renault

Hi Don I've only ever used one - O & O Defrag . I use it to clean up my SSD's, to TRIM them and to defrag my HDD(s) which is where my scenery addons are kept. It does the job well and has a lot of options. There is a free 1 month trial available for it I believe. All I can say, is that it works well for me, does what is advertised and didn't cost a lot. Since there is only scenery on my large HDD (8 TB) and I usually only add to it (Orbx and the like) , it doesn't really need a defrag very often. I defrag it about every 6 - 9 months or so, but I don't really notice any change in performance. When I do defrag it , I defrag by "Name" , which I have found does make a difference in terms of access time on a mechanical drive. All my program executables etc are on a M2 SSD ( XPlane and MS2020). My C drive SSD is also an M2 SSD & only has Windows on it. My MS2020 & XPlane addons (not scenery) are on Samsung SSD's (2 TB ones) I also have a smaller HDD (4 TB) which I could best describe as a bit of a rubbish bin for stuff. That one I defrag once a month and sometimes, depending on what I did , defragging really does make a difference. It's also where I keep freeware scenery etc. so some stays and some goes. If I do have a freeware addon that I like after trying it, I usually move it over to one of the Samsung SSD's. For MS2020 I use addon linker to keep track of it all. For XPlane I use a symbolic link addon that Nick Cooper @Nick Cooper posted a long time ago. I think this is it . Link Shell Extension (schinagl.priv.at) This way I can keep things cleaned up nicely and if I ever have to do a sim install I don't also have to reinstall all my scenery and addons. For me that is the real advantage to using symbolic links to storage devices (Addon Linker and Link Shell Extension). Also, it means that I don't spend a fortune on large capacity SSD drives but can have inexpensive large capacity storage for the things that require that. And in my case, I don't notice or feel that the slower performance of the HDD for scenery compared with the SSD storage (the Samsung EVO's) has ever been a detriment . I have tried it both ways i.e. keeping scenery on the Samsung(s) and didn't really notice it made any difference when flying. Now I keep only sim addons (aircraft, paints, utilities etc) on the Samsung. Of course the M2 SSD's are blazingly quick which is why all my program executables are kept on those. And keeping only my OS on its own M2 SSD means that a reinstall is not a large issue at all. Hope this is of help Cheers Pete

Hi Nick This made my entire year !! Thank you Cheers Pete

This is related to a note that I posted in the technical section, on improving full image texture clarity in a flight sim through an Nvidia driver level setting. I had posted a series of Drone shots in MS2020 , but because I started from ground level I had no idea what the true elevation was. So I am bringing favourite aircraft back into MS2020 and testing each to make sure it is compatible with HF2 and I don't CTD. Just two screenshots, but the one reminded me of high school physics calc's with cannonball trajectories - velocity is zero at the apex stuff.... This is the limit of the Vertigo racer (43,500 ft) , but over KSBA texture clarity is still good and the fine detail is still there. So hopefully you will enjoy it , and have a look at the note as well if you're interested in such things. HF2 is definitely a keeper in my book. Cheers

Hi Derek My computer shop went through the scenario you described when my current machine was built. They simply brought two SSD's from the old machine and installed them in the new machine without any issues and I am still using them today. The really important bit though, is that these two drives only had Data and programs that did not have a Windows registry entry. Any other program that I had that was a conventional Windows based program which installed and was registered in the normal way had to be reinstalled. "Best way to go after a major hardware upgrade is a brand new start IMHO " @B12 Very sound advice and not what you were hoping to hear unfortunately. But if you just have data or standalone programs on a drive then my experience is that the drive can just be plugged into the new machine and it should work. Hope this is of help. Pete

I guess everyone should have one of these when flight simming. Just coming out of KSBA, I thought gosh, the sim is fluid , and way off in the distance I can still make out the buildings at KSBA and see the runway markings For me, I never expected this to happen but for me it was my first OMG moment. I'm now going off to re-explore the Orbx AP's and City Scapes. Who knows what I may find Cheers R

