Author: Tom Tsui

256: Switching to P3D — An Afterthought

| Tom Tsui

I being as a long-time FSX users switched to P3D recently, followings are my thoughts given to a friend who asked if it’s worth to “upgrade” from FSX to P3D.

Merely as a general pilot flight training aid, P3D doesn’t differ much from FSX in my experience.

Therefore, its $199.99 Professional (I’d rather call it a Basic) Licence price-tag is comparatively quite high.   If someone wants to develop software for it, he/she has to pay an extra $9.95 to Lockheed Martin every month.

Even though its $59.95 Academic Licence seems to be more reasonable, users of this Licence should note that they are positioning themselves as undergraduate or K-12 or pilot students.  I wonder how many users of this group are actually coming from the defined categories.

Moreover, Continue reading →

Location Suggestion in Switzerland and Italy

| Tom Tsui

Hi Friends,
–
I’ll be in Europe for a two-week travel in September.    During the stay, my son and his fiancée are planning to spend two days for wedding photos.
–
Wonder any of you have any good locations in Switzerland and Italy (not necessarily big cities) to recommend for such occasion.
–
I’d appreciate it very much.
–
I’ll arrive in Munich first and the rest of the journey hasn’t been finalized yet. Perhaps we will be meeting somewhere, sometime then.
–
Tom
–
Edit:
Received many good suggestions in just a few hours. Thank you!

255: A Lesson Learned – The SLI Myths

| Tom Tsui

Started from dissembling the rudders for fixing a bad contact throughout the whole morning, then carried on to adding extra power to enhance the stability of the computer’s IO ports in the afternoon,  my day was full of grease and rust.  Since the chassis was opened, I unplugged the second graphics card on a whim.  Holy cow, my P3Dv2 ran even better.

MSI-SLI

Continue reading →

254: The SkyShifter

| Tom Tsui

TechLevel03W
I don’t know how you use REX (Real Environment Extreme) in your system.   I just choose the environment textures I prefer and then install them into FSX or P3D for good.   True, I might pick a different cloud or sky texture once or twice a month to give the simulator a fresh look.   But that’s all.

Based on the concept from my earlier ShadeShifter, which allows the changes of tones and colors of the environment in the simulator everyday, I recently wrote another utility that SkyShiftercould inject different pre-extracted sky and ocean textures from REX according to the calendar day of the month, prior to the loading of FSX or P3D.   And these textures have been further mixed to maximize allowable texture-combo variations.  In other words, my sky and ocean now look differently each day.

Continue reading →

News: Dovetail Games’ Licensing Deal with Microsoft Takes Flight

| Tom Tsui

Referred by Hans (VH-ANS) for a recent game licensing deal between Dovetail (Rail Simulator developer) and Microsoft he saw on the PC Pilot magazine.   Worth a look if you skipped it like I did.

Sounds interesting enough to create some expectations.  Not a bad thing.

 

253: My Cockpit View Switcher

| Tom Tsui

TechLevel03W
During the testing for my Cockpit View display, I needed to switch back and forth numerous times between the Normal View and the Wide View.   And the files involved with the necessary changes are:

  1. fsx.CFG
    (Prepar3D.CFG)
  2. Cameras.CFG
  3. aircraft.CFG

To avoid confusion while making changes to these files directly,  I instead created two additional copies from each of them and named these new files the “-Normal” version and the “-Wide” version accordingly:

  1. fsx.CFG,  fsx-Normal.CFG,  fsx-Wide.CFG
    (Prepar3D.CFG,  Prepar3D-Normal.CFG,  Prepar3D-Wide.CFG)
  2. Cameras.CFG,  Cameras-Normal.CFG,  Cameras-Wide.CFG
  3. aircraft.CFG,  aricraft-Normal.CFG,  aircraft-Wide.CFG

Then, I could separately Continue reading →

252: My Cockpit View 2014 Update Part 2

| Tom Tsui

TechLevel02W
Although my cockpit display has already reached the widest possible angle from the aircraft.CFG settings (InitialZoom=0.3 and WideViewAspect=False) stated in last post, I still couldn’t help asking myself in the last two months if it is possible to further widen it.  The longer I flightsim with the setting, the stronger desire I want to expand the cockpit-span angle.

No doubt,  the cockpit view (aka Normal View) from above configurations is giving quite a prominent result than the one from my previous single 30-inch monitor set up.   However, it is still comparatively narrow because the horizontal field of human eyes could reach up to 180 degrees or beyond even though the effective range is about 70 to 120 degrees.

Solution, obviously, could only be sought from changing the WideViewAspect from False to True.   And surely the prerequsite of keeping the glare-shield true to scale remains unchanged.

NormalWideCockpit-01S
The overall range of display (bottom image) has roughly improved by about 10 percent with no significant distortion towards the edges on both ends

Continue reading →

251: My Cockpit View 2014 Update Part 1

| Tom Tsui

TechLevel02W
With the three 27-inch monitors in place, I’ve been able to bring up a glare-shield of the Cessna 172 panel that matches the size of 41 inches (105 cm) as if in the real cockpit. To achieve the result, I set InitialZoom=0.3 in the Virtual Cockpit of the aircraft.CFG, and WideViewAspect=False in either fsx.CFG or Prepar3D.CFG.

This creates the widest scenery display in front of the wind-shield from my 8040 x 1440 monitor-combo, without the appearance of distorted scenery objects towards the edges on both ends (see image below).

Click to see full image in 1/3 of the original size
Click to see full image in 50% of the original size

Followings are the Camera Definitions for my C172:   Continue reading →

250: New Gauges – Sorry, Not Free

| Tom Tsui

Time flies.  The next Anniversary of FSX Times is coming in two months.   FSX Times will be four years old.

In the note for the last Anniversary day, I mentioned that it’s very likely that I would set up a Donation link for my blog so that I could get some free cups of coffee while sharing my hours of works and creations for the flight simulation friends.

Unfortunately, Paypal’s requirements towards oversea donation uses are harsh.   In my country, only registered charity organizations would get their approvals.

Since I’ve developed many gauges for the flight instrument panel (FIP) users for free for years, I believe it shouldn’t be irritating if I charge a small price for some of the new gauges that are complex and time-consuming to build.   Updates to these gauges, of course, will be free and be on high priority.

Continue reading →