’ve noted.
Please support the development of new X-Plane scenery to fill our world with places as pretty as this (yes, Chip and I both paid for the scenery ourselves). Gettit from X-Aviation here.
