garrettm30

The Karma discussion obviously is something several people feel passionate about. I would like to respond to a few of these points myself, but I do think we could move it out of this thread. There is already a topic about the Karma where people have in the past voiced some opinions. If anyone is interested, I will post some of my own thoughts about what was said in that other topic: http://forums.x-pilot.com/index.php?topic=80.0

I'm with you there. I can appreciate a good exterior model, but it really isn't important to me. I look at it very little while on the ground; and in the air, I spend nearly 0% of my time outside the cockpit.

I fly in X-Plane especially because I can't afford to fly for real. I have recently had the good fortune to make friends with a fellow who has been taking me up in a Cessna 150 to teach me to fly. I can't get hours logged this way, but I do get to satisfy my longing for real flight. I have discovered that this real experience is really improving my flying in the sim. Would I still use X-Plane if I could fly for real as much as I wanted? Well...probably so!

I voted. Like all but two (so far), I voted that I want it all. That option there I think makes this poll less effective. Nearly everyone is going to want it all, and in a perfect world, who wouldn't? The poll could be more informative when you can only have one or the other, because it is then that you get a sense of what people think is more important.

I'm so glad it worked out for you. As for the texture compression, I think it is just a matter of what you are using versus what you have available. With that 512 MB card, it shouldn't make any difference in frame rate whether you use 100 MB or 500 MB, so you might as well use all you can. If you can turn off texture compression and stay within limits, then great! In fact, you are supposed to be able to get away with a little over your limit because not all of it is used at the same time. However, when you do run out of VRAM, it is suddenly apparent, as it will bring your system to a crawl. You can see how much X-Plane is currently using from the bottom of the rendering settings window. Does anyone know if that is total VRAM used or VRAM used by just X-Plane? If the latter, you will want to remember that your system needs some of that as well. Some of the newer payware aircraft have better--and therefore more memory intensive--textures. I can't get away with the same settings when flying them as I used to with default aircraft. I have textures set to Very High with compression turned on, whereas I used to have it on Extreme. If I turned off compression, it would probably mean I would have to drop texture level. It's all about preference.

I though it might be beneficial to repeat Ben Supnik's posting that the cutoff for submitting airport layouts for X-Plane 10 is October 10. For those who don't know, airports can be submitted at any time to be included with the next incremental update. Airport boundaries, however, are updated at each major release. You use airport boundaries so that when the scenery mesh for each major release is processed, the boundaries will be taken into account for elevation and land class purposes. Your next opportunity after this is not expected to come until X-Plane 11 will be released. I mention it here only for increased exposure of the announcement. You can see Ben's original announcement here: http://xplanescenery.blogspot.com/2010/09/airport-layouts-your-cutoff-is-101010.html I know I'm hurrying to finish my local airport by that time. I'm glad I happened to start the project this past month rather than next month. It's about the perfect time. I'm new at this, so I welcome folks more experienced to clarify what this means if necessary.

That's not a very likely assumption since it is a completely different issue. The latest word I've seen is this posting on Ben's blog: http://xplanescenery.blogspot.com/2009/12/why-isnt-slicrossfire-no-brainer.html Also notice what he says in response to one of the comments on that blog entry: That post was ten months ago so who knows what is in the works. What we can learn from this is that the issue of multiprocessing and the issue of dual GPUs are two very different things, so drawing an assumption of GPU usage from what was stated about CPU multiprocessing is as good as a guess until they tell us more. If it were me, I'd spend the extra money of a second card on one single card that much better.

I own pedals, but I'm just one person. You could start a poll in the general section. It could be informative. I'm ignorant in this matter: is it done this way because the real Mentor works in that way? If so, I would think that modeling it that way would be ideal.

I just use a second monitor where I put all my charts. The old CRT displays are very cheap to come by and they are quite adequate for the task. Even cheap, an old Windows laptop is a lot more than I want to pay just to use some software on Windows because a developer won't make it available for Mac.

I understand SimPlates is also not available for Mac.

That seems to me to be the king of incremental change that can be released after a major release. I'm sure they are focusing on the really big things that they want to keep stable across an entire version, particularly the things that affect development. With such a small team, they have to focus on their priorities.

Thanks for keeping us up to date.

I saw Tom Kyler was mentioned in the list of people you wished to thank. We know he also is working on some X-Plane 10 stuff. Is there some collaboration there?

Hey, did you notice that big rig is passing on a double solid yellow line? Tsk tsk! >

The "plausible world" airport scenery looks really good. Obviously most people would prefer to have the accurate scenery in custom airports, but this is such a huge step up from the completely flat airports of nothing but concrete. I'm really excited about this. I hope it can help alleviate all those "no airports" complaints we're all the time hearing. But I doubt it. Every time some really exciting news comes out, there is a deluge of complaints about what's not there.

