My X-Plane Testing - 210 degree Projection - New Videos

[Maurice]

How is the crabbing effect with XP? Crabbing is not apparent on your video, so does XP automatically correct for it or did you make any adjustments to minimize the effect.

Also, is WideView part of XP or is is it still a separate component? Since the clouds did not transition smoothly from one view to the next, did you have a chance to see how planes transition from one view to the next when you are on the ground?

Thanks,
Maurice

[XOrionFE]

How is the crabbing effect with XP? Crabbing is not apparent on your video, so does XP automatically correct for it or did you make any adjustments to minimize the effect.

Also, is WideView part of XP or is is it still a separate component? Since the clouds did not transition smoothly from one view to the next, did you have a chance to see how planes transition from one view to the next when you are on the ground?

Thanks,
Maurice

Great questions.   The crabbing effect doesn't seem to be there at all but I haven't done any long approaches so I need to test that more.  I will get back to you on that.   One thing I think needs to be adjusted is the height while sitting on the runway because it seems a little low to me considering I am supposed to be in a 737.   This model is the x737 so not sure if it was supposed to be higher or whether XPlane puts everyone in a GA sized height and you have to modify.     

The wideview functionality is built into X-Plane so nothing extra needed.    I have another video I am trying publish but it seems that not all clouds are problems but some definitely as you saw in the video had issues.  This may be something that is in the bug tracks already in Xplane that would hopefully be corrected later.   The question about airplanes I have not looked at yet but will try to capture that in next video session to see how it behaves.  I believe I recall seeing some planes taxing and didnt notice any issues.

I should note that you can see in some of the videos road traffic and in Xplane it is just phenominal.   Not that we care when bombing around the sky at 30+ thousand feet though :-)

[Maurice]

I should note that you can see in some of the videos road traffic and in Xplane it is just phenominal.   Not that we care when bombing around the sky at 30+ thousand feet though :-)

I love seeing road traffic when landing but unfortunately I had to set the road traffic to zero so as not to end up with a slide show in FSX. I suspect that the reason your frame rates are not much higher than what they are is probably because of the road traffic as well. Still, your frame rates are excellent & I wish I could have the same with only 10% road traffic 

Maurice

[Kennair]

I should note that you can see in some of the videos road traffic and in Xplane it is just phenominal.   Not that we care when bombing around the sky at 30+ thousand feet though :-)

I love seeing road traffic when landing but unfortunately I had to set the road traffic to zero so as not to end up with a slide show in FSX. I suspect that the reason your frame rates are not much higher than what they are is probably because of the road traffic as well. Still, your frame rates are excellent & I wish I could have the same with only 10% road traffic 

Maurice

Actually I think if Scott loaded up FSX on this system you would get similar frame rates with similar traffic, and maybe even birds!  However I do love the water effect, not sure about the clouds though, they seem like they're out of a Tim Burton movie sometimes.

Keep up the good work Scott, I'm playing with XP9.7 at the moment until my XP10 disc arrives.

Ken.

[Bob Reed]

[/quote]

I love seeing road traffic when landing but unfortunately I had to set the road traffic to zero so as not to end up with a slide show in FSX. I suspect that the reason your frame rates are not much higher than what they are is probably because of the road traffic as well. Still, your frame rates are excellent & I wish I could have the same with only 10% road traffic 


[/quote]

Actually I think if Scott loaded up FSX on this system you would get similar frame rates with similar traffic, and maybe even birds!  However I do love the water effect, not sure about the clouds though, they seem like they're out of a Tim Burton movie sometimes.

Keep up the good work Scott, I'm playing with XP9.7 at the moment until my XP10 disc arrives.

Ken.
[/quote]

Ken, I am told the clouds in 9.7 are nothing like 10. None of the graphics are supposed to be. Now that being said I do not have 9 so I can not compare. I know the clouds I am seeing are very nice.

[cmdurney]

Scott ,its great you have taken the time to show us all the out standing lighting effects of XP10

Im happy right now with FSX/ Prosim737 setup BUT NOW am very interested in XP10.

I had SA with FSX for about a year but became very unhappy with it so switched to Prosim737 and am loving it......I know you were playing with prosim too......so was wondering if you can comment on XP10 and Prosim737?

Cheers

Chris

[Maurice]

I had SA with FSX for about a year but became very unhappy with it so switched to Prosim737 and am loving it......I know you were playing with prosim too......so was wondering if you can comment on XP10 and Prosim737?

