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Recommended addons

Started by Chris Liu, Mar 04, 2013 14:48

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Chris Liu (1001)

For Intercity ACARS and repaint textures, please click here

If your FSX is not running as smoothly as you'd like, we suggest you study and try some of the tweaks out detailed on Avsim's FSX tweak guide.

If you are getting Out of Memory Errors (OOMs), please see this guide for more information.

The following addons may enhance your experience in FSX whilst flying with Intercity. We recommend members invest in at least one payware aircraft that Intercity operate. If you would like advice on which addons may be appropriate for yourself, please post in this topic.

Aircraft
Payware:
• PMDG BAe Jetstream 41
• Majestic MJC8 Dash 8 Q400
• Aerosoft Airbus A320 professional
• FlightSimLabs Airbus A320

Utilities
Freeware:
• FSX Save (fsxsave104.zip) by Glynn Wilshaw
• FSXWX Weather engine
• Shader 3 Mod for ATI/AMD graphics (shader)
• ENB Serie Mod (post processing lighting effects)
• Roland Herblot weather radar gauge for ASN

Payware:
• Real Environment Extreme (REX) Texture Direct (environmental textures)
• Flight 1 Flight Environment X (environmental textures)
• TOGA Envtex (environmental textures)
• FS2Crew Voice Commander for PMDG Jetstream 41 (multi crew) 30% off all FS2Crew products for Intercity pilots!
• FS2Crew Voice Commander for Majestic MJC8 Q400 (multi crew) 30% off all FS2Crew products for Intercity pilots!
• HiFi Active Sky (weather engine)

Scenery
Freeware:
FSX freeware scenery list
Global terrain mesh elevation data (FreeMeshX)
Germany
• Berlin (Gernot Zander freeware)
• Cologne/Koln (Ray Smith)
• Düsseldorf (Thomas Ruth, Max Epperlein, Mathias Mueller)
Ireland
• Knock Scenery & Update (EIKN) (George Keogh)
Italy
Milan Linate (LIML) Napulevola
Palermo (LICJ) (FSAIDT)
• Naples (LIRN) NapuleVola
Valenica (LEVC) Akesoft

Netherlands
Photographic scenery (Netherlands 2000)
Norway
Airports of Norway (FS Norway)
Spain
Photographic scenery
UK
• Various UK airports UK2000 Xtreme free versions
• Edinburgh and Glasgow Scotflight


Payware:
• Orbx Global Base + vector (scenery textures + vector data)
• Ultimate Terrain X Europe (landclass and vector data)
• Ground Environment X Europe (scenery textures)
• UK2000 VFR Airfields Vol 1-3 (UK airfields)
• UK2000 Xtreme Full (various UK airfields)
...Intercity pilots get 20% off all UK2000 products!
• Horizon VFR X, Vol 1-3 and 7-8 (UK photo scenery)
• Earth Sim Treescapes, Vol 1-3 and 7-8 (autogen trees for Horizon VFR X)
• FTX Orbx Scotland, Germany North etc
Düsseldorf (JustSim/SimMarket or Aerosoft)
Milan Linate (Jetstream Designs/SimMarket)
Cologne/Koln (Aerosoft)
Geneva (FSDT)
Innsbruck (Aerosoft)
Munich (Aerosoft)
Nice (Aerosoft)
Vienna (FlyTampa)
Zurich (FSDT)
Barcelona(Aerosoft)
Copenhagen (SimMarket I believe)
Oslo (Aerosoft)
Stavenger (Aerosoft)
Dublin (Aerosoft, also Fly-Wonderful-Islands)

Please note we accept no responsibility for the content of external websites, nor addons and products provided by third parties. If you would like suggest an addition to this list, please send a personal message to Chris Liu, user number 1001. Intercity receive no payments from any developers or publishers.[/i][/b]

Richard Myers

Have a look at this site...


http://www.akesoft.es/


Nice freeware scenery for lesser known Spanish Airports.

Chris Liu (1001)

I see they've done Valenica (LEVC), which is an Intercity destination from Düsseldorf on the Q400.

Chris Hulme (1003)

Thats a nice little find there  8)

Gert Visser (1391)

I found this very welcome addon (FREE) on the internet:
Free Mesh for the whole world at 19m (LOD10)
http://xtrnets.com/evntech/
A remakable transformation for the fsx world!!