Good luck , everyone Cheers R KAVX, Catalina "It's harder than it looks"

I hear you John. You are not alone - I have had issues as well. And yes , it is very frustrating , especially when you get a CTD. But as you have no doubt seen , they have acknowledged a range of issues and are planning a hot fix very soon for some of the major ones, followed by additional updates. So fingers crossed that the sim we all enjoy so much will get back to a more stable and even keel soon. Cheers Pete

Thanks John. I'm pleased you enjoyed it. Cheers They're a really good bunch and deserve our heartfelt thanks for what they are accomplishing. But I'm sure that in the greater good in the world, having me in charge of public relations for anything would not be the best of moves - ha, ha . Diabolical disaster, is perhaps the kindest comment I could make about my chances of success Cheers John

The following article I found to be very informative about how MS2020 uses a very different technology to create scenery. It is not a "Deep Technical Dive" at all, but rather an easy to read and informative description of the basic ideas. Because of that I thought it would be very helpful for my fellow members . Hope you enjoy it. Cheers Pete Meet the startup that helped Microsoft build the world of Flight Simulator | TechCrunch

Almost close to 50 yrs ago when we made our first trip to the UK. Landed at Gatwick. I couldn't believe that such a wonderful, beautiful place existed. Loved it on the first visit and still feel the same way. As W2DR @W2DR said "Life is good" . We have so much to be appreciative of. Cheers

I just saw this quote posted by a member of the Working Title Team at the MS2020 forum website IMHO it bears repeating.... “Patience is not simply the ability to wait – it’s how we behave while we’re waiting.” – Joyce Meyer Asobo has found a series of bugs in the WU5 update and continue to work the issue. A hot fix is soon to be released and other updates will follow. I think it is important to acknowledge that any Developer doesn't wake up and say I wonder what I can mess up today. The are all human like the rest of us and try to do the best they can, but sometimes mistakes happen. We need to take heed of Ms. Meyer's quote and remember that be it Asobo , Orbx or any other developer who sometimes has a misstep. Behave in the fashion towards them that you would like to be treated, cut them some slack when necessary to solve the issue , and continue to support them and you will find that they will respond in kind. Cheers Pete

This one does require a lot of patience , and in my case a sense of humour when it all went south half way through and I had to start again. Cheers & thanks Pete Thanks Wayne And I see that there is the first hotfix coming out tomorrow. It will be an interesting few weeks I think Cheers Pete I never seem to have great luck with updates Derek. I keep getting the dreaded "looping on big files issue" which is a pain as when I restart the sim I always end up having to face a 55.7 GB download of the main scenery file. But it does just go through without hiccups when this happens which is a blessing. I almost am on a first name basis with the Zendesk support people and I have tried everything they have suggested but so far no joy. Its just how my updates go I guess. Cheers Pete It is worth it Graeme. It does work very well for me here and as I said previously I think there will be fixes coming out for the major issues with it. First one tomorrow apparently. Cheers Pete I always forget to update this John. I remember when the Japan update came out I flew in Japan and wasn't at all impressed. When the next world update came out, I was aware that you had to also go to the content manager to download specialized scenery content and that was when I saw the Japan update. Couldn't believe how excellent it was Cheers Pete Thanks . I don't have P3D so I will take your view on that. From screenshots posted here , it does look pretty good though and certainly the difference to me seems in the details when compared with MS2020. As much as it is frustrating when the internet is bogged down or there is an outage, I really have come to like the scenery streaming process for MS2020. With other generation sims, you need a bit of disk real estate to hold all your scenery. But to be fair , it is always available to you and doesn't depend on a web connection for content so it can be a bit of a mixed bag so to speak. So far I still haven't had any issues with view snapping so fingers crossed on that one. Cheers Pete

