Putting the “Plus” in VictoriaPlus

Holger and I have decided, with the support of Don Grovestine, to expand the scope of Victoria+ in FSX to include the San Juan Islands, including Blakely, Decatur, Lopez, Orcas, San Juan, Stuart, Waldron and many smaller islands.

We will be adding accurate mesh, landclass, shorelines and hydrology, roads, correcting airfields and making floatplane bases AI capable (Don is working on that).   This adds 16 airfields and 5 Floatplane bases, bringing the total number of facilities in Vic+ to 50.

This will make Victoria+ contiguous with Vancouver+, and with Holger’s North Cascades addon, when that becomes available.

Here’s all the facilities in Victoria+.  * Denotes new facility in this version.

Canadian airfields

• Butler Field
• CAM3 - Duncan
• CYYJ - Victoria International Airport* (Don’s superb version)
• Gaines Strip
• Hastings Strip
• Hudson Island*
• James Island*
• Qaumichan Lake - Raven
• Saltpring (closed)*
• Sidney Island*
• Thomas Strip
• Village Bay - Mayne

Canadian floatplane bases

• CAB3 - Bedwall Harbour
• CAP5 - Victoria International
• CAP8 - Port Washington
• CAV8 - Shawnigan Lake
• CAW7 - Mayne Island
• CAX6 - Ganges
• CMAP - Maple Bay
• CYWH - Victoria Harbour
• Whiskey Point

Canadian heliports

• CAL7 - Ganges Hospital
• CBF5 - Mayne Medical
• CBF7 - Camel Point
• CBK8 - Victoria Jubilee Hospital
• CBW9 - Madrona Bay
• CBZ7 - Shoal Point Coast Guard
• CMBH - Mount Belcher

US airfields*

• 1WA9 - Friday West
• 2WA3 - Stuart Island West
• 38WA - Blakely Island 
• 4WA4 - Windsock
• 61WA - Burden Field
• 6WA5 - Wilding Farm
• 78WA - Center Island
• 7WA5 - Stuart Island Airpark
• 90WA -Eastsound - Wardonair
• Crane Island
• KFHR - Friday Harbor
• KORS - Eastsound - Orcas Island
• S31 - Lopez Island
• Shaw Island
• WA09 - Roche Harbor
• WA18 - Decatur/Jones
• WA35 - Clam Harbor
• WN07 - Decatur Shores

US floatplane bases*

• W33 - Friday Harbor
• W39 - Roche Harbour
• W49 - Rosario
• WA81 - Fisherman’s Bay
• WA83 - Westsound/wsx

Fix for Out of Memory errors on Vista

Many FSX users have been plagued with Out of Memory errors (OOM errors), despite having lots of RAM.  Phil Taylor posts info on a fix for this problem in Vista.  The MS knowledge base article is here.

James and Sidney Island in Victoria+ for FSX

There will be three new airstrips in Victoria+ for FSX: Hudson Island just off Thetis Island (as a result of extending the coverage area North), and James and Sidney Islands just East of CYYJ.  James Island is privately owned by billionaire Craig McCaw, unless someone has grabbed it for the US$50M price he’s put on it.  It includes an 18-hole Nicklaus-designed golf-course as well as other amenities.  Sidney Island is largely strata-owned by about a dozen owners, but under strict conditions to preserve the majority of the land as undeveloped.  These screenshots show FSX-default (but include Don’s CYYJ) vs. the islands as they will appear in Victoria+.  The airstrips are clearly visible in these views, as well as the more detailed shoreline (with custom shore texture) and improved landclass.

Victoria+ for FSX

I’m pleased to say that Holger and I have started work on the conversion of Victoria+ for FSX.  There won’t be much in the way of new features, perhaps a couple of new airfields, and an enhanced coverage area (going a little further north).  The exciting news is that we will be working with Don Grovestine to integrate our work with his CYYJ to create a single addon for the area.

This will be for FSX-only, release date not yet defined.  We also want to make sure that Victoria+ for FSX works will with Ultimate Terrain X - Canada and FSX SP2.

DRM on it’s way out?

