Mike Hotel

Feels like NZAA without our lovely jets placed on the tarmac

Since you did not bother to lookup the iMac hardware, here they are: i7 Quard 3,4 with 6970 1GB VRAM and 4 GB RAM. Sorry to be a dumb Mac user. No, I won't change that. XP10 crashing in version 10 is not acceptable - which program of yours does that? Mac or Win? None on my Mac. The XP10 eye-candy is great (esp. HDR). But is it worth the ride compared to XP9 at the moment? We could start the discussion about serious simming a flight or the game-play attitude of having eye-candy first. I don't want to do that. The reality for me is that I will continue to use XP9 on my home machine (on my old MacBook Pro). And I will refrain from buying XP10 only stuff for a while, too. Sad, but thats my perspective on things. Do I feel left behind? No. You gotta go with the times sometime.

Yes and no. From my point of view (user), I can max out and rely on XP9 when simming commercial flights on online networks (IVAO). XP10 is nice to look at, but needs constant testing and tinkering. With settings I like, my top of the line iMac always crashes to the desktop when flying. When flying at home on my 4yo MacBook I have to use XP9. Period. And thats rock solid again. If I wouldn't run a virtual airline, I would not buy XP10 aircraft at this point. If I were a developer I would do XP10 only, because that will be the future market. I still do not understand why XP10 is still so behind its "expectations". Yeah, I know how things are in dev land. But I would still consider it a beta, even it may be a late one. Well, wait and see. Maybe XP10.6 will run on my MacBook. Who knows?

Congrats making the first flight, the learning curve is a steep one. It took me a while to get the CRJ airborne, too. Did you watch Javiers excellent 60mins tutorial video? Just wait for the moment you are ready, engines running, and not being able to move the CRJ from the very spot. If you want to try real ATC, have a look at IVAO (sneak peak) or VATSIM. But thats is another challenge...

I have been toying a couple of weeks to open a post on painting. OK, here is my point of view (rant): Currently I am painting Dan Klaue's ERJ for my VA and am finding the process discouraging. PlaneMaker is a big performance hog and sucks up about 30 % of my CPU when idle. In order to load the livery I just changed, I have to open another livery and then open the one I would like to look at. Not to mention making the lines connect at areas where the wire frame in the paint kit (not there) would show an unexpected 45 or 90 degrees bend or offset. Am in the 14th hour of painting. Ridiculous, if you ask me. Most time is lost saving to 24bit .pngs and loading/loading the livery. Why do some have to be so hard to paint? Some? The most interesting from my point of view. Which? The SSJ with its three part fuselage. Or aligning the lines on the vertical stabilizer for Javiers CRJ200 and 747. There are some easy to paint aircraft around (the payware Heinz 787, the freeware Airbus A332) with loads of liveries around. Sigh. Thats why there are probably so few painters in general... Could aircraft designers make painting liveries easier? Regarding the DC3, I suspect that it is due to its current market share, since it is relatively new. Plus that the priority of the most pilots is in current jet-crafts. A retro prop like the DC3 requires a distinct love for an era of aviation, too. Since a current design would not fit, research is required.

Waypoint.txt - ah, yes, stupid me. I was asking myself why one needs even more way points than those in the Navigraph files, since it already takes ages to fly across them all. So, where my I download the in-flight refueling plug-in? I always wanted to cross the big pond and re-fueling stops on the ground are overrated anyways...

Am not sure you can currently. But you could edit the XML file of the saved route in the plugins folder. Then you just have to figures out how to calc "rad_".

Ah, you got me, thanks. Me sits on my brains - got a cold... Never saw .dds files before or read about them, OS shows no icon - no wonder, MS stuff. Been looking, but came up empty: What program would you recommend for _just_ painting a .dds livery on Mac OS? Only Gimp a possibility? Is converting .dds forth and back preserving all layers? Guess Blender would be overkill...

Well, if you could pass the word (hint, hint)... Where are the paint files gone I used to place (a none empty 747-400 United_paint.png file)? Are the purple _nml.png UV textures?

Had a quick look at the 747 - really nice. Still prefer the CRJ200 How did painting planes change? I looked and just found _nml.png containing purple pictures. Do you know if there will be paint kits in the final release?

Hi all! My first impression of XP 10. Can't wait for the discs to arrive! Cheers, Mike