Happy Boxing Day

Hope you all have a Merry Christmas.  What present does Santa bring to you ?  Here’s mine:

Merry Christmas

652: Backup Your US Tour

MSFS just released a new update.

In the last US update, the Japan Tour was gone.  Should you don’t want to lose the US Tour this time, you’d better backup its folder from the Mission directory first:

C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft Flight Simulator\MISSIONS\Asobo\US_Tour

Also backup the asobo-liveevent folder from the Official directory.

Quite annoying, isn’t it?  Many users are requesting Asobo to keep the highlighted Tours after updates.  Obviously it’s