thainoodle wrote on Jan 17^th, 2009 at 1:28pm:



opppsss


Is that title still around?  



OK...  heres FS9s tuning


FS9 CONFIGURATION FILE REBUILD


Save a copy of your current FS9.cfg file in a safe place. Then DELETE the FS9.cfg file being used by the sim.

Start Flight Simulator. You will be starting clean with a new FS9.cfg file Let the sim boot and go to the SETTINGS area. Make the following changes:

DISPLAY BUTTON:  
Scenery Tab:  
All sliders to 100% and ALL check boxes checked (water FX on 100%)

Aircraft Tab:
Drop down box, select HIGH, which should enable everything

Weather Tab:
set in order of the sliders 60 -40 – 100 with Detailed Clouds and 100% maximum density

Hardware Tab:
Frame Lock @ 30
XXXXxXXXXx32, NOTE: SET THIS TO YOUR MONITORS NATIVE RESOLUTION - X32
Check in: Render to Texture, Transform and Lighting, UNCHECK AA,
Trillinear Filtering,
Mip Quality 4 FOR ATI, 8 FOR NVIDIA: NOTE: may need to be 4 to kill shimmers
Hardware Lights 8,
Global Texture Slider 100%

CLICK OK

SOUND BUTTON:
Sound to HIGH,  

TRAFFIC BUTTON:
Traffic to 90%, click OK (keep at between 80 and 90)


REALISM BUTTON
Drop down Box; set to HARD, UNCHECK allow collisions with other aircraft. AUTO RUDDER should be enabled if you fly keyboard and do not use pedals. Click OK


WEATHER BUTTON:
Check only Download Winds Aloft with real world weather, click OK


Close the sim

Once you close the sim a new FS9.cfg file will be written with the settings you just made. Open the new FS9.cfg file in notepad.

Scroll down and VERIFY - ADD - EDIT - CHANGE the following items in the list:


[CONTROLS]
PAN_RATE=700 <--- will always be 700

[DISPLAY]
RUNWAY_LIGHTS_SURFACE_SCALAR=1.2
RUNWAY_LIGHTS_VASI_SCALAR=1.0
RUNWAY_LIGHTS_APPROACH_SCALAR=1.0
RUNWAY_LIGHTS_STROBE_SCALAR=1.5
UPPER_FRAMERATE_LIMIT=30 // note.. if the processor is a bit slower, this may need to be 24
TEXTURE_BANDWIDTH_MULT=240 < --- make this 240 or 400 (400 works for better hardware)

[TERRAIN]
TERRAIN_ERROR_FACTOR=100.000000
TERRAIN_MIN_DEM_AREA=10.000000
TERRAIN_MAX_DEM_AREA=100.000000
TERRAIN_MAX_VERTEX_LEVEL=21
TERRAIN_TEXTURE_SIZE_EXP=8
TERRAIN_AUTOGEN_DENSITY=5
TERRAIN_USE_GRADIENT_MAP=1
TERRAIN_EXTENDED_TEXTURES=1
TERRAIN_DEFAULT_RADIUS=9.9 // Also try 9.5
TERRAIN_EXTENDED_RADIUS=9.0 // Also try 4.5 (with 9.5 above)
TERRAIN_EXTENDED_LEVELS=4 < --- If you use FSGenesis mesh, make it 4. If not experiment with 1. This setting is either 1 or 4, nothing else

[SCENERY]
IMAGE_COMPLEXITY=5
DYNAMIC_SCENERY=1
DYN_SCN_DENSITY=5
DAWN_DUSK_SMOOTHING=1
SUNGLARE=1
LENSFLARE=1


Close and save the FS9.cfg file.


--------------------------------------------------------



FSUIPC SETTINGS:


Here are the FSUIPC settings... you will need to boot the sim and open the registered version of FSUIPC to set it up... once complete you must close and reopen the sim:

Boot a flight, any flight. Hit the ALT key, Select MODULES - FSUIPC

Make the following changes for awesome weather and reduced hit on performance

Winds Tab – Smoothing settings:
Check in “Smooth wind changes” in the three boxes under that heading, input the following:
5
0
0

Uncheck everything else under the Winds Tab

=========================


Visibility Tab

General Limits and Extensions:
Check in “apply vis limits” add the following numbers in the boxes in this sequence:

