SimTips

The site is moving

Well, the contents are moving at least. Owing to a generally fickle nature I’ve come to the conclusion I can’t blog about any one topic for more than a month or so before I’m distracted by… OH LOOK A BUNNY RABBIT! Yeah, like that.

I’ve reopened shop with another fellow over at the Cave of Distraction, where we’re blogging about all sorts of distractions but mostly gaming. I’ll be merging all this FSX content into there (or may have done so already depending on when you read this) so, please come visit and get distracted by something. All in all we hope you.. OH LOOK ANOTHER BUNNY RABBIT.

New site URL : http://www.caveofdistraction.com
New site RSS feed : http://feeds2.feedburner.com/CaveOfDistraction
New site Twitter feed : https://twitter.com/cavedistraction

Extra large FSX

This isn’t a tweak exactly, but more of a suggestion if you happen to have the hardware available.

I bought a 32″ LCD television awhile back for our Xbox360 and at the time I made sure I got one with a VGA input in case I ever wanted to try it out as a computer monitor. Last night I finally decided to give it a shot. All I needed was a VGA cable, and a DVI to VGA adapter both of which I happen to have kicking around already.  Set up was simple a matter of unplugging the various things from the TV and plunking it on my computer desk, then sticking the VGA end of my cable into the TV and the VGA/DVI adapter end into the DVI out on my video card. A quick change of resolution and I was good to go.

The resolution of my TV only goes up to 1360×760 so I had to turn FSX down from my usual 1680×1050, but not only did it still look terrific I had a bit of extra headroom to turn everything up to max including the water, 4x supersampling and literally everything else. Very, very nice and a view big enough you have to look around to fully appreciate.

If you’ve got a spare LCD tv with a VGA input kicking around, or more likely if you can easily swipe your main one out of the living room when no one is looking this is well worth a try. I can only imagine how great this set up would be if I had a TrackIR system for head tracking.

Delete your FSX.CFG

Yes, seriously. If you are like me you’re constantly tweaking and farting around with your FSX.CFG to get things running and looking as nice a possible. On top of that there are addons getting installed and uninstalled all the time, meaning FSX is a constantly changing platform rather than something you can tweak once and forget. Over time, FSX can get a little weird from all this messing around. Load times can go way up, and frame rates way down depsite all the right tweaks being in place. Once this starts to happen, a simple and effective way to sort it out is to delete your FSX.CFG file, then restart FSX. It will recreate a fresh CFG file for you, and often times you’ll find a great deal of improvement as it’s flushed out a lot of the junk that had accumulated or tweaks that conflicted, or were left in place my mistake.

It would be wise to make a backup of you original of course, to allow you to find the tweaks you do want to carry over from the old file to the new. I recently found my FSX load times getting way out of hand, and deleting/rebuilding my FSX.CFG completely sorted that out. It also gave me a frame rate boost as I selectively went through my tweak list and added those I wanted to include.

Nothing like starting fresh now and then.