On The Glideslope

Taburet Lighting: First Test

2016-04-10

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Screen Caps
I posted earlier that I had tried out Night Environment for night lighting, and had liked it a lot. But they don’t have coverage for the full US, so yesterday I downloaded Taburet 3d for a big chunk of the Rocky Mountain West. Here are some shots. The lights are a bit bright, but I think I can adjust that, and I think they look great.

Here’s the full gallery …

[gallery_bank type=”images” format=”masonry” title=”false” desc=”false” responsive=”true” display=”all” sort_by=”sort_order” animation_effect=”” album_title=”false” album_id=”2″]

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Review: iFixit 54 Bit Driver Kit

2016-04-10

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Product Reviews
One of the things a person has to do when building (and constantly tinkering with) a flight simulator is get into, update, repair, change, deconstruct, and reconstruct lots of different devices. Nearly all of these have screws and fasteners, and most of those screws and fasteners are some weird head design you’ve never seen before, and they’ve been designed that way precisely to make you less likely to get into, update, repair, change, deconstruct, and reconstruct that particular device.

Need to go small? Sure …

Over and over again in this process I’ve been very thankful for the iFixit 54 bit driver kit that I picked up from iFixit last year. The kit costs $24,95, but between you and me, it’s probably only worth three times that.

As the name suggests, the kit has 54 bits. They cover every type of screw head I’ve so far had to deal with. The kit also has a flexible neck attachment (which, incidentally, I used to tighten the door handle on our freezer yesterday), other bit attachments, and an extender.

Build quality is spectacular, as is fit and finish. You can read more about the details at their site, but if you were to ask me which three things you should have sitting around to help build a basement flight simulator I’d say, in no particular order, (1) a circular saw, (2) velcro tape, and (3) the iFixit 54 bit driver kit.

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VFR Flight From SLC#2 to Heber Valley

2016-04-09

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Videos
And here’s the aforementioned video of the dusk flight from Salt Lake to Heber. Hope you like it.

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SLC#2 to Heber Screen Caps

2016-04-09

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Screen Caps
Today I took a little VFR flight from SLC Airport #2 to Heber Valley airport, up Little Cottonwood Canyon, over the top to Sundance, and then over Deer Creek Reservoir for final approach. There’s a video forthcoming, but here are some screen shots from along the way (with the full gallery below).

[gallery_bank type=”images” format=”thumbnail” title=”true” desc=”false” responsive=”true” display=”all” sort_by=”sort_order” animation_effect=”” album_title=”false” album_id=”1″]

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File Under “Wow”: Night Environment

2016-04-06

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Add Ons, Screen Caps
After reading so many good reviews of it over at AVSIM, tonight I decided to download the Night Environment scenery for Pennsylvania. I don’t know if I got the install quite right, and it took a minute to figure out that I should turn off the default autogen scenery (which also makes lights), and I probably should have turned off the Ultimate Terrain scenery, too … but even with all that, it looks REALLY great. Lights from horizon to horizon. I had good frame rates with this – 30 fps or so – but it took a huge chunk out of my working memory. I know with some tuning (and turning off other stuff I don’t need to see at night) memory won’t be an issue, and the lights will look even more like the real thing.

I took some screen captures during the flight. Can’t wait to do more.

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An IFR Day In Philly

2016-04-06

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Screen Caps
I’m starting to figure out how to take screen captures in the simulator. Here are some from a quick weekend flight around Philadelphia, where it was raining and IFR conditions most of the day.

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Saitek, A2A, And Wanting To Have Your Cake And Eat It, Too

2016-04-06

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Saitek, Uncategorized
My favorite aircraft in P3D is A2A’s truly remarkable Accu-Sim Cessna 182 Skylane. It looks, flies, feels, and works as close to the real thing as I can imagine a simulated aircraft can look, fly, feel, and work. But it does not seem to communicate well with the Saitek Pro Flight Switch Panels or Flight Information Panels. In matters that have been better documented here and here, the Switch Panel doesn’t play nice with all the appropriate 182 switches (the alternator and battery switches in particular for many people, and the avionics switch for me as well), and the FIP’s tend to report incorrect readings on the RPM gauge and several of the engine / fuel gauges. While none of this is Earth shattering stuff, these issues can be an annoyance in the least, and sort of a problem if you’re trying to learn and follow actual startup / shutdown procedures or if you’re flying a realistic sim where RPM and mixture matter for procedures and performance (which I am in both cases).