I’ve complained about iTunes stranglehold on online music distribution, and despite their willingness to offer some DRM-free music, the vast majority is still locked into Apple: only playable in Apple products like iTunes and iPods.  Following on Amazon.com’s May decision to offer a DRM-free music store, Boing Boing reports that Universal Music is apparently going to experiment for a limited period with DRM-free music.  So buy your music online without DRM crippling where and when you can, and that will hopefully move us towards a DRM-free future.  /soapbox [applause swells and fades]

DX10/SP2 update

Phil Taylor posted some important information on the upcoming DX10 update: it’s not just for DX10 but there will be fixes for DX9/XP systems as well.  So it’s now called FSX-SP2(DX10).  We won’t know until early September which bugs will be fixed or what the DX10 features will be.  But this is very good news, hopefully some important outstanding issues will be resolved.

Dillingham now available from Aerosoft

Dillingham, O’ahu, Hawaii for FSX has been released.  Combining photoscenery with Bill’s famous detailed “Womacking” this is a gem in FSX addon product world.

You can find Bill’s romantic description on his blog.

Suggested scenery settings for FSX

Here’s an updated list of suggested settings for FSX.  This serves as a starting point only.  This is taken from the Vancouver+ FAQ.

Items denoted with * are ones where you may want to adjust as noted:

Graphics
● Frame rate: 25* (some get better frames at unlimited)
● Filtering: optimum for your video card
● Global texture res: Very high
● Lens flare: Yes
● Light Bloom: No
● Advanced Animations: Yes

Aircraft
● Global: Medium High* (reducing this could make a big difference to sim performance in some aircraft)

Scenery
● Level of detail radius: Large* (can reduce to medium to help texture loading times, textures will be less sharp at a distance)
● Mesh Complexity: 80
● Mesh resolution: 10m
● Texture resolution: 1m or 30cm (we provide configuration files for both). Some find no loss in performance at 30cm and it looks great when taxiing at CYNJ or CYPK
● Water effects: Low 1.x (this is the most realistic colour for the area)  Many folks prefer the reflections in High 2.x, but this will greatly reduce framerates
● Land detail textures: Yes
● Scenery Complexity: Extremely Dense* (you can drop this for improved performance)
● Autogen Density: Dense (Many can fly usually at Very Dense, but Extremely Dense is not recommended for any current hardware)
● Ground scenery shadows: No
● Special effects detail: Medium

Weather
● Global Setting: Medium High (unlike FS9 weather settings don’t seem to have much effect on performance)

Traffic
Note: our traffic files are designed to add more traffic at 30-35%, and again at 60-70%. FSX default AI has a major performance hit, and a global traffic replacement addon is a recommended addition. General Aviation and Airline traffic, as recommended by Microsoft, should never be set above 80%.

● Airline traffic density: 25%*
● General Aviation traffic density: 25%*
● Airport vehicle density: minimum
● Road vehicles: 11%* (and you can choose light or heavy traffic in the Vancouver+ Configurator)
● Ships and ferries: 10% (much more than this and you will start to see ships in odd places)
● Leisure boats: 15%

New airport facility editor for FS9 and FSX

Lee Swordy kindly created a superb freeware program which could be used to graphically edit airport facility files in FS8 and FS9.  He moved on to other things long ago, and the gap has apparently now been filled with a new program from Flight1, Airport Facilitor X.  Both FS9 and FSX facility files can be modified.  It seems to go far beyond Lee’s excellent AFCAD2, with features like live Flight Simulator updating in another window to preview and align your changes.  Intro price until August 19 is US$29.95.

I haven’t tried it yet, but it looks promising. 

EDIT: I purchased it and tried it out.  The GUI has apparently been almost directly duplicated from Lee’s AFCAD program, making transition to this tool easy.  The only differences I could see being in the added functionality.  Being able to see results in the sim as you work is superb.  I found a small latency in dragging points around when synced to the sim, but I understand this, and it didn’t bother me or affect my ability to use the functions.  Apparently there are also some XML commands the program doesn’t support, and some other minor glitches, so I’ll hold off for a while on using it for commercial projects (extra cost license that they are somewhat mysterious about), until they fix this up.  But I expect them to address any issues quickly.  As Arno points out there are some freeware alternatives out there.  Personally I prefer commercial versions, they are much more likely to be supported in the long term.

Support forum at http://www.simforums.com/forums/forum_topics.asp?FID=31