Gert 1391

Steve Prowse (1046)

Hi Gert,


Welcome to Intercity I'm sure you're going to enjoy it here as the rest of us do, if you have any questions feel free to ask here on the forum, we're a friendly bunch  ;) .  The free mesh you found is excellent I loaded some months ago now, this is what Chris said about http://viaintercity.com/forums/discounts/free-global-terrain-mesh-for-fsx/msg2259/#msg2259.  Anyway all the best and enjoy this great VA.


All the best


Steve


Arron Hartley (1550)

I can thoroughly recommend Airports of Norway, which is a freeware. Coverage is great and includes the three destinations we fly to: ENGM, ENZV, ENBR. Link here: http://www.flightsimnorway.com/addons/default.php?funct=dl&pack=aon

Make sure you install the photopacks too, which are included further down.

Sean Donno (1110)

Good stuff on this thread.


Thanks to all contributors  :D

Chris Liu (1001)

#8
Every so often I get asked which addon products do what in relation to scenery, so I've provided this simple explanation for reference (and for me to copy paste when required ;D )

"Scenery", the world you see in flight simulator, consists of several layers, from bottom to top:
• Mesh. Terrain elevation data (DEM), basically hills! It comes in different LODs (Level of Detail, the higher the LOD the closer the elevation points are) e.g. LOD9-76m (this is what Europe is by default) LOD10-38m, LOD12-9m etc. Typical examples are FreeMeshX, FSGenesis and FSGlobal.
• Global terrain textures. Images that cover the mesh to show fields, towns, forests. Included with the simulator are several continent sized sets, each set containing up to 5 seasons. Common paid examples are FTX Global that replaces all areas, Flight1 Ground Environment X that is available as regional sets, and some free examples are by Adam Mills.
     • Autogen. 3D objects such as buildings, street lamps and trees, which are usually included lined up to terrain texture packs. The location of autogen is determined by both landclass and textures, and the amount you see depends on your settings. A specific autogen only product is FTX Global Trees HD, a free alternative is Aime Leclercq's TreeX, these both update tree textures. Another type is JustFlight Revolution X or Earthsims Treescapes which place autogen objects as per the real world to line up with aerial photography. A final type is Aurora BuildingsHD which replaces the textures on buildings and updates some of the models.
• Landclass. Tells the simulator what global textures should go where, e.g. this is a town, this is a village, this is a golf course, these are fields, this is a forest etc. ORBX OpenLC and Flight1 Ultimate Terrain X are common examples of this.
     • Orthographic/photo scenery Instead of generic textures positioned by landclass data, this is actual aerial photography loaded in to flight simulator. Sometimes this has autogen accurately placed on the top. It usually includes a high LOD terrain mesh. Vector data is required if you want to see moving cars on the photographic roads, this may be included too. Horizon VFR X Photographic, JustFlight VFR Real Scenery, MegaSceneryEarth and Orbx TrueEarth are common examples
• Vector. "Lines" such as streets, roads, rivers, coastlines and railways. ORBX Global Vector is an example of this, Ultimate Terrain is a combined product with both landclass and vector data included
• Environmental textures: the sky, clouds, concrete, water/sea, tarmac/asphalt, moon, sun, railway tracks, taxiway markings and so on. (REX4TD+SC, EnvTex and FEX are the most common)
• Custom objects. These items are placed in specific locations and often made especially, common examples would be custom airport scenery and landmarks (e.g. lighthouses, tall buildings, suspension bridges). These are typically bundled in to a landclass or orthographic scenery.
• Combined packages FTX ORBX Regions are the most well known example, including a LOD11+ mesh, global terrain textures that are specific to the region with new autogen building models on them, vector data that includes less major roads, and custom scenery landmarks such as windfarms, country houses, power stations and others depicted on visual navigation charts. F1 Ultimate Terrain bundles landclass and vector for a specific region.

The most cost effective scenery improvement you can make is to get a global texture pack sitting on top of free mesh, because the textures included with FSX and P3D are low resolution and often poorly coloured. Then an environmental texture product to get sky, sea and airport surfaces looking better. You could now consider a landclass product for areas you regularly fly over, which adds variety and detail. There isn't that much value in vector products for airliners unless you frequently fly along coasts, but they're good for VFR as they'll give you additional roads and railways to navigate with/along.

