New kid on THIS block

[andersel]

I am ready to add P3D to my FS life now that v2.0 is out.

The manifest beauty of the P3D world is what has drawn me towards it as an addition to my simming.

But I find the apparent complexity of installing it (and setting it up correctly) to be rather daunting.

Although I have been flying in FS9 for quite a while and can move around in it comfortably I am, by no stretch of the imagination, a tech type.

Can some, or all, of you direct me to a simple to understand, simple to follow guide to achieve my simple goal:

Installing and setting up P3D on my FS rig?

[crashaz]

Welcome! First read that readme file.... good info there.... need to make sure you have the minimum requirements... OS... hardware... feel free to list what you have... that can only help those of us looking to help.

[Meshman]

But I find the apparent complexity of installing it (and setting it up correctly) to be rather daunting.

Here's the complexity I encountered Sunday night/Monday morning.

Sunday: Saw that it was out and went and spent the $$$ to download it. It was late and I left the computer on overnight and let my download manager do it's thing.

Monday: Unzipped the 10gb file and ran the Setup program. Let it finish, as it "appeared" to have frozen at the end, but realized it is 17gb~. Activated by copying license data into the screen and a few seconds later it was done. Started the program and found it was ready to fly out of Virginia. Changed it to show the startup dialog where you can choose plane, airport, etc.

Once I get loaded up I hit the Alt-Enter to get into the psuedo-full screen mode. When I'm ready to quit, I hit Alt-Enter to go back to Windowed mode, so that I don't encounter the black screen effect when starting some time later.

No tweaks yet, though I plan to make a couple! I like that when I hit Shift-Z to see decimal degrees for Lat/Lon and for the FPS to show me an running average. Other than that I have no desire... at this time... to tweak anything. Very pleased with the visuals and I haven't even started to load anything in yet.

So on a scale of 1-10 for complexity, I'd give it a 2.

[P38man]

I recommend you read this first. My guess is Meshman has only tested of the default airport?

http://forum.avsim.net/forum/436-the...general-forum/

I have been going through it, looks like a lot of tweaking will be needed and wait for an upgrade.

[Meshman]

My guess is Meshman has only tested of the default airport?

No, I've ventured off to other exotic locales, such as Hawaii and my little area of the PNW.

And I've read every thread over in the P3D forum at Avsim. There are a few issues for people with other than (what I term) standard configurations. And there are people who are treating P3D just the same as FSX, but that don't realize that maybe they do not need to setup nVidia Inspector or that setting up three or four monitors is different than how it was in FSX or that the beta version of FSUIPC might need to be changed once Pete gets back from vacation.

But as far as downloading and installing P3D? In my case there was no real issue(s) at all.

Now I'm off to try out that new fangled terrain tessellation whatyamajiggie, just to see if it affects my FPS at all. Wouldn't want anyone to buy some defective mesh...

[Lionheart]

Hey Andersel,


Welcome to the P3D room and the V2 simulator.

I trust you have installed it already? Do you need to install it to a different hard drive other then C: drive?

There's not much to setup unless you have a pretty sophisticated system. Just run it and fly. Then start experimenting with the different adjustments.

In P3D, you now have a settings page for just Light, which includes light and shadows, and something called HDR which makes everything look super real via working with the way light bounces off of things, darker shadows, etc, like how the human eye see's.

There really isn't a tutorial out yet of how to 'best' setup P3D. I am sure Kosta will have one out soon. But in the mean time, I would just play with the simulator settings. If it gets pretty off course (bad settings), just click reset settings to default and you should be good to go again to experiment some more with settings.

Note; In P3D, you have Autogen Buildings and Autogen Flora (trees and bushes) and you set the sliders for how much you want showing.
Note2; Lots of traffic will bring down your frame rates, so don't up that too much. Experiment with it and see how high you can go before it brings down your frame rates.
Note3; You can set a 'setup screen' to be your default opening window in the sim. Go to File/Scenario Setup and on that page, near the bottom right, is a tick square labeled 'Show At Startup'. Tick that 'on' and your setup screen shows up when you boot up the sim. Untick it, and you boot up into the default flight.
Note4; if you haven't started the sim yet, you will need your customer account number and code to unlock the sim when you run it for the first time.

Think of it as like FS9 in the future. Basically the same thing, just looks different. Settings might be a little different, but its almost all the same. Now we have adjustable shadows, ships out at sea, clouds that are like fog, we have real fog now on the ground, some really really nice planes and more. Just don't crank everything up to the top yet as you'll bring down your frame rates. Again, experiment...

If you have any questions, just ask. Be specific, that will help us help you.


Bill

[Lionheart]

Also note (everyone) that when you first boot up into the sim, it will be very slow for 5 to 10 seconds. The sim is uploading (flashing) the scenery data into the graphics card memory. Hold short for a moment and then frame rates will bump up to normal.

[andersel]

Thanks, all, for the input.

My hardware set-up is -

MOBO: MSI Z77MA-G45

CPU: Intel 15-3470 (3.2ghz)
6mb cache
LGA1155 77W

GPU: NVIDIA 640GT (4gb)

RAM: 8gb DDR3

OS HD:WD 500gb

FS HD: WD 2tb

All of that is installed in a DELL XPS case. The only OE on board are the power supply and the CD & DVD drives.

I currently have all of my FS9 stuff extant on the 2tb drive and it takes up about 1/3 of the space
available on that HD.

Is this architecture up to the job of handling P3D adequately? If so, I will proceed from here.

[crashaz]

Processor and memory wise... you are good. Not sure about the vid card... but it is a 6 series Nvidia... should be good.

How about Windows version.... I am guessing Win 7

[Lionheart]

Looks pretty good to me too. Just make sure the NVidia card is DX11 capable. That's the main requirement.

[andersel]

crashaz -

Damn! I just knew I forgot something. Running Win 7 (64)


Bill -

I checked and the graphics card IS 11 capable.

I'll most likely DL P3D on Friday and then take my time installing over the weekend.

Will report back first thing next week.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING TO ALL!!!