Question to a flightsim professional - Pete Dowson

[Georg Liigand]

Hello!

I am having a problem which many probably have and it seems like there is no clear solution to this. I have tried in many forums, but haven't got a better answer than check your graphic card drivers. There's nothing to check unfortunately :(

The problem is that when running FS2004 in full screen and opening a right click menu, the top menu by clicking ALT or the chat window in multiplayer mode for example, FS tries to go the "simulated" window mode in order to show those menus. But, every time I open or close the menu, FS freezes for about 2-10 seconds, time depending on the scenery and addon aircraft I have loaded. And in case the delay is longer, FS starts to load up all the textures again after the freeze and it's like extremely annoying :cry: I know that many people have this problem and I've even seen it in some other computers myself. Do you have any suggestions what I should try in order to fix this and maybe there is some FSUIPC setting which could improve this?

Thanks so much!!

I know it's not the best forum for this question, but this is probably the place where the highest professionals hang around so I decided to give it a try :)

[Pete Dowson]

The problem is that when running FS2004 in full screen and opening a right click menu, the top menu by clicking ALT or the chat window in multiplayer mode for example, FS tries to go the "simulated" window mode in order to show those menus.

I'm not sure what "simulated" window mode actually means.

But, every time I open or close the menu, FS freezes for about 2-10 seconds, time depending on the scenery and addon aircraft I have loaded. And in case the delay is longer, FS starts to load up all the textures again after the freeze and it's like extremely annoying

Are you running something like FS Real Time or similar which is set to correct the time? That's the only time I see such things -- if the time is adjusted by more than a few seconds, FS will reload textures. It's to do with its time of day or shading algorithms I think.

Doesn't this occur in Windowed mode too? If not then my guess is wrong and your other advisors are correct, it's to do with your video card and its drivers. It sounds like their memory "expires" and their huge cache of textures needs reloading. This is one of the problems of large memory video cards -- similar effects can be obtained with sound cards which do a lot of wave file caching.

But I've no answers, except to (a) run in Windowed mode instead -- there is, these days, usually no penalty apart from the title bar at the top of screen, which can be kept very small at high resolutions, and (b) why go into the Menus in any case when flying? If you are not flying at the time, then surely the time spent for FS to sort itself out is nothing to get upset about. If you are flying then using menus is extremely unrealistic and disruptive in any case.

Sorry if you expected more from me, but graphics and video behaviour has never been my subject at all.

Regards,

Pete

[Georg Liigand]

Thanks Peter for the good explanations. Actually I don't want to switch through the menus at all when flying, but sometimes it's just necessary if you accidentally hit the mouse right button for example...

Thanks anyways!