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One word - outstanding Cheers Pete

Hi Wayne The nomenclature stands for Scenery Animation Manager. It is a plug in that includes various animation features used by scenery developers in XPlane For example, it allows things like Jetways to be animated, hanger doors to open, etc. It comes with pre animated objects that a scenery designer can include with their scenery package or if they wish they can completely customize their package objects with SAM. It allows Orbx designers to use the package to make their sceneries come alive for us and be animated. By including it with Orbx , all the scenery designer needs to do is to refer to one of the library files in the package to create their magic for us. As far as I know, what is included in the SAM Orbx version only works with Orbx products. As you mentioned there are other packages in the market that also use SAM , but I believe that they would require the more general and complete SAM package. In other words , what is included by Orbx is customized for their products. And that's the extent of what I know about it. Cheers Pete

Hi Landon That is great. As I mentioned, it was a bit of a long shot for the original member , but I'm really pleased that it was useful and helped with your issue. It definitely is an odd one It's easy to question why all these settings for power management are set the way they are, but from what I was able to find they are all designed to maximize laptop battery life. It would be nice if there was a setting to tell windows update that this is not a laptop, so don't mess with my settings, but sadly that seems to be missing Cheers Pete

This is a "long shot", but I have seen this type of issue from time to time. It seems that win10 has a little random habit of resetting power management for various devices when it updates. To check: 1) Right click on the start icon and open Device Manager 2) Go to Network Adapters and expand it 3) Depending on whether you use a direct connection to your router or wifi, right click on the appropriate adapter and select Properties 4) Check that "Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power is NOT checked" Win10 updates (at least for me) seems to enjoy resetting these options from time to time BTW this also happens for USB ports. Although there is a setting in Power Management to control this, I've found that the settings in Device manager tend to take priority . This is often the cause for various USB devices suddenly disconnecting from MS2020 i.e. if this setting is on for the XBox controller and you haven't used it for a while during your flight, you might find it doesn't work . As I mentioned at the beginning it is a bit of a stab in the dark, but since i have had it happen to me, I thought I would mention it. If your wifi adapter or ethernet adapter does shut down, the server side will automatically assume you have left i.e. you are logged off. Hope this may be of some help Cheers Pete

I hope the following little tip will be of interest to my fellow forum members. Please note , that this is not a hack, but was mentioned by the Microsoft Zen Desk about a year ago as a method to reduce the MS2020 loading time. I have the Steam version of MS2020 and I find that this reduces the loading time by a bit over a minute, which is significant. Cheers Pete For those of you who like watching videos, this is a good reference. As I no longer use the MS2020 store version, I did a little bit of research for the instructions for using this tip with the store version. As a result , my instructions differ slightly from those in the video. I have an added line, ( @echo off) which simply blanks out the second line of text from appearing on screen when you launch MS2020 For the windows Store version Open notepad and add the following lines: @echo off start “” C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe /C start shell:AppsFolder\Microsoft.FlightSimulator_8wekyb3d8bbwe!App “-FastLaunch” Now save the file as a .bat file following the screenshot as shown below. Use Save as type: All Files (*.*) Don't save this as a .txt file as it will not work Give it any name you wish such as Launch MS2020.bat Please note there have been some comments on various forums that sometimes this approach doesn't work for the store version. I suspect that the primary reason, why some have difficulty is that they save the file as a .txt file not as a All Files (*.*). Therefore, before I would do the following modification to the instructions I would double check that the file has been saved correctly. If it has been and still doesn't work then try removing the quotation marks from the "-FastLaunch" text at the end. i.e. it will look like the following, which you would paste into the .bat file @echo off start “” C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe /C start shell:AppsFolder\Microsoft.FlightSimulator_8wekyb3d8bbwe!App -FastLaunch Now after you have saved the file simply double click it to run MS2020 in quick launch mode. MS2020 will start at the checking for updates screen, having bypassed a significant part of the startup graphics, which are informational/advertisement only. Steam Version For those who have the steam version, this is easier to do and can be done within the steam application A pictorial guide follows : What you will want to add in LAUNCH OPTIONS is -FastLaunch Exit from the steam application and start MS2020 in the normal way. In my case, I have a desktop icon which starts the steam version. As soon as MS2020 starts it will go to the checking for updates screen, having bypassed the initial startup graphics.