This has turned out to be a "difficult birth" . It often has seemed like I was going backwards rather than forwards, but then I would see a glimmer of hope and get things moving in the right direction again. My "hobby thing" with flight simulation is visual fidelity and this update has been a challenge There is a hotfix tomorrow and I'm sure there will be others and things will eventually sort themselves out. But at the moment in spite of my issues getting things going it is quite a workable sim for me. And the great news of the day for me was when my sim monitor or worse yet my GPU, died this morning it turned out to be just a wonky cable which was fixed with a quick trip to the computer store. So here are the last of my test sequence. There are one or two here that surprised me, and I am slowly coming to the conclusion that rather than being a regressive step visually compared with the previous update, this one actually has much more potential. What do I mean - well in Usercfg.opt there is a very nice and welcome parameter line called Raytracing 0 Yes please .... just give me the update where it is set to 1 and I will never ask for anything more. Really ! I promise I particularly like the smoothness and also that my machine is now just idling along : CPU temp at 46C, GPU at 61C with everything on Ultra at 2.5K. And I am now getting happy with the visual fidelity. Next step is to start loading in Orbx and checking it all out. I hope that your experience is also moving in the right direction as well Cheers R For those of you who are into photography, you will know that getting the white balance right can really be a right little pain. And this was no different. Didn't help that I forgot that the monitor hardware calibration LUT that I had made the night before the update release was still sitting nice and safe on my hard drive rather than in the monitor where it belonged. . I don't mind being forgetful in my old age. I keep meeting the nicest people , all of whom seem to know me from somewhere before I like making my own weather presets and just started playing around a bit at this point. I'm not sure the ground crew appreciated my sense of humour though And this one just made all the frustrations disappear. It is kind of fun what you can accomplish with a bit of tweaking

Well all I can say is after what was truly the "update from h..l " which lasted all of 8 hrs. , I am impressed with how well MS2020 is working. It is super, super smooth, both cpu and gpu load are significantly lower than before. Rough numbers at KSBA which I like to use for testing is that CPU is much more evened out and my one core which I always thought would "melt" from over work is running at about 85-90% utilization. On the GPU side I have gone from about 85% utilization pre WU5 to about 65% utilization after the update. This is all with everything on Ultra , but with the terrain slider now set at 200 ( the forests have repopulated ). Everything else is the same as before and fps is locked at 30 fps. There seems to be a mixed reception to this update at the moment, but so far I am pleased with the result. Just thought my fellow members might be interested. Cheers R One of the first "niggles" was that in cockpit view , everything was drifting around, without any input. Fortunately the fix was easy and took all of 5 seconds. Just make sure that you reset all of the XBox controller zones as there are two extra ones right down at the bottom of the listing. This isn't the first time this has happened to me , so I don't think it is unique to WU5 There has been a lot of discussion regarding "views snapping" into place compared with WU4. This is an optimization that is present in all modern gaming engines and is designed to save resources (ram/vram) and increase throughput , by not loading image data surrounding your view point until you need it. All I can say, is that I don't have this issue as far as I can determine. The following two images, were literally taken by just quickly swinging the camera from straight ahead to a side view and pressing the "v" key as quickly as I could. I do have very fast low latency RAM in my machine and that may be influencing the results. And considering the load on the MS severs at the moment, I didn't expect this. Not a "melted" building in sight And lastly, we now have particle effects. True confession time, I must have spent all of 10 minutes just blasting back and forth on this runway, just watching the spray .... So that's about it. YMMV of course , but I hope that at the very least this may be food for thought. For me personally, its early days, but I am really impressed with how well everything has come together. Yes of course there are "glitches" and things that worked before but don't now, but truthfully as with all software they will be fixed. But in terms of graphical fidelity and performance I see this as a very big , and positive step in the right direction. Cheers everyone

