PeterR
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Posts posted by PeterR
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Wow, that's some avatar Lizardo's got here. :shock:
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Phew! I've been swamped with real life. Haven't flown in ages. The good thing about being away for a while, though, is that I was able to pick up FS2004 on sale last weekend for only $20. :P
Hi Francois and Mike! :)
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Well, fixing the water would help alleviate this problem. Adding new features when the fundamentals aren't right doesn't help much. GIGO: Garbage in, garbage out.
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Yep. The brightness and hue of the paint under the reflection impacts how it looks on 2k2 also.
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When the driver is set to Application, it doesn't mean that the application is doing the work. It just means that the settings in the application will tell the driver what settings to use. This way, you can have one game at 2x and another at 4x and each game will configure the card accordingly. If you set the value directly in the driver, games have no control over it.
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Since FS has to pull data from the hard drive as the sim runs, improving read throughput will probably help too. Even though IDE interfaces go up to 133 MB/s, hard drives do not. One way to improve read speed is by using more than one hard drive.
In Windows NT/2000/XP, you can put multiple drives into a RAID configuration via software (i.e. you don't have to buy a RAID controller card). RAID enables each drive to pump data to the PC thereby increasing the overall speed of data loading. RAID 0, striping, is enough to improve read performance, however it's not as safe as RAID 5 because if one drive in a RAID 0 configuration fails, the whole array is unreadable. As a result, it's better to use RAID 5.
How much speed difference does it make? With one IDE drive, you may get around 35 MB/s no matter how fast your IDE controller is. With two drives in an array, you'll get about twice that much. If you can set up an array of three drives, each on their own channel, you'll actually use the full capacity of 32-bit IDE (133 MB/s).
To read some more about it,
http://www.tomshardware.com/howto/20010906/
This article only talks about RAID 0 but RAID 5 will also improve throughput because the data is strill spread across multiple drives. Since RAID 5 can recover from the failure of a drive in the array, it's preferred in most cases over RAID 0.
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Hi Jeff,
That explains it. Russell added me to the beta team too which was why I was puzzled how you got 2k4 support. :D If all goes as planned, FSHost is going to be great with both versions of FS.
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I have a Radeon 9500 Pro. By reducing AA and AF to 4x and 4x instead of 6x and 16x, respectively, I've been able to get great frame rates even with clouds set at 100% (instead of only 50% as shown at the above web page).
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Jeff,
Is FS2k4 support being provided by FSHost or is the server running 2k4?
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FS2004 allows you to select the port on which you want to connect so the IP address doesn't have to change. However, FSHost does need to be updated to support the new multiplayer protocol. It's currently being worked on so have no fear. It'll be here when it's ready.
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Yeah, looks like the site's down. Maybe had too much traffic. :(
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Oh, I see. A friend of mine has been tinkering with the AI plane settings and he doesn't see any difference in frame rates when changing the %. So, at least the AI engine seems to have little impact.
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I turned on full AI (100%) at LAX at 5:00 pm and stayed in the pattern for a while but only saw three for four planes at a time. Frame rates were 15-20 depending upon where I was looking (locked at 20). Is there a better time to catch a lot of planes?
By the way, the ATC is pretty nice. And boy is it good to have taxiway signs! I really missed those from FU3 (never got around to installing the sign add-ons for 2k2).
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I'll have to try it. I'm a bush pilot so I rarely fly into those areas. 8) Stay tuned.
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Check any XML gauges in 2002 aircraft that you load into CoF. There have been problems with bitmap size/alignment in some XML gauges depending upon how they were written.
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I've found the following to be a good balance of image quality and performance on Radeon 9500 Pro:
4x AA
4x AF
Performance mode
If you run at very high resolutions (e.g. 1600x1200) you can probably turn off AA altogether. The 3D clouds have lots of textures which makes for a lot of work on AA. When I had AA set to 6x and Quality, I could only get good performance with 20% 3D clouds. Now, at 4x and Performance, I use 90%.
Overall, I have everything at nearly maximum and get 30 fps so I lock at 20. In the Thunderstorms theme, I get about 17 but that's still okay.
P4 - 2.40B
512 MB PC2700
Radeon 9500 Pro (running at 4X AGP due to motherboard limitation)
Win98SE
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Yes, that's what I meant. The drawback to FSHost time syncing is that it can only update the sim-local time, not sim-UTC. As a result, if you start in one part of the world, and someone else starts in another part of the world, you'll both have the same time of day. Of course, this isn't a problem for the event session since everyone would be in the same time zone.
As for keeping the time correct, have you tried using FS Real Time when you connect to the server? Will it allow the time in FS to be set (i.e. adjust its offset) and then continue to keep the time correct? I would guess not.
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That's what I've found but wanted to get as much feedback as possible.
I also found out from Russell that when FSHost sets the time, FS interprets it as being "local" sim time. So, the sim time will be set in whatever timezone your plane happens to be in. What this means is that people located in different parts of the sim world would start the session with the same time of day (contrary to how the real world works).
By the way, here's a link to FS Real Time:
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I don't know. I'm asking as well. :wink:
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CPU: P4, 2.4 GHz (533 MHz FSB)
RAM: 512 MB PC2700 DDR (CAS 2)
Video: ATI Radeon 9500 Pro
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Ah, yes, I've heard of that little tool. It's the one that fixes inaccuracies in the FS clock, right? You'd still have to get everyone to use it and set it to the same offset, though.
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This issue was mentioned in one of the recent threads after the fly-in. It's also been a passing comment during events on Bush Net too. Essentially, the problem is that if everyone's time is different, they don't see the same lighting nor the same weather. Granted, different weather programs can generate different weather but keeping all players' sim clocks in sync would help.
FSHost, which EFFC and Bush Net's servers run on has the ability to set every player's sim time based on the server's game time. The server's game time can be the actual server time or a time set in FSHost by the server admin.
Since the EFFC event session is different than the EFFC backup session (on Terry's server), the event session could be set to Pacific time and configured to set everyone's sim time accordingly. The backup session could remain as-is (no forced time setting).
What do you think?
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EFC-309, PeterR, KSJC
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Hi everyone,
Thanks for the flight. Had lots of fun. I missed earlier fly-ins and was very happy to have caught up with everyone on this flight. It had been quite a while since I had flown in that area. Hope to do it again in the near future.
Memberlist 2 - EFFC Members Who JOINED SINCE 3 DECEMBER 2003
in EFFC Information Forum
Posted
Wow, the callsigns are up to the 800s now! EFC is really growing. :D