The AJ Hackett Auckland Sky Jump

Hi Wayne Sorry to hear that you're not feeling well. But that's life isn't it, one door closes, but if you look you often find another opens for you. Cheers & be well Pete

Fantastic captures John! I very much enjoyed these Cheers R

Hi John I agree with you that this is a great idea. I would only like to add a comment, or more like a plea to my fellow members. It is "Please try to keep your comments focused to the actual topic " On so many other forums I other read comments of the like "Well I don't have that problem on my machine", or the standard, almost classic, " If it ain't broke , don't try to fix it " . Perhaps worse yet is someone who "derails" the topic to force a discussion to their particular agenda. The person who posted the original question asking for assistance is not helped by comments like these. They took the time and trouble to ask for help. and at the very least I feel they deserve advice from fellow members on thoughts , suggestions that are focused on actually addressing their problem. My worry is that this idea, as great as it is, could quickly go down the "rabbit hole" that plague so many other forums who try to do this. Fellow members, the choice is ours as to which we wish to be .... Pete

Excellent ! You certainly haven't lost your magical touch Cheers Pete

Hi Don It looks like you may have had some "corruption" , so having repaired those files, MS2020 is also requesting Content manager updates for those files as well as the SU8 bug fix. Before you press "fly" if you click on your "aviator" symbol in the top right hand corner, you will then see the actual version of your current MS2020 listed. It should be the SU8 bug fix, version 1.23.12.0 . From what I remember the SU8 bug fix had two updates which were about 1.5 GB in size (I have the version with the extras rather than the base one) and a few others which were very minor and appeared to be related to specific areas (i.e . UK, Germany etc.) If your version checks then your base system is now correct. I would update the 1.5 GB ones if you have them. Again just checking from memory, they seemed to be related to the base aircraft that now have the new propeller modeling effects etc All the other files seemed to related basically to scenery fixes etc. So if you have the base version updated and correct, you could just continue to update them over the next couple of times you have MS2020 up and running and you are using it. Or you could just click update all, and have a cup of coffee or tea while it completes everything. Hopefully this could be easier for you under the current circumstances. Cheers Pete

All the best Wolfgang! Enjoy

Hi Don Literally as I was typing my response and hit submit , Landon @Sniper31 just posted his. I was going to pass on the same link that he provided in it, so I have edited my original post. Fingers crossed for you mate Cheers Pete

Hi Joe I would second Landon's suggestion. XMP profile is click and forget . The extra cost, if you can cover it, is worth the difference it will make to both your blood pressure and frustration levels. Cheers Pete

Very nicely done Sir John I'm really pleased to hear that it has such a personal connection for you. Yes I did see that , in fact a number of them in the pac has different "City of ....." which I think is quite cool. Coming from that part of the world you may be able to give some additional insight into this. In the opening sequence of screenshots for MS2020 when it is starting up, there is a 747 shown which has a 5th engine , very close to the fuselage. From what I have been able to discover, these "pods" as they were called were not operational, but were used as a method to transport engines to where they were needed at other locations in their fleet. Just out of curiosity, during your travels , did you ever see any, or have the good fortune to be on the seat side of one. Thanks Pete

I love that !! Cheers John and thanks! Pete The aircraft liveries (Asobo default A32N) are available in two packages. They cover the "V Jet" series from 1959 to 1967 - Pack 1) , and pack 2 (1968 - 1979) The aircraft liveries are available at : Pack 1 - Painted & Clean : https://flightsim.to/file/28006/qantas-a32n-retro-pack-1-1959-1967-painted-clean Pack 1 - Metallic & Clean : https://flightsim.to/file/24970/qantas-a320n-retro-pack-1-1959-1967 Pack 2 - Painted & Clean : https://flightsim.to/file/28007/qantas-a32n-retro-pack-2-1968-1979-painted-clean Pack 2 - Metallic & Clean : https://flightsim.to/file/24972/qantas-a320n-retro-pack-2-1968-1979 The ground crew liveries are available at : https://flightsim.to/file/20063/qantas-ground-crew-total-package Here are two snaps to show you a little detail. This is the "V Jet" - 1968 from the package.