Hi Derek I'm not sure that John actually said that you do a straight copy or move as I think you may have assumed in your reply that is what he meant possibly. I didn't see a reply from him here though. In essence though, MS2020 will allow you to keep the contents of your Community Folder somewhere else on your machine where you have more storage space. You just have to supply a "pointer" in your community folder to allow MS2020 to know where this information is stored. In computer speak , this pointer is called a symbolic link. If all you want to do is keep your Orbx scenery somewhere else on a bigger drive, you can use Orbx central to do that It is in the Orbx Central manual, under the section "Moving a Library to a new location." Here are the steps from the manual Moving a library to another location Moving a library is painless with Central and can be achieved in a few steps only: 1 Go to Settings > Libraries. 2 Note the directory of the library you’d like to move. 3 Remove the library that you would like to move (remember: this doesn’t delete the actual files). 4 Close Central by right-clicking on the tray and selecting “quit”. 5 Create a new and empty directory in the new location 6 Start Central again 7 Open Settings, and then the Libraries page 8 Press ‘Create New Library’ 9 Select the new library location, give it a name and then press ‘Save’. 10 Move the files from your original library into the new location. DO NOT amend the file structure. This step may take a while depending on your disk speed. Central will automatically scan the library for installed products, and then configure your simulators appropriately. I'm sorry if my original reply confused you, as I wasn't completely clear if you had information in your community folder beyond just Orbx Scenery. My answer tried to cover that topic as well. Only data that you would normally put into the Community folder such as Scenery etc. can be placed elsewhere on a different drive for example. Everything else that is in your MS2020 install location must be kept together in the current location. However, since Orbx scenery data , especially if you have a lot of it , can become quite large in size ,the option in Orbx central to place the scenery data elsewhere where you have more room is a very good and flexible option. I mentioned the Addon Linker program to you , only because it allows you to keep other types of data that you would also install into your community folder, such as liveries for aircraft, or aircraft mods etc on another drive. It uses the same computer instructions that Orbx Central does , by placing its own pointer (symbolic link) in the Community folder to tell MS2020 where to locate this information. Hope this helps and again , apologies if my original answer confused you All the best Pete

Hi Derek I have the exact same arrangement as John @John Dow. I have never noticed any degradation in performance with this arrangement All my Orbx scenery addons along with my freeware ones are on my HDD. My MS2020 is on an SSD and also on the SSD I keep my aircraft addons, custom liveries etc. I use the freeware Addons Linker tool ( MSFS Addons Linker » Microsoft Flight Simulator to manage it all. It makes it extremely easy to keep it all in good shape . The Addons Linker works the same way that Orbx Central does, in that it creates symbolic links from your folders where you keep your custom content and links it to the Community folder. One very nice feature is that you can create custom presets, so for example you could have specific geographical areas in the preset. So you could just load up , say North America preset and then when you were finished, if you wanted to fly , say in the UK , you would just exit the sim, run Addons Linker and you would then have just your UK content in your community folder. As you start to accumulate more scenery, planes, livery etc it becomes an extremely efficient way to manage everything. So you can keep your addons in a very logical named order elsewhere on your machine and the Addons linker will take care of linking it to the MS2020 community folder for you. It is really the number one addon for MS2020 that I simply can't do without. Hope this helps Cheers Pete

Thanks J^3 Cheers Pete

Hi Landon I have only one on your list, #2 the Edgley Optica. I really like it, visibility is one of its really strong points , its relatively easy to fly, very stable and overall for an "armchair flyer" it really suits me. I would certainly recommend it. If I could suggest a freeware GA alternative have a look at the GotGravel mods available on flightsim.to ( Savage Carbon - STOL Realism Mod » Microsoft Flight Simulator ). I enjoy the Savage Carbon and lot, and it is really payware quality. Might also be of interest to you for GA flying. About the only other one I use is the Bonzana A36 "modded". Again available at the same website. I also like the FBW A320 , not because I am into jets at all, but I just was curious how all the sequencing worked. Still a lot to learn there though. For me , I enjoy looking at the world and so in most respects the aircraft is more a means to an end in that regard. So my important criteria are around ease of use, stability and the ability to go slow and enjoy MS2020. Of course every one is different and enjoys different aspects when it comes to aircraft. Cheers Pete

Thanks so much Mike. It is appreciated I am very pleased to hear you enjoyed them. Cheers Pete