Chris Liu (1001)

#9
I'm occasionally asked to recommend components and systems for a particular budget to suit P3D, so I've come up with this specification for Q3 2019 under £1000 excluding peripherals:
• i5-9600k processor with Hyper212 Evo cooler, Gigabyte Z390 motherboard and 8GB-16GB DDR4-3200 RAM (The extra cores/threads of an i7 or i9 are mostly unusable in P3D, it just wants high clock speeds and single core performance).
• RTX2060 or GTX1660 Super graphics (a used GTX980 or GTX1070 has similar performance for a little less. If you have more money then fit an RTX2070 instead. 4GB minimum, suggest 6GB).
• Crucial P1 or P2 M.2 500GB SSD primary storage, Western Digital 2TB 7200rpm secondary storage (If you have the budget can use SSDs exclusively)
• Cases I recommend lots of large but slow fans (at least 92mm and ideally 120 or 140mm) with filters, and installing a reputable 550W+ semi-modular power supply (prioritise reputation, not wattage)
https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/list/VNNpk6 is a spec sheet with reputable brands already specified and links to purchase (at your own risk, total £980 as of July 2020)

This build should be good for up to 1440p resolution or a superwide 1080p setup. A 27" monitor such as £185 AOC Q2778VQE or £290 BenQ EW3270ZL would seem a good fit, for those on a budget a 24" 1080p will do.

Update July 2020 AMD Ryzen 5 3600 processor is posting very similar performance to the 9th generation Intel i5 for single thread performance and better multicore performance, for around £100 less (price £890 as of June 2020).

Chris Liu (1001)

#10
The new MFS20 hardware requirements are different in that MFS leans on the GPU a lot more and can leverage multiple CPU cores, it's also much more hungry for memory, both video and RAM (although P3Dv5 is possibly even more memory hungry!).

The two above specs are still very much applicable but it is worth spending more to get a video card with 6 or 8 GB memory, such as AMD's RX 5600 XT or the RTX 2060. 16 GB RAM is now a minimum, MFS does benefit from 32 GB so that's the ideal if budget will allow. Whilst Intel still leads the way on single thread processor performance this matters much less now, so AMD is suddenly much more attractive, especially if you're not comfortable doing your own overclocking the Ryzen 5 3600 does a reasonable job of automatically overclocking itself.

Intel Comet Lake i5 10600K is perhaps a little quicker than either the 9600K or 3600 in our recommended specs (depending what benchmark you use) but the price is still high as it's new on the market, the money is definitely better spent on the graphic card right now. Having said all that, it's probably worth waiting for the RTX 3000 series graphics card to come out and be benchmarked (announcement expected September) rather than start a build now.

EDIT: i5-10600KF build https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/list/sqjX68

Chris Liu (1001)

#11
Updated build recommendations for 2022. Graphics cards are still silly money at the moment so if you are self-building you may wish to reuse your old graphics card until later in the year when the RTX 4000 series makes an appearance.

i5 12th generation overclockable (£985 without graphics card, £1500 with an RTX 3060 12 GB) https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/list/rZjxGL
i5 12th generation non-OC (£770 without graphics card, £1300 with an RTX 3060 12 GB) https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/list/JXdQZw

Update: I have now built the i5-12400F system myself, although I've reused my old GTX980. It's pretty quick, will out perform a i7-10700k in most cases.

Chris Liu (1001)

#12
So you've got your new machine, but how do you set the MFS's graphics? There is a fantastic guide at https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/how-to-graphics-settings-and-performance-guide-su12-update-7-26-2023/132407 where every graphics option is explained with images of each setting at each level, plus the likely framerate hit in both CPU and GPU bottlenecked situations.

See if you're GPU or CPU limited by looking at Windows Task Manager whilst using MFS and seeing which is hitting 100%

The big performance hitters are (FPS gains/drops based on a starting point of about 60 fps):
  • Terrain level of detail, beyond 100 you start to get quite big performance drops relative to quality increase. This setting adjusts the detail of distant objects, the effects of going much beyond 150 are mostly only noticeable in photogrammetry (PG) areas. PG hits performance hard and looks terrible on lower tLoD settings so if you've got a slower system, go into the Data settings and turn off Photogrammetry (PG areas such as London will become autogen buildings on top of aerial photography like everywhere else)
  • Grass and bushes at ultra you'll lose 2 FPS vs using high, and high looks nice anyway
  • Object level of detail (LOD) doesn't seem very linear in terms of improvement, upto 100 you get big detail gains zooming into distant objects, beyond that things only sharpen a bit, so 100 is definitely a sweet spot. This only really affects the CPU though, so if you've got CPU headroom you can turn it up 200 without much FPS hit
  • Volumetric clouds, there's a big GPU impact from High to Ultra (we're talking 7 FPS!) without that much improvement visually. You want to run High clouds if possible though as they look awful on medium!
  • Water Waves look nice on High but you pay for them big time with framerate, you can easily gain 3 FPS in GPU limited scenarios by switching to Medium waves although there is a big drop in quality too
  • Terrain Shadows stick to 1024 or lower, going to 2048 in a GPU limited scenario could cost 4 FPS but it's hard to spot the visual improvement
  • Windshield effects Ultra looks gorgeous as it adds SSRT reflections to the windscreen (e.g. cockpit screens get reflected in the side windows), if you drop down to medium and lose the reflection plus some raindrops, you could gain 3 fps if GPU limited
  • Ambient occlusion Use high if you can, otherwise medium. Ultra costs 3 FPS for a subtle upgrade, the visual difference between high and medium is quite significant though
  • Raymarched reflections the difference between Medium and Ultra is a huge 6 FPS along coasts in a GPU bottleneck situation
  • Depth of field basically a blurring of distant items this is very much a taste thing but you are paying for it with performance too. Low will give you much of the effect of Ultra but save you 1 FPS