Thanks Graeme I didn't at the time. Probably a few wet days are very welcome after a hot summer Cheers Pete Thanks Adam! See you Pete Thanks . I am really pleased you enjoyed it. The first time we went to Australia , the couple behind us on the flight over kept telling us how wonderful the weather always was. Landed in Sydney, and gosh they were right. A beautiful sunny day (it was November) and I though this is my kind of place After a night where I watched the cleaners in the office buildings around the Marriott turn lights on floor by floor at 3:00 am we decided that as soon as we could we would go out for a walk. Our destination was the rocks. It was chucking it down and we got soaked. By the time we were across the harbour, we were frozen. I remember finding a shop that had a huge lineup because they were selling hot chocolate. I closed my eyes to the cost as it had one important feature - it was hot. The rest of the day was a bit of a blur and all I remember was trying to warm up and thinking, are we in the right place? Next day it was gorgeous again and stayed that way. What can I say? Cheers and thanks again for commenting All the best Pete Thank you John Cheers Pete

Thanks Wayne Cheers Pete Thanks Howard Cheers Pete Thank you Iain Cheers Pete Thanks John To which I would add .... Intense pain in right foot .... Stone fell on foot! Cheers Pete Thanks Landon Yep, remembered to tighten everything I loosened up this time See you Pete Thank you Ken Cheers Pete Thanks Gerold See you Pete

Cheers Pete If you can't see the clouds, it's raining ..... And if you can , it's just about to start.... "A penny for his thoughts' definitely comes to mind ... I just liked the lighting in this one ....

Hi Doug I saw a comment in a recent dev video about it. Seb discussed that they had investigated and prototyped DLSS and were very surprised how well it worked. There is no committed release date yet for it (they are hoping in release 10) , but apparently it is now part of the package of DX12 "goodies" coming later this year. His comment about DLSS starts at approximately 1:02:36 in the video. Cheers Pete

I really enjoyed viewing this John. It is a cold, wintery day where I live, and after watching the video, I definitely felt much better about going out to clean off the driveway. I especially enjoyed the commentary and the personal experience comments you added. It really helped me to understand the complexity and history of the city. I've seen F1 racing from here and I was surprised in a very nice way to have an aerial commentary of it all . It really helped me to put things in perspective. Thank you for doing this and please consider doing more. Cheers Pete

Hi & welcome Very sensible advice from Doug. I think the most important question going forward, along the lines of Doug's suggestion is a fundamental one. What resolution do you wish to use. There is a major difference between the gpu capability required to render a 4K image at even a locked 30 fps compared with the gpu that would give very nice results at 1440p or 1080p. For me personally , 1440p has been a really good resolution to use and I have a rather dated RTX2060 super gpu. I have both XPlane 11 and MS2020 so, my comments are related to those two simulators. If you desire to go with 4K, then the best answer is to buy the most capable card you can afford, because at 4K even a RTX 3090 can be challenged. From what I have seen at 1440p, a RTX 3070 or even the RTX 3060 /(tii) will work very nicely giving you great visuals and very good performance. Other members have for example, picked up a used GTX1080 ti and have found that it works very well for them at 1440p, so that might possibly be an option. So quick summary : at 4K your options are limited and very expensive, at 1440p/1080p your have many more alternatives at much more reasonable price points compared with the cost of a 3080/3090. I would though seriously keep in mind that later this year, MS2020, if that is one of your choices will be implementing Nvidia's DLSS rendering technology. This will result in a significant boost in GPU performance and especially with the RTX series of cards, will make use of special processing cores on the card called tensor cores, which are not currently used at all. This will give you additional GPU performance over using DLSS on a non RTX series card. Cheers Pete