Thanks Wayne Cheers Pete Thank you Iain Cheers Pete Thank you. I'm pleased you enjoyed it. I appreciate your comments And I enjoy what you do very much as well All the best Pete Thanks Bernd! See you Pete Thanks Gerold The natural world is pretty interesting and fascinating place. See you Pete I'll tell you John, you really make my day! Cheers! Pete Thanks TTM - "I think" I hadn't noticed until you pointed that out. I'm not sure you are complimenting or the opposite But if you've had kids , you come to realize that it is a fact of life. It's surprising though how often it occurs in nature Cheers Pete PS - maybe avoiding Dunedin, NZ might be a good move as well

It's off the beaten path but definitely worth a visit. It's a bit deceptive as the altitude is a lot higher than one would expect. Glad I had a "turbo" , as I first tried the Edgely and that was a bit of a struggle. Cheers Renault Orbx Iceland Freeware Mesh The latitude and longitude are given on the first screenshot and will put you in the vicinity. It certainly looks volcanic and I half expected to see a steam vent or worse as I went over. Fine particles of pulverized rock called "glacial flour" absorb and scatter sunlight in ways that can give melt water a wonderful blue-green color. The lichen is spectacular I thought. I've never seen 3 glaciers merging IRL and I've seen a fair number over the years. This is pretty cool

Hi Wayne You have a very capable machine and I suspect you will be pleasantly surprised with the performance uplift in MS2020 from the July 27 update, so I think that Sherm's advice is very sound. I can't comment on P3d or its variants as I don't own them, but on my system i7 9700k @ 4.7 ghz, RTX2060 super 8GB , 2.5K monitor, Z390 MB and 64 GB ram with my fps locked at 30 fps for both MS2020 and XPlane i have all settings on ultra or fully to the right respectively and have a very satisfactory flight simulation experience, regardless of where I fly. Item 2. In my experience I have never found that I have run out of VRAM with 8 GB and 2.5K resolution regardless of where I fly. Of course everyone's experience my vary in this regard. Item 3. When you buy from the MS store the games and apps go with your account at the MS store and are not tied to a particular PC You just have to make sure that you use the same account that you purchased them with , if you want to install them on a new PC Here is a MS article which gives the essence of the process for installing on a new PC Reinstalling flight simulator 2020 on a different pc desktop - Microsoft Community Item 4 In my experience it is always preferable for best image fidelity to use the same resolution setting in the sim as your monitor resolution i.e. a 1080p monitor , you set the sim at 1080p , 2.5 K monitor you set the sim to run at 2.5K. Having said that ,here is a little tip that you might find useful and wish to try. MS2020 has a very good built in upscaling routine that can allow you to set the simulator to run at a lower resolution than monitor resolution. What I found is that if you set the rendering resolution to 90% then you are rendering 19% fewer pixels in total and this gives your system a nice little "breathing space" improvement. i.e. you render at 2304 x 1296 pixels in the sim, but MS2020 upscales the image to your monitor resolution of 2560 x 1440p. The nice thing is that the image fidelity is almost indistinguishable from rendering fully at native monitor resolution, but you system will run much smoother since it is not working as hard as it does at native monitor resolution. Of course you can reduce the setting even more than the 90% setting , but I found that image quality also starts to degrade as you go below 90% So what I would do is to pick an area to fly in, including ground scenery and fly first with MS2020 set to the same resolution as your monitor (i.e. 100 % scaling). Then reduce it to 90% and repeat. If you are happy with the image fidelity, then you can keep that setting. If not reset it back to 100% scaling. I have a forum colleague who has tried this suggestion at 4K and was really pleased with the result. Image quality was excellent, and his GPU certainly liked the reduced rendering load. Give it a whirl and see what you think. Combining this with a locked 30 fps (I use NVCP maximum frame rate setting for this) with your system I think you will be pleased with how well it will work. Fingers crossed for the 27th but should be even better with these settings Hope this is of help Cheers Pete