Cheers

Chris

I do not know what version of SimA you were using but there have been huge improvements and more functionality in their current release, so I would not dismiss using XP with SimA if I were you. I use SimA with FSX and I love it although I too was not too happy earlier.

Maurice

Maurice

[cmdurney]

I had SA with FSX for about a year but became very unhappy with it so switched to Prosim737 and am loving it......I know you were playing with prosim too......so was wondering if you can comment on XP10 and Prosim737?

Cheers

Chris

I do not know what version of SimA you were using but there have been huge improvements and more functionality in their current release, so I would not dismiss using XP with SimA if I were you. I use SimA with FSX and I love it although I too was not too happy earlier.

Maurice

Hi Maurice, Ive used all versions....currently using Beta 1.93.

Cheers

Maurice

[XOrionFE]

Scott ,its great you have taken the time to show us all the out standing lighting effects of XP10

Im happy right now with FSX/ Prosim737 setup BUT NOW am very interested in XP10.

I had SA with FSX for about a year but became very unhappy with it so switched to Prosim737 and am loving it......I know you were playing with prosim too......so was wondering if you can comment on XP10 and Prosim737?

Cheers

Chris

Hello Chris,

Glad you enjoyed the videos so far.  Yes I have Prosim737 and actually own a copy of it and have used it extensively.    I think it is a great package though I have not even touched it though for use with X-Plane.   As I understand it Prosim737 does not have direct support for XP10 yet but looks like Marty is planning on it.   So for now you would have to use with XPUIPC I presume?  If you currently own Prosim737 you could give it a shot but maybe wait until Marty offers support for XP10 directly?   Other than that I cant comment on how it works with XP10.   As for Sim-Avionics, two premier builders are using it with XP10 to great success that know their 737 systems far better than me so I decided to follow suite rather than take a chance on all the unknowns of XP10 and Prosim737 right now.    Sim-Avionics is also a superb system that is being enhanced all the time.     

We are so lucky to have all these choices these days!    (<---Thats my way of saying that I am not going to comment about Sim-Avionics versus Prosim737.  I am lucky enough to have both and they are both good systems in their own rights)

Scott

[firstinflight]

I have already provided my feedback to Scott about his work...

Before i ask any more questions about FSX lights or throttle quads, can i ask if there is a way to filter out Scott's posts... I just bought a brand new setup... How in the world can i explain asking for two more within a week of getting first one... :-)

I remember i was a very content person before i came to this forum and even more so i met Scott.
Living close to his place i thought was one of the best things that happened to me...now i wonder...

Humor apart, i told Scott last week, he is one of those few people i know, whose latency between thinking and action is a less than a few nanoseconds. And of course, i will always remain envious of his woodworking skills and his penchant for clean, near perfect work.

The amazing thing is that he knows how to make a virtue out of errors and mistakes. That calls for ingenuity... For those who have been to his workspace and his Sim will know what i am saying....

NICE WORK Scott! As always...

CPJ

[XOrionFE]

I have already provided my feedback to Scott about his work...

Before i ask any more questions about FSX lights or throttle quads, can i ask if there is a way to filter out Scott's posts... I just bought a brand new setup... How in the world can i explain asking for two more within a week of getting first one... :-)

I remember i was a very content person before i came to this forum and even more so i met Scott.
Living close to his place i thought was one of the best things that happened to me...now i wonder...

Humor apart, i told Scott last week, he is one of those few people i know, whose latency between thinking and action is a less than a few nanoseconds. And of course, i will always remain envious of his woodworking skills and his penchant for clean, near perfect work.

The amazing thing is that he knows how to make a virtue out of errors and mistakes. That calls for ingenuity... For those who have been to his workspace and his Sim will know what i am saying....

NICE WORK Scott! As always...

CPJ

Hey CP, when are you coming over to check out this awesome new 3 computer X-Plane Visual setup??!!!    Just kidding....your wife probably would like to shoot me by now....lol

Thank you for the very kind words my friend.      Seriously though...I only feel like I am good at taking all the wonderful ideas and little nuggets from everyone else and incorporating them.    This is an awesome community with research abound.....  Also awesome vendors that support us with awesome products.  Anyone new to building just needs to spend some time reading all the awesome posts by everyone and they have a wealth of knowledge to use.
Scott

[Maurice]

he is one of those few people i know, whose latency between thinking and action is a less than a few nanoseconds.