I have a lot of sympathy with the original poster , as this has been the story of my experience with the SU7 update. Simply put, constant CTD's at random times with no real rhyme nor reason. MS2020 simply became unplayable. I have reinstalled win10 4 times (keeping apps and settings) ,disabled Malwarebytes , which was the root cause of my looping files issue , but did nothing to solve the CTD issue , followed all the Zendesk advice regarding community folders etc, read I suspect a significant percentage of all the articles both good and bad on MS2020 CTDs and still I kept having the problem. That is until I finally , in my case tracked down the root cause of the problem. This is my story. What I discovered was in my particular case, the problem was all due to a program called Nahimic. Nahimic is a group of audio drivers designed to enhance the users audio experience. In essence it is virtual sound software. In a great many cases, PC's are shipped with Nahimic preinstalled. In my case with a MSI motherboard, Nahimic is part of the MSI Dragon Center package. With Asus, it is actually installed in the bios with the motherboard. The problem comes from a recent change with Windows updates. Now the Nahimic driver update adds a companion app which provides a user interface for the driver which allows you to add additional Nahimic features. In my case ever since I updated to SU7 I was getting CTD's all the time. Prior to this, my system was completely rock solid. What I discovered was on the day of the SU7 release, when I updated my windows, it also updated the Nahimic driver (nahimic mirroring device). Unfortunately this update is "buggy as hell" to quote the dozens of different forums that I have looked at. It seriously interferes with the audio output from games and applications in a negative way in many instances. When this happens , you get an immediate CTD. I have attached a link to LinusTechTips about it. What is nahimic companion and why is it suddenly on my custom pc? - Programs, Apps and Websites - Linus Tech Tips My experience mirrors, the discussion in this article. Simply put, Nahmic is impossible to delete, although with a bit of effort , in my case I was able to disable it. If you do think you have deleted it, then Windows update will simply reinstall it. There are good instructions in the article about disabling it. However, I also want to mention that I use a free Microsoft program that is perhaps the most useful bit of software you can ever have on your PC when you run into problems such as this. It is a program called Autoruns64 which to is best described as the most comprehensive way to see (and disable (temporarily or permentantly, if desired), every program which is configured to run during system bootup/login or when you run windows built in applications. It includes programs in the startup folder, Run , RunONce and other Registry keys etc. As a complete aside, it is very surprising when you actually see all the programs and other apps that Win10 starts with. The programs listed in the Task manager etc, are a very minor part of the startup process. Autoruns for Windows - Windows Sysinternals | Microsoft Docs It is a very user friendly application, very simple to use and also allows you to use Virus Total (Google multi virus scanner website) automatically to check an application. So if you think that a particular application, extension service etc. is a problem you can easily disable it from startup, reboot to see if it solves the issue. In my case to be doubly sure, I found that the main Nahimic executables , the first two can be disabled by the Windows services app as per the LinusTechTips article. However. the Nahimic Mirroring device driver along with the Nahimic Task executables, don't show up in the windows services menu and the only way to disable them was with Autoruns. I also found that if they are left active, Windows updates detects that and redownloads . So in my case disabling Nahimic required both applications and a layered approach. If you do use Autoruns, make sure you follow the instructions in LinusTechTips note on disabling the Nahimic services first , before you use Autoruns. Otherwise windows will revert to using the Services entry as part of its startup and you will be back at the beginning. In my case, since doing this SU7 has been 100% CTD free, except for when I rechecked these Nahimic drivers, rebooted , started up MS2020 and guess what CTD. The longest I have left MS2020 running is 34 hrs and it was perfectly fine at the end of the test. I knew immediately when I started up MS2020 after disabling Nahimic that I was on the right track. I have never heard until now, that as you circle an aircraft with its engines running that the sound varies and shifts from one stereo channel to another or the sound inside the cabin of my Kodiak is much more muted than it is outside the aircraft. These simple pleasures did not exist with Nahimic , even though it is supposedly a virtual sound application. So this may not be applicable to the original author as you may not have the Nahimic device present, but I wanted to put a response together, on the off chance that this may be of help either now or in the future if you do. As I mentioned , it is on many different systems and until Windows updates the driver to include the Nahimic companion, you will never know it is there. And exactly how and why Windows Updates chooses to update the driver to the Nahimic companion seems to be one of life's great mysteries. In many ways , Nahimic is not a bad program as listening to sound while playing a video was quite nice with it, but MS2020 simply doesn't get on with it at all I discovered. I sincerely hope that this may be of some help to the original poster in combination with the latest Zendesk support and at the very least may be helpful for future reference. Cheers Pete

