FSX is just annoying sometimes

[PilatusTurbo]

In advance, sorry for the rant. Hopefully some will read this and have some answers to these stupid issues. Other than that, me just blowing off steam to those who can understand. Small issue in the big picture (FS issues), but hey.

I just don't get it.

FSUIPC saves the previous flight, and you can set that as a default flight. I've done this for years with FS, however, FSX just decided to start closing oddly and it reloads the same damned flight every time. Just these little nuances that are stupid. When I hit file and exit it closes down normally to my desktop, then there's a weird millionth of a second black screen. So, I'm assuming it's not closing correctly, or some issue is causing it to reset to that one last flight like 3 months ago when that happens.

It still has performance issues on my relatively powerful rig. What do you have to do to get this game to run smoothly? I'm running Track IR4, which does cause a huge performance hit, (believe me, it does) but still. It shouldn't have been so poorly optimized. I'm glad those morons at ACES got canned; they deserved it for putting out such a POS game.

Speaking of TrackIR, whenever I go to spot view, I can't move the camera with my joystick hat. My Track IR head tracking moves it, and you have to pause Track IR to use the hat to pan around your plane. Simple issue, but remarkably annoying.

Many of the payware planes I've recently purchased for FSX have horrible radio set-ups. I have to go into the panel.cfg and mod the crap out of them for it to make any logical sense. Seriously, are the developers of these expensive payware planes thinking about realism, or just photorealism? Give me something functional; I don't care if it doesn't look as pretty as the real deal, as long as I can use that damn thing while I'm flying, or flying through turbulence for that matter.

Aside of my bitching, it does have some really cool features. The detail and new flight models, for one, are awesome. I'm just frustrated; this little list of stupid issues is putting me off simming. I just don't want FS to be more work than it is enjoyment.

[Felixthreeone]

Trust me when I say...I know exactly how you feel!!! Seems as though just when you have it running good and setup properly, something goes awry and performance suffers...or an addon works with this and not that...it is an extremely fussy program, and one that even the best hardware can't tame. I personally run with TrackIR, Active sky evolution, REX2 w/OD, ORBX, and all of the Saitek panels plus rudder/yoke/x52pro etc...and registered FSUIPC to boot. And do you know what? The percentage of flights that I have had where I have been satisfied with every aspect has been=0! Something always pops up that annoys me...stutters here and there, panels disconnecting from FSX on their own, blurries, geez I could go on for days. But...when it works the way it should, the results are outstanding, and worth the time troubleshooting and tweaking. I believe there is a freeware fix for the trackIR issue you describe...where it will essentially shut off trackIR for you when you are in an external view. I purchased a copy of EZDOK camera addon to ge the cool in-cockpit movements and found out that it too has a feature which will override trackIR in external view. And I like the addon very, very much..except for the set-up, which if you have lots of addon aircraft can be very time consuming.

...Bottom line is, FSX isn't well put together. There are things even our powerful setups cannot overcome....just alleviate. I cannot comment on your FSUIPC loading issue, as I do not save flights as you do...

...As far as the payware planes? Yeah, I feel you on that one too. Functionality sacrificed for realism. It is a tradeoff. I purchased the new Aerosoft Katana 4X and flew it a bunch of times with lots of smiles on my face. A short time later, I added the saitek panels only to find out that they only work with SOME aircraft...and of course, the Katana wasn't one of them. Radios, same deal in a lot of cases...

And to touch on the 'more work than enjoyment' thing...You will have to try a lot of things to optimize FSX to your specific setup. Forget anything FS9 taught you...none of it applies here. There is a thread in the top of the FSX forum that has all kinds of cool info on things to try. But, it isn't as simple as just buy and fly. FSX needs a bit of massaging to get it to run well, and it needs that on each computer in a slightly different way. You will get it, and I am sure there are plenty of people here far more experience than me to lend a hand. Sorry for the long-ish post!

[Felixthreeone]

Also, just for clarification, what are your system specs?

[mfitch]

Trust me when I say...I know exactly how you feel!!! Seems as though just when you have it running good and setup properly, something goes awry and performance suffers...or an addon works with this and not that...it is an extremely fussy program,

Indeed. I haven't had FSX start correctly for weeks. Most of the recent quirks seem to be external (drivers or similar).

Difficulties with virtual cockpits, augmented by TrackIR which I have set to be rather sensitive, are common for me also. A more recent purchase, Flight1 T182, helped me recognize the main problem as being the scale. To fit into my little monitor everything is quite small requiring greater precision of control than reality. That model also has the "won't work with all my hardware" annoyance. I love the G1000 simulation, but they had to use custom controls rather than default (particularly autopilot). Oh well, I still have a lot of fun.