Tom Tsui’s Awesome C172 Gauges

You can kludge and configure your away around the switch problem (although I wasn’t able to get this to work for me), and I’ve simply saved my default “cold and dark” P3D scenario with the battery and alternator switches already on, and assigned the avionics switch to a toggle on the throttle quadrant. But there seems to be no workaround for the FIP gauges. Tom Tsui at FSX Times has been working to get these things to play nice with each other, and he finally tossed in the towel and asked for his money back. Me, I’ve been torn between flying the A2A with these concessions, or the Carenado 182, which works great but honestly (and with respect as it’s a great piece of software) just doesn’t feel as realistic to me as an airframe. When I fly it I find myself missing the A2A.

I have noticed one odd thing, though, and it’s that the RPM gauge seems to work for me some of the time. I’ve had some flights where it seems to be reporting the correct data, and then I’ll have a flight where it doesn’t get over 1,500 RPMs. I don’t know if that’s true or just my impression, but it seems to be happening, and I don’t know why that would be other than something interfering with the communication between the panel and P3D.

It looks like Tom and the creator of the SPAD.neXt alternate Saitek drivers have been working on a fix for all of this. I hope they are, that it works, and that it’s available soon. In the meantime, it is what it is.

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Video: Newport, OR to Albion, CA

2016-04-04

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Videos
Yesterday I mentioned the VFR flight I made from Newport, OR to Albion, CA. I put together a little video of the trip, and here it is. There’s even a surprise co-pilot appearance about half-way through …

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New GoPro

2016-04-03

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Videos
I splurged and replaced my five-year-old GoPro with a new model. And boy is the low-light performance better! Here’s a brief video from today’s flight (be sure to watch it in 1080p HD), and I’ll have more video up soon.

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Problem Solved (Mostly)

2016-04-03

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Configuration
As I posted yesterday, I’ve been on the hunt for a memory leak in the basement sim. I devoted a good portion of yesterday to the job, and rather than mess with uninstalling and installing things one-by-one, instead I uninstalled everything (EVERYTHING: the sim, add-ons, aircraft, textures, land classes, instruments – all of it), and started from scratch with new installations. My method was to install the sim first, and then install an add-on, run the sim to test stability, exit, install
the next add-on, repeat.

The results? Everything worked great up to the very last add-on, the GTN 750 GPS software from Flight 1. There were no problems with memory, but soon after adding it Prepar3d started to throw some crashes, as did the RemoteFlight connector. I uninstalled the GTN, and a much more stable sim returned. I’m not sure why those would conflict, but that seems to be the case, and I hope I can find a fix because the GTN 750 running on the 7-inch touchscreen in the cockpit panel is an awesome tool. I also installed SPAD instead of the Saitek drivers, but it actually was making communication with my panels more difficult, so I uninstalled it and went with the latest drivers from Saitek which worked fine.

But GPS or not, I’m left with a spectacular flight simulator. I’m getting 30-60 frames per second, with the A2A C 182 Skylane, high graphic settings, high-resolution textures, max scenery and autogen settings, Active Sky Next live weather, AI traffic, and MultiCrew Experience running in the background. Today I took a 3-hour VFR flight from Newport, OR to Albion, CA (KONP OTH CEC FOT ENI KLLR – click the image at right to see the route, which was VOR navigation the whole way), and had not a single hitch.

So I’m REALLY happy. The sim loads fast and runs great. There are a few micro stutters, but I disabled hyper threading to try to maximize my VAS usage and tomorrow I’ll re-enable it and set my Affinity Mask back to 116, and that should be the end of those. Most important, my memory usage is rock solid, with my available VAS never dropping below 1.3 gig. Now I just need to ping Flight1 support and see what’s up with the GTN. Maybe they know of a fix. In the meantime, it sure is fun flying the basement sim.

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