Outwith graphics, the other heavy hitter is traffic, so keep those sliders to the left if you're struggling with framerate.


Chris Liu (1001)

#13
You've got an nVidia RTX 4 series card and want to use Frame Generation (FG) and anti-aliasing in MFS; it's a bit of a faff with a lot of meaningless acronyms but you may double your framerate so it's worth trying out, here's how to do it:

  • In your Windows graphic settings, you must enable "Hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling" (HAGS) and you'll need to restart the PC for this setting to take effect
  • The DLSS3 Frame Generation included with MFS is older but can easily be updated to reduce artefacts and blur. Simply drop an updated nvngx_dlssg.dll & nvngx_dlss.dll into your main MFS installation directory - if you're not prompted to overwrite you're putting it in the wrong place! Find the files at https://www.techpowerup.com/download/nvidia-dlss-3-frame-generation-dll/ and https://www.techpowerup.com/download/nvidia-dlss-dll/ . You should backup the original MFS version of these file just incase you need to revert. Theoretically these files should update any game with DLSS3.
  • OPTIONALLY in the nVidia control panel (NVCP) you can enable higher than native rendering resolutions that the GPU then scales down to native before outputting, to produce a better image with less jaggies (aliasing). In the NVCP under Global look for "DSR- Factors" and then under "DL Scaling" select the first and second options. After a reboot, you can then select these oversampled resolutions in most games.
  • In the nVidia control panel, just for MFS (although you can set global if desired) I suggest enabling VSync to fast as this will reduce screen tearing whilst moving the camera without introducing too much input lag (don't use VSync within the MFS settings, it's laggier). If you've got a posh FreeSync or GSync monitor don't use Vsync. All these options cap your framerate to make things smoother, if you are number chasing don't enable any of the options in this section.
  • Now we can start MFS and twiddle the settings in-game. Firstly you'll need to be in DX12 mode for official supported FG (this is in MFS General Options, Graphics page). You may need to restart the sim after changing this before the other options appear.
  • Back into MFS General Options > Graphics and we've got a lot to set:
    * Set the resolution to your monitor's native (or higher than native if desired).
    * Display mode to FULL SCREEN (this gives the best performance)
    * Render scaling at 100 (i.e. no scaling), you can turn this down a tad to gain performance and soften the image but it costs instrument clarity.
    * Set NVIDIA DLSS Frame Generation to ON (if this is greyed out or missing, refer to steps above)
    * Ensure Vsync is OFF
    * NVidia reflex low latency keep switched OFF as enabling FG forces this to be done elsewhere anyway, although you can experiment with this setting if you get issues. Enabling lots of low latency options can lead to stutters which is why I'm advising to keep this off initially.
  • Finally there's lots of anti-aliasing options, I'm just going to cover the most pertinent:
    * TAA (Temporal anti-aliasing) is my preferred option as it keeps the instruments and gauges sharp. But it's also amongst the most taxing options on a computer. Sometimes it can create "shimmering" on scenery too.
    * nVidia DLSS Super Resolution (Deep learning super sampling) is less taxing on the system but not as sharp because it renders at a low resolution then upscales, this gives a soft look. The quality setting determines the scaling (performance runs at half output resolution, quality is 67% of your full resolution, with hacks you can enable 80%). DLAA is the same technology but without any scaling, this will tax your PC similarly to TAA. If you notice blurriness on moving altitude/speed tapes and dials, it's caused by DLSS and you should try TAA

You can also enable FG on AMD and RTX 3 series with various FSR3 mods and tools (NukeM9 etc) but YMMV as it's not officially supported. I've not covered it here.