[stiz]

have you tried uninstalling all the addons that change FSX or add things into it? ;)


I know it can be frustrating when FSX crashes, but before bashing the program and the developers, think what you added into it to enhance the graphics, which in some cases are textures twice as large (or 4 times in some cases!) as the defualt textures. Then all the programs that tap into fsx and force it do something else, or to ignore what it was going to do in the first place .... so ... when you think about it, its amazeing that FSX runs at all really :engel016:

[PilatusTurbo]

All good points, gentlemen. Thanks for not just writing me off as a whiny bitch. LOL :ernae: It was just frustrating earlier today, trying to get some basic, but useful radios into a plane I just got.

I liked your point, Stiz. It is amazing that it does run. However, my roommate and best friend of 18 years is a really cool guy, and an amazing mathematician, and an excellent programmer. He explained that, because hardware has gotten so much faster in the last 10 years, programmers have simply gotten sloppy. The speed of the hardware, he says, allows them all this leeway, and picks up their slack in the form of poor programming. He mentioned that, if programmers were as on top of it as they were 10-15 years ago (when they had to be with slow hardware), with modern hardware many programs would be lightning fast.

Only sad thing, is he is not a gamer, so he doesn't care to debug something like FSX (which, believe me, he could probably do lol :-). He's been programming a smartphone app he expects to go viral once they get legal stuff sorted before its release.

Felix, you kinda helped re-energize my desire to keep working on it, and hopefully get it runnin'. I may just do a full re-install; this is my first FSX install that I've really done anything with, so there is a good chance I gummed stuff up myself.

System specs are not god like, but still, every game I want to run even if it's recent runs pretty dang well. FSX is just an exception, I know.

AMD Phenom X2 550 BE 3.1 OC'd to 3.5 ghz
4 Gigs RAM
GTX 285 with GTX 260 PhysX--Will be upgrading main GPU to GTX 460
300 GB main HD SATA

[stiz]

Phill (i think it was phill) who was one of the devs at ACES did say how they programmed FSX with the mind that clock speeds would get faster and faster (so 3GHz, 4GHz, 5GHz etc which is what the trend was at the time) but instead, just around the time they released FSX, everything went into multiply cores instead. I reckon that if things had gone the way it was expected with faster and faster speeds rather than more cores, FSX would be a lot easier to run. :)

[Dimus]

I definitely know the feeling Pilatus, I've been there myself. However, after tweaking and finding the "sweet spot" for my setup the enjoyment flights are now much more in number than the disappointing ones. You may already be aware but may I suggest Nick Needham's tuning thread below. It has certainly helped me and my specs are lower than yours:

http://www.simforums.com/Forums/setting-up-fsx-and-how-to-tune-it_topic29041&SID=597739871cad484be3czz7bdcz88z2150925926.html

I see you will be getting a 460. I recently got one myself and am very happy with it (good value for money card). It did not help increase my FPS (this is mainly core speed related) but has certainly increased the texture loading speed and reduced a lot of the blurries at high airspeeds.

[PilatusTurbo]

Well, that methodology certainly didn't pan out for them. Horrible investment. LOL You won't see a huge difference between 3.5 ghz and 4.5 ghz for anything. However, 4 or 8 cores all running at 3.0 ghz is great for heavy multitasking, video and audio editing. They just weren't thinking too well.

Case and point: my little dual core 3.5 ghz AMD works fine for most games. For gaming you do not really require multicore processors. It's the photoshoppers and editors that need all those extra cores, even if they're running at 2.5 ghz, they'll still get a lot more bang for their buck.

I wonder if what Phil said was actually true, that they were banking on processors getting up into the 4-5 ghz range. Ouch. Wasn't ever going to commercially happen in the next 5 years, and oh wait... it hasn't... LOL :d Not hindsight, but I simply coulda told them in '07 when FSX came out and I got my first dual core machine going that processors with speeds up in the 4-5 ghz range were not ever going to be mass produced. People OC them to those speeds, maybe, but there won't really be a mass produced and financially viable 5.0 ghz processor. I can't see that happening; they would run too damn hot, and computer companies aren't about to start adding liquid cooling stock, and liquid cooling aftermarket installation is beyond probably 90% of regular computer users who don't know jack about building them like I do. :ernae:

[PilatusTurbo]

Nice, Dimus. I was hoping for the FPS increase, but blurries are a constant issue. And I'm getting this 460 from a buddy used at only $100 bucks. Not too bad, considering they're still going for the upper 100's range.