CPJ

You can say that again. One day he talks about buying three computers and the next day they are bought, installed and running with X-Plane. I would hate to be one of his employees if he expects the same efficiency from mere mortals 

Maurice

[MLeavy737]

  One thing I think needs to be adjusted is the height while sitting on the runway because it seems a little low to me considering I am supposed to be in a 737.   This model is the x737 so not sure if it was supposed to be higher or whether XPlane puts everyone in a GA sized height and you have to modify.     

  I remember posting a pic here somewhere from inside the airplane on the runway.  Ill have to dig a little.  I remember how many people commented that the real one seemed low as well lol. 

To me a good measure of the height is when your taxiing. If anyone has flown smaller GA airplanes at a busy airport its very hard to tell and identify taxiways and where they start etc. all you really see is the ones right in front of you.  In larger airplanes like the 737 ive noticed that now you can really get a better view of taxiways and the airport overall.  Picture being low and everything blending in and now having a more overall top down view. 

Scott... I was almost spending the day up there in ORD Sat.. Was soo close! Was on the phone to trade a trip to get there and someone else picked up part of it and decreased the value of the trip too much... I really want to see that sim in person!!

Mike L

[XOrionFE]

Drop in any time you can Mike.  I will accommodate. Would love to have you over.

[Benja]

Mike,

If you mean the pic you took for me when at the start of the runway, I still have it.

Let me know if you still have it, if not I can post it?

Thanks

Regards
Ben

[blueskydriver]

Hey Scott,

I know I called you and Rob during the trip to get the F16 cockpit without calling either of you back afterwards, and I apologize for that to both of you. It just seems my brain is scattered somewhat lately. Anyhow, I wouldn't mind coming to visit sometime in the future. Let me speak with Simlady and see if she can get time off, if not I might try it alone... My birthday is in August, so that could be a good time to come.

On a different note, about your visuals with XP10, you're getting 23-26 avg on the ground, what about in the air during heavy cloud layers? Also, are using any SLI modes with the GPU's? Did u get the GTX 690 cards for all three machines? If not which cards are in use? Additionally, are you overclocking the cards, overclocking the CPU's, using SSD drives, using Ultimate Defrag (or another defrag program, in which can place XP10 on the outer rings), and do you know if XP10 can take advantage of PhysX or CUDA? I ask those above questions because they would affect your visuals in terms of FPS.

More questions would be concerning the network you're using. You said in a video that sometimes clouds or images are not matching, can that be due to your network speeds and NIC cards? Is your backbone 1Gb or still 100Mb, as well as your cards matching it? Then, how does your avonics computers interact with that network? I am wondering because network lag or interference could be a little drawback if the visual computers are not dedicated. I have not read any of this yet, but it could be important... Even more so, how does the concept of a server and three visual boxes play in, if someone went that way? Is that even possible with XP10?

Finally, have you tried to import anything from FSX over to XP10 yet? It would be nice if we started a file download section here on CB, and then any files that have been converted could be uploaded for sharing; especially, since more folks might see the benefit of that and XP10, if aircraft and scenery were being made easily available. Besides, it saves on recreating them by everyone; maybe, we could do a sectional workload. In other words, each person would do a certain area if scenery and a certain set of aircraft... I'm sure Bob would be first in line to get that King Air.

John

[XOrionFE]

Welcome anytime John.   Would be nice to have you over.

As for your questions....where do I start LOL

I guess the first thing is to remember that I did this setup quite fast.  I built the 3 computers myself over the weekend and didnt even get xplane going until the end of the weekend and now back at work all week in a very busy week for us.  So everything thus far is not tweaked yet.

The computers are each based on the Asus X79pro MB and Intel i7 3930 processors.  The ram is 16 gig DDR3 1866 Corsair Vengence memory.  Single 300 gb WD 10k rpm Velociraptor drives, and EVGA GTX 560ti single video cards.   No SLI.   CPU cooling is with the Corsair H100 liquid cooler. The CPUs are 6 cores and native 3.2 ghz.   I have a mild overclock on them right now of 3.9ghz.  I pushed them up to almost 5ghz and they passed on the bench tests but seemed to have instability problems once running the sim so I dialed back for now.   I will likely be able to push them up further to around 4.5 ghz or so but am going to wait a little before doing that.    The video cards are not doing SLI or tweaked in any way.  Straight out of the box with latest nvidia drivers.    I installed windows 7 and did some of the Nick Needham tweaks specifically related to windows 7 performance and not the ones related to FSX.  I have O&O defrag loaded on each of the systems but have to do the defragging yet.  Didn't have time yet.  I am also running kaspersky AV without any exclusions right now and all security settings turned on at there defaults.  The network cards are running at 1 gb to a dedicated Netgear 8-port gigabyte switch.   Networking and Internet security along with computers have been my vocation for 20 years so I am confident in the overall setup.

