[MidCon Admin]

I did purchase good payware for all of our hub cities-

LatinVFR
Miami

FSDreamTeam
Los Angeles
New York

TropicalSim
Kansas City

FlightBeam
Phoenix

[MidCon Admin]

Good question..and I have no idea, I haven’t actively searched for freeware airports in years.

Back in the FS98/2000/2004 days I used to scour the Avsim and Flightsim.Com libraries.

I currently have a handful of payware airports and GSX. I started collecting payware airports for P3D during various sales before I made the transition from FSX.

Once FS2020 was announced last year I pretty much stopped investing in P3D add-ons.

GSX provides enough “life” and customization at the default airports to where it’s good enough for me until FS2020 comes along.

MC

[MidCon Admin]

Thanks for the heads up!

Mike

[MidCon Admin]

They’ve simulated distance-based degradation very well.

Not sure, but I don’t think they’ve simulated any effects of weather.

The voice client (vPilot) is extremely easy to set up. Simply download the and run the installer, make a few configuration choices and you’ll be up and running in minutes.

Let me know what you think!

Mike

[MidCon Admin]

Thanks for the update. Not sure what could have changed either, but glad it’s working for you.

The quirky world of flight simming! 🙂

Mike

[MidCon Admin]

Ian,

Congrats on grinding through it! This program has broken lesser men! LOL 🙂

I just sent you an email.

Mike

[MidCon Admin]

Have you ever thought about implementing company routes for the FMC?

So, I think I may have misunderstood your original post.

After re-reading this I believe you’re referring to a database of company routes to be used by the FLIGHT PLANNING SYSTEM (PFPX) for planning and subsequent export for FMC uplink.

Real world FMC’s just don’t have the memory to store thousands of routes and are typically uplinked during preflight.

Our real world flight planning system DOES contain stored routes between all of our domestic city pairs, some pairs more than others. So in that context, YES, I have thought about a MidCon company route database for PFPX, but as of now haven’t really started putting anything together.

MC

[MidCon Admin]

Now and then I think about it.

I’m not really a fan of stored company routes since that implies that a flight will fly the exact same route every day regardless of winds, weather, ATC etc., and obviously that’s not the case.

To make something like that even remotely feasible, we’d have to have multiple routes between every city pair and it wouldn’t work at all for the North Atlantic.

In my mind, the complexity of managing such a task would quickly outweigh any benefit.

I always feel it’s best to plan the route based on the “right now” weather conditions and ATC constraints in which I would be flying.

Having said all that, which tools are you looking at? 🙂

Mike

[MidCon Admin]

Fleet specific pairings have been posted!

MC

[MidCon Admin]

Nice!

Thanks for the heads up!

MC

[MidCon Admin]

Congrats!

Coming from FSX to P3D was pretty amazing. The academic license watermark isn’t distracting at all, you’ll get to where you don’t even notice it.

In my opinion, the ORBX packages are well worth the investment.

I’m running Global Base, Vector, All the Landclass packages, HD Trees, HD buildings. The results are nothing short of stunning.

I’d also recommend REX SkyForce with ActiveSky as the weather engine, I have Environment Force as well, but haven’t installed it yet. It’s essentially a shader application, and is supposed to work in concert with SkyForce to provide a more life-like “living environment”. Not 100% convinced yet that I need it.

Keep us posted on your progress!

Mike

[MidCon Admin]

You can save some money by not going with the $200 version of P3D as long as you don’t mind that it says “academic” in small text in the upper right hand corner.

Mike

[MidCon Admin]

Ian,

Thanks for the check-in and the suggestion.

Will see what we can come up with.

Thanks,

Mike

[MidCon Admin]

John,

I haven’t built a PC in over 10 years, before SSD’s and liquid cooling were commonplace so I had no experience with that. Rather than risk ruining expensive components I just opted to do a custom build this time around.

I spent a lot of time looking at/pricing systems with pretty much every custom builder out there.

Ultimately, the best bang for the buck ended up being AVA Direct, a company in Ohio.

My new rig:

Full tower ATX case
1000 Watt power supply
ASUS TUF Z390-Pro Gaming mainboard
Intel I9 9900K / overclocked to 5.0 Ghz / Liquid Cooled
64GB 3200 Mhz RAM
nVidia GeForce RTX 2080 11GB video card
Samsung 2TB SSD / primary drive
Seagate 4TB 7200 RPM storage drive
Asus STRIX SOAR 7.1 sound card
Windows 10 Home
AVA Bronze (3 years labor / 2 years parts)

$4500.00 / FedEx Shipping

————————-
Monitor – Viewsonic VX4380-4K – 43″ UHD 4K computer monitor (not a TV)
$600.00 from Amazon

All said and done, a little over 5 grand invested…but, it’s been 10 years since my last new system and I was WAY overdue.

P3Dv4.5 out of the box with default settings I actually saw frame rates in excess of 250 FPS!.. LOL

I’m currently running P3D with most sliders well to the right, along with Orbx Global Base, Global Vector, North American/South American/European Landclass, Global Trees HD, Global Buildings HD, REX SkyForce with ActiveSky as the engine, and consistently have frame rates above 50.

If I get into some really heavy weather the frames will drop to between 30-40 but visually it’s still smooth.

I’m just now to the point where I’m ready to start adding 3rd party planes and airports.

Mike

[MidCon Admin]

John,

Possibly. I’ll look into it a bit more and see what’s required or what the benefit would be.

If it’s loading a daily flight schedule that might be a bit much to have 500+ flight segments in the system every day.

Will advise when I know more.

Mike

[Author]

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