6000 4000  2000  1000

Uncheck everything below that and make sure “stop visibility going below” is @ 0

Smoothing Options:

Smooth Visibility  
10% every 2 sec  
But after weather is cleared, delay smoothing = 0
Smooth onfiltered= UNCHECKED

CHECK “Set Graduated Visibility”

Enter the numbers in the boxes in this sequence:
6000
25000
9000

=========================

CLOUDS TAB

CHECK IN:  Add light cirrus layer

EVERYTHING ELSE unchecked and don’t worry about any numbers


===============================

TECHNICAL TAB:

CHECKS IN THESE BOXES ONLY:
Enable V/S Sign  
Control Spike Elimination (all three)
Fix Control Acceleration


Additional Facilities area:
Check the first 5 boxes in that list. Extend Battery should be set to 0

CHECK IN: Smooth Pressure Changes
Enter the following in this order:
5
40
Flight (drop down box)

Click OK, close the sim

From this point on FSUIPC will integrate into your weather system and will not allow FS9 to pile on layers of clouds which you cant see anyway. This will show up in the sim when you boot a flight and go to set the weather.... you should notice the setting will usually be "user defined weather" no matter what it was set to in the prior flight. FSUIPC has control of the cloud layers and will optimize what ever weather scenario you choose




FLIGHT ENVIRONMENT (for better cloud performance.. major hit in FS9)

When it comes to Flight Environment, IF all you want is the clouds and the extended contrails without the other extras, after you install the program browse to:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Games\Flight Simulator 9\Flight One Software\Flight Environment\Data

Inside the data folder RENAME the following folders:

SKY – SUN – WATER

to

XXSKY – XXSUN – XXWATER

That will prevent the program from installing anything but clouds.

Run Flight Environment, select the following Cloud Set:

Solid Cumulus = More Majestic
Stratus = Strong Opposition
Wispy Edges = Scene One
Cirrus = First Choice

On the main screen place a check in the following:

Create Lower Resolution Clouds
Create DXT3 Clouds
Extended Contrails

Save and Install

When you boot a flight in the sim NEVER set weather before you start the flight. ALWAYS boot the entire flight first, THEN once the flight has loaded, click ALT - WORLD – WEATHER and set your weather scheme. You will notice your weather screen will always have a bullet in “user defined weather” That’s normal… its just FSUIPC settings I gave you overriding the crap Microsoft setting… you can select any manual weather pattern or Real World Weather and FSUIPC will override the cloud layer bug without erasing your desired weather.

NOTE: If you don’t like the look of the lower resolution clouds, close the sim and reopen FE then UNCHECK: Create DXT3 Clouds, save and install.

If you still don’t like the lower resolution, UNCHECK: Create Lower Resolution Clouds. However, I can tell you this… that 3D cards HATE high poly clouds so if you can live with both those boxes checked, do it because it WILL increase your performance, especially running real world weather.

One more thing… Always pan around your plane several times after you set weather for your flight or anytime leave and re-enter the sim after making a change or dropping to the desktop. It will load all the surrounding textures into the memory and make flying much smoother!

That has nothing to do with the tweaks I posted assuming you did them correctly and you dont have programs running at Windows boot causing the problem...  AV's and other scanners can do it as well as too many boot programs

How is this all installed, on one hard drive and one big partition?


Active Sky 6 is just a weather engine (unless you purchased some texture package with it) and can be used with what I posted too

Get yourself a VelociRaptor (the come in 150 and 300GB) for your sim

do not partition it

You may be having drive problems and yes, what you could be seeing is storage related stutters

I always run my OS and installed programs (other than performance programs like MSFS) on one drive and the perf games on another

thainoodle wrote on Jan 20^th, 2009 at 2:32pm:



Well.. goodness

If you have spyware and have malware running in the background that will cause the stutters you are seeing

Ok.. Help! I'm totally unable to shake this bloody virus/malware, have tried AVG, Avast!, Malware Bytes, Spyware Doctor, Ad-Aware et al. The main problem is I cannot update the programs, as if the malware is blocking the programs from updating. Its really dragging my system down now, bar from a format/re-install what can I do?

Thanks
Paul

Ok thanks nick, I'm going to bite the bullet and buy a faster hdd and do a clean install, can you recommend the bext XP to install? I have noticed an sp3 xp doing the rounds, would this be worth bothering with or should I just go for the sp2 32 bit?

Thanks
Paul