You say it's not big news, but if I understood what the video seems to be telling us, you just dropped a bombshell on us. Is it true that all of these planes are made by JRollon and will be included in (or available for) X-Plane 10? The Space Shuttle (and it's beautiful!) 747-400 KC-10 X15 B-52 B-2 Lancair Evolution Aside from the CRJ-200, Javalin, SeaMax, and T-34 Mentor, that's 6 planes that we didn't know Javier was working on. This news is as big as Austin's post about some of the features of X-Plane 10. Surely I'm misunderstanding something! Folks, you don't want to miss this video.

I used to be able to run textures at Extreme before I bought any payware planes. I often flew the default Cirrus jet in 3D cockpit with textures on Extreme. When I bought the MU-2, I discovered it put me over the limit of my 512 MB VRAM, so I had to put it down to Very High, where it has been since without trouble. Being that we have the same systems other than RAM and OS, I am surprised that you have such terrible performance with Very High textures. The difference can't be much attributed to the different OS, since it was 10.5 I used back when I first got X-Plane and had that good performance. The 2 GB of slower RAM might affect frame rate overall, but I didn't think it had anything to do with textures. On that note, I will be interested to know how much difference there is when you get your new RAM. Could you take a picture of your rendering settings for us to study over? My first guess is that you have that setting about compressing textures or saving VRAM or whatever turned off.

If it were not for an event I have this Saturday, I would say that this time works better for me than the previous fly in. If it is 8 AM in New York, that amounts to 7 AM here. I hope to participate in a future Saturday fly in.

I can find no record (at least in the US) of such a machine being released. The Mid 2007 iMacs (with model identifier iMac7,1) had system busses of 800 MHz with 667 Mhz RAM, then the next line refresh was Early 2008 (iMac8,1) had system busses of 1.06 GHz with RAM speeds of 800 MHz. And there was also only one model--the 24" 2.8 or 3.06 GHz (of the Early 2008s)--that came with the optional Nvidia 8800 GS, and that computer has 800MHz RAM. The reason I noticed it is that I have that model, and I saw your specs match mine in every respect but RAM speed. It of course makes no difference to me, but it seems to me you got cheated. It appears you got sold a machine with slower RAM than it was designed for. It may be (and I'm guessing here) that perhaps you bought from a company who had a promotion of an extra 1 GB. They may then have put in a 667 MHz. The system slows down to the slowest RAM speed, and that's the speed it will report, but it's not necessarily what it can support. Or else, perhaps the company just switched out the better RAM for the slower RAM. Anyway, you can go to your System Profiler and look at the Hardware Overview page (should be the first page to come up), and if the model identifier is iMac8,1, then you are good to go on 800MHz. It's still slow, but I would want to get all I could out of memory. And anyway, you can put 800MHz RAM in a machine designed for 667MHz without any harm. If your machine is really designed for 667MHz, it will just run the RAM at that speed without any problem. Just keep in mind that all your RAM will run at the slowest speed installed. I hope it works out for you.

I'm not sure how relevant this would be to your question, but is there some reason you have 667 MHz RAM in a system designed for 800 MHz? If not, you can breath some more life into your machine by putting in 4 GBs of the proper speed not just a whole lot.

I very much do appreciate your help. I got into this project because I recently have started real-world flight training in a C150. The airport that we are most often at is the North Little Rock Municipal (KORK, formally 1M1). The default airport is very basic and probably automatically generated, so I wanted to make it more realistic for practice. I doubt anyone else would be interested in this airport unless they have spent time there for real. Even so, I would be happy to share what I'm doing if anyone were interested.

Actually, I am probably going to have a few questions as I press on in learning WED (not beta) that I hope some of you experienced users wouldn't mind helping me with. I have already read the manual as well as the tips on http://forums.x-pilot.com/index.php?topic=562.0, http://scenery.x-plane.com/library.php?doc=apt_guidelines.php, and http://data.x-plane.com/index.html. I do try to find out as much as I can through searches, so I hope you won't mind if I post those few questions that remain unresolved. For the moment, here is a quick one. I know how to enter a value for roughness of runways and taxiways in the attributes section, but I don't know how to determine what value is correct. Any ideas?

This is my first time, so I'm not using the beta at the moment. It's all still a learning experience.

I was glancing over the README that came with WED 1.0r1. Take a look at the last item in the Known Issues: Did I read that right? Are we really talking about the standard computer input device here? So if it's broken, WED might not function properly, really? ??? That seemed so obvious I had to read it several times to make sure I wasn't missing something. Does anyone know if I am actually missing something, or is it just a case of a bit of developer humor, perhaps inspired by some particularly daft tech support case? Well, it gave me a good laugh at least.

I understand the visual model is as finished as it is going to get while there is some further coding going on. So why not give us a screenshot of the current work--the code? Then we can all drool over the craftsmanship of those beautifully written lines and say, "Wow, you've outdone yourselves again. Can't wait to get her in the air!" Okay, so that is not the most serious of suggestions, but perhaps if you really did it, it would get the point across that the project is beyond the point where sreenshots are relevant. Uh, maybe...