Hi Joe Good to hear. As far as the "fish eye" effect, their does not seem to be a lot of resolution on Asobo's end. It was broken around SU5, supposedly fixed but I have not found now that it actually does anything (may be inoperative). I normally leave it off. I've found that a zoom factor of about 70% with the camera tends to work reasonably well at getting rid of most of the problem. Just for comparison I have posted 3 screenshots with memory and GPU utilization on my system that you may find interesting Cheers Pete All are in OZ. (Mackay). My terrain rendering is set at 300 16.5 GB ram, GPU - 70% 16.8 GB ram - GPU - 74% 15.8 GB ram - GPU 57%

Hi Joe Just as a comment that may be of help hopefully. I have exactly the same processor and GPU as your original machine, with the exception of 64GB ram (3200 mhz). My CPU is Intel turbo boosted and normally runs at 4.7 ghz. I have fps locked at 30 and am using a 1440p monitor. All my settings are on Ultra. My OS, MS2020 are on SSD's and my Orbx scenery is on a WD HDD. You haven't mentioned the monitor resolution you are using. In my experience a RTX 2060 super works very well at 1080/1440p but doesn't have the horsepower to work very well at 4K. I have to say I have never had any issues at all flying anywhere with either MS2020 or XPlane 11 with this system. I am wondering if the culprit with your current system is the 16 GB ram, as from my monitoring of such things I see a total ram usage on my system at times of over 20 GB when using MS2020. From the description of what happened to you in your flight, it sounds very much like what would happen when your computer runs out of available ram and starts paging onto your hard drive , which is considerably slower. This would turn your experience into a "slide show" as you describe . I am attaching a link below to a tech note I wrote last year on what I discovered after I upgraded from 32 GB to 64 GB. Memory management in Win10 is a complicated process, much more than I ever realized. You might also wish to consider that later this year, MS/Asobo will be implementing DLSS (Nvidia Deep Learning Super Sampling) in MS2020. One aspect of this that I have not seen mentioned is that for an RTX user, DLSS has a significant impact on your GPU performance (improvement). The reason for this is that DLSS uses the tensor cores on your card. At the present time, these cores are sitting idle, because they are not used in any type of normal graphics rendering (either DX11/12). So the improvement from DLSS is significant as it is a combination of both rendering at a lower resolution and upscaling to monitor resolution and also using the additional tensor cores on your RTX card that are currently not used. Also, I have been experimenting lately with rendering scale/TAA in SU7 in MS2020. There was a brief mention in one of the Asobo videos, by Lionel regarding their upgrade to their upscaler (13 tap ). In my experience, they have significantly improved how the system works in SU7, even though there was no mention of this in the release notes. What they have done is to improve how well TAA and image sharpening work when the upscaler is activein my experience. I believe that this was the reason up until recently that Asobo was saying that they were not considering DLSS as they felt their implementation worked just as well. However, their change in outlook resulted from their own recent work where they saw improvements beyond what they were achieving. What I found is the following, and I have to admit I am a "stickler" for video fidelity. I cannot see any difference in rendering quality on my system with this change. Under normal usage at my gpu load (measured with CPU-Z) runs at about 80%. If I change rendering scale from 100% (native resolution) to 90% my GPU utilization at exactly the same locations drops down to about 70-72%. The reason I am describing the change in this fashion is because my fps is locked at 30 . This has the effect of normalizing the system behavior and allows me to see the reduction in GPU utilization from these changes more clearly. If I reduce it further to 85%, by GPU utilization drops to between 65 -68%. Below 85% rendering resolution I do see a drop off in visual quality. Of course this type of change is a function of an individual user, and I have to admit that I was pretty much in the camp of native monitor resolution is always the best policy, but these experiments in the last few weeks have led me to believe that there are some significant benefits to be achieved with a bit of graphics tuning with SU7. Perhaps you might want to consider upgrading your system memory to 32 GB as an interim step if this is an option to you. Of course individual mileage will vary. As an aside, in my experience DD scenery is very hard on frame rates and on my system (Seattle) takes far more system ram than other products, although it does look quite spectacular. I hope this may be of interest and some help in your decision. Cheers Pete