Thanks for your insight on that, and I'll be studying that forum post with performance tweaks tomorrow. :ernae:

[fxsttcb]

...Not hindsight, but I simply coulda told them in '07 when FSX came out...Don't forget the development time. Previous to the release of FSX the direction CPUs were going was speed. Once the game's engine was coded(a couple years before the '07 RTM) there was no going back.
That's one of the items they tried to address with SP1. Multicore aware and affinity helped considerably.
A lot of mainstream motherboards in those days woudn't support more than 2GB of RAM. Later some more tweaks and SP2 helped with that.

Using Nick N's and Jesus Altuve's(Bojote) tweaks, tunes, and insight has helped my FSXA install, a ton.
Still challenged with a 3.1GHz CPU, I'm happy with FSX though. Careful adjustment and finding my sweet spot, along with realizing that I can't have all the eyecandy I desire, has given me a lot more enjoyment than most $30 purchases have.

I'm hoping that Ivy Bridge E, next fall, will net me that 5GHz+ 24/7 machine to give more life to FSX...Don

[mfitch]

After multiple hours spread over two days I finally have all my addons installed and FSX will allow me to fly. For a long time after selecting an aircraft to fly it would freeze. Windows would report it was not responding and it did not show any processor use in the task manager. Often the same thing would happen switching from the settings to the free flight tab.

The following finally fixed this problem. First I deleted the fsx.cfg file. Next I disabled all addons in the exe.xml and dll.xml files (edited to <disabled>true</disabled>). Next I disabled all addon sceneries using FSX (happily I could enter settings and exit FSX without freezing). At this point I deleted every auto generated file (scenery indices, SimObjects entries). I also removed my default flight. After all of this FSX would start and I could select a plane. However the planes were rendered with parts strewn about and textures missing. Updating the fresh fsx.cfg file using Bojote's tweaking and tuning tool fixed the display problems, and I could select a plane and fly. Next I enabled addons in exe.xml and dll.xml. I could still fly. Finally I enabled all the scenery addons. I could still fly, and it ran a bit faster than anytime recently.

After all of this I had two newly purchased scenery packages to install. This left FSX unable to run again. After futile attempts to restore order by simple fixes, I did that whole procedure again. I can now fly in FSX again. I think I am avoiding new addons for a while. Happily there are plenty already installed.

[Roger]

Hey PT,
A little thread here showing where cpu speeds are going, lol!

http://www.sim-outhouse.com/sohforums/showthread.php?57550-AMD-Overclocks-FX-8150-to-8-4GHz-and-Bulldozes-into-Guinness-Book&goto=newpost

[LonelyplanetXO]

I agree with everyone here. A large part of the problem is m$ policy of designing apps for the next generation of hardware when they don't really know what that looks like. It consistently produces dogs like FSX & FS2000 (anyone remember that pile of crap?)
When FSX runs well it's great but "perfect" flights are few and far between. FS9 was a way better platform, which begs the question of how they could get X so wrong. Aside of the FPS and resource issues my biggest gripes are the bugs - like insufficient drag in the flight environment that sees your aircraft glide nearly forever; pulling back the throttles in X doesnt seem to have much effect on progress, that ridiculous turboprop start bug, how your IFR flight gets cancelled because the radios stop working, batteries that go dead in 5 minutes, unrealistic turbulence, I could go on. And that's without ever going near third party add ons - the track ir problem mentioned previously, various incompatibilities with all sorts of stuff. Also resource usage, it's such a shame that all addons don't work like Lotus' L39. I guess code optimization is nearly a lost art.
Overall FSX IMHO is a fail from the McDonalds of software houses, micro$oft. I suppose one saving grace is that roughly every odd release is better than the doggy predecessor, so Flight may address FSX's shortcomings. But then there's the wholes Microsoft shop thing threatening to spoil the party. I'll be firmly sitting on my hands, watching when that ones released...

LPXO

[Oelwanne]

After multiple hours spread over two days I finally have all my addons installed and FSX will allow me to fly. For a long time after selecting an aircraft to fly it would freeze. Windows would report it was not responding and it did not show any processor use in the task manager. Often the same thing would happen switching from the settings to the free flight tab.

Had the same Problem once. My Fsx took Years to fire up and when trying to select an Aircraft it just crashes. My Solution was to disable the Preload in the fsx.cfg ([Main]DisablePreload=1). After that it was just running fine.

[mfitch]

Had the same Problem once. My Fsx took Years to fire up and when trying to select an Aircraft it just crashes. My Solution was to disable the Preload in the fsx.cfg ([Main]DisablePreload=1). After that it was just running fine.

Thanks. I googled this, and that makes sense. I will try this.