Hi Don Just food for thought .... You have spec'd out a very powerful system, however as Nick as mentioned the GPU may be a bit on the weaker side. I think the one critical aspect missing from the discussion though is what resolution do you plan on using and what fps do you wish to achieve. There is an enormous difference in system resource load to render at 4K compared with a lower resolution. For example on my system I use 2560x1440 native resolution with all settings on Ultra MS2020 and fps locked externally at 30 fps with NVCP. My GPU is a RTX 2060 super 8GB. Vram is roughly always about 4- 5.5 GB , My personal operating strategy is that I like to have my GPU utilization in the range of around 60 - 85% or so load, and these settings allow me to do this. Performance is absolutely rock solid in MS, regardless of where I fly. I have tried running on a 4K monitor and performance is very much less than stellar shall we say. I still have sufficient Vram but my gpu simply doesn't have that processing capability to render MS2020 efficiently at 4K with the render settings that I chose to use At 1080p native resolution my fps (unlocked) is 45 - 55 fps and of course rock solid at 30 fps locked. In XPlane I have all sliders to the right , with fps locked at 30 with the same result and fps unlocked in the range of 60 -70 + My understanding though is that the 3060 with 12 GB Vram, simply doesn't have sufficient processing power to actually make use of the total 12 GB available for a flight simulator , so it may be poor economy in that regard. I fully support Nick's advice in terms of gpu suggestions , but would wish to add that the performance upgrade coming on the 27th may give additional insight into which GPU performance criteria are now important. There are two other aspects which I think are also very important in the discussion. Firstly a very high quality, very stable power supply is a must in such a system and high quality PSU's are not that much more than the less expensive ones. In my experience i have had very good luck with both Corsair and Seasonic (my current build) The other aspect that I have found makes a big difference to my system is the case and how well it is designed for air flow. I recently had my case upgraded by adding slightly larger air intake (120 mm to 140 mm) and extra exhaust fans. My computer builder said simply that to cool efficiently you need a good case (I have a Fractal that I am very happy with) but more importantly you need to bring as much cooling air into the system as you can and balance airflow on the exhaust side. The result - my gpu temp dropped 7C on average and my CPU (air cooled) dropped 5C. So keeping my settings exactly the same as before, at 2.5K my gpu temp now runs at right around 62 - 63C and my CPU is about 45C. Prior to adding the extra air balancing, my GPU was always at 70C and my CPU was right around 50C Heat is the Achilles heel of electronics in my experience. I understand that PSU and case cooling are subjects that folks don't get terribly interested in, but I mention it simply because it is often overlooked. However in my personal experience I found that it can make a very positive difference when you get it balanced out. The best part is that extra good quality fans are not expensive (I am having good luck with Arctic cooling) and my machine under load is very much quieter. Hope this helps Pete

@Mawson Hi Mawson I think there is some confusion regarding this. The message you received does not mean that there is a data leak at Orbx. My understanding of it is the following: Firstly saving passwords in your browser, even though it is very convenient can create a significant security risk for the following reason. It is apparently very easy for websites to read the saved password cache from a browser when you access them if they wish to do so for whatever reason. If you are interested there are many articles available in a Google search on this topic , especially with respect to specific browsers and how they react to this. Unfortunately some are much more robust than others in terms of how they deal with this situation. The option that you have turned on in Edge, allows Edge on log on, to access a MS based data file that lists passwords that have been compromised in some fashion by comparing passwords that you have saved in Edge with the MS master list. Google Chrome also has the same feature. How or where the compromise occurred may not be clear to you at all and most likely is unrelated to the actual website that matches with your password. Please don't misunderstand my comment. I am not implying that you visit nefarious websites at all. Rather that having saved passwords in your browser can create a security risk as potentially somewhere in your web browsing experience, your saved password cache may have been read for some reason and a resulting compromise occurred as a result. This I believe is what the Edge message is telling you. As Ed mentioned @Ed Correia in his note to you, Orbx is secure , but also provided some useful tips . Both MS and Google also have excellent information available both in terms of documentation and additional resources that may be helpful to you in providing a secure browsing environment. Hope this is of help Best regards Renault

Here is mine. Good luck everyone Cheers Pete "Plane, Train and Automobiles"