So as you can see, there is a lot to do yet.  OC the CPUs, tweak the video settings, defrag the drives, possibly add additional drives to separate spindles, possibly test SSD.., turn down or off AV, etc.   I have barely scratched the surface.   I also still have to play more with the rendering options in Xp.  Turning up more weather, adding multiple cloud layers, turning up more water effects, adding more traffic...all will have more impact on fps.   I have read there is no hardware today available that will allow XP to run at full settings so I have to find the nice misddle ground I can be satisfied with which I guess is no different than what we all have dealt with with FSX.   That said, I like that XP takes full advantage of GPU and video memory as well as multiple cores.   That means over time things can only get better.

As for going with a 4 system setup having one dedicated to the server and others to visuals...I can't answer if it would be any better.  It doesn't seem to me like my server/middle visual machine is running any slower than the other two just doing visuals so I am guessing it wouldn't make much difference but who knows....    Three was expensive enough :-)

I have not tried converting any scenery either yet.

Hope this helps answer.   Still all very early and probably much too improve yet with tweaking.

Scott
So in shor

[rhysb]

I have had a go at scenery conversion and it's quite simple once you have done it! I noticed that actually converting fs9 sceneries was producing better results as fsx took a bit more fiddling with overlay editor.

Scott , absolutely loving your work her and it's great info! I'm using the same gpu cards as you but with the latest i5 processors and happy with the results,

Did you try the warping software in xp10?

[XOrionFE]

Awesome,

What are some of the scenerys you tried?  Sounds very promising.    I have Innsbruck, midway, and Boston Logan.

Can't wait to do some more testing tonight...

Scott

[Bob Reed]

Not to sound, well, snubish but could we put the scenery stuff in another thread? That will make it easer for us to follow all the threads!  Thanks.....

[XOrionFE]

Here is another video showing more terrain features.

Hope you enjoy.
Scott

http://youtu.be/t-QgpbGzEdw

[Kennair]

I must say that twilight sky looks lovely and I do like the fact that time can be changed instantly.  Thanks for the latest update Scott and keep up the good work.  You're helping (or perhaps hindering) many of us here with these.  I feel like making a donation to your project given the amount of ground work you're doing for me in particular 

Thanks,

Ken.

[XOrionFE]

I feel like making a donation to your project given the amount of ground work you're doing for me in particular 

Thanks,

Ken.

Lol, thanks Ken for the nice thoughts.  I am glad to be involved in this effort to try new things and contribute something.    You have already done so much for us all as well with your time and efforts testing new systems.   Heck...you and your original site and airplane were one of the inspirations for me to get into cockpit building in the first place!  I copied my original Cessna sim yoke setup from you!   Anyway, let me know if there is anything specific you want me to test.  Still a work in progress.

Scott

[Kennair]

Lol, thanks Ken for the nice thoughts.  I am glad to be involved in this effort to try new things and contribute something.    You have already done so much for us all as well with your time and efforts testing new systems.   Heck...you and your original site and airplane were one of the inspirations for me to get into cockpit building in the first place!  I copied my original Cessna sim yoke setup from you!   Anyway, let me know if there is anything specific you want me to test.  Still a work in progress.

Scott

Well I guess we're all here for the purpose of sharing our experiences, and happy to do so.  As my website states "Knowledge is useless unless shared" (and yes I pinched that from someone else too).  Your X-Plane testing specifically for cockpit builders is really very enlightening however given that this is really the only remaining serious sim platform that is still under development.  While I am still pursuing P3D it will never offer multicore CPU and modern GPU support and certainly not 64 bit support (which I beleive could be in the wings for XP).

One other question which I'm not sure you've answered.  How is the crabbing effect?  I know you said the height may have been a bit low but wondered about the feeling of runway centerline.  I am keen to use 3 x 42" LCD TV's for my view which will take me closer than your projector screens.

Cheers,

Ken.

[XOrionFE]

The out of the box eye point must already have some offset because I have not done any correction (ie-shifting all angles by 10 degrees to favor the captain) and it seems to be fine.  I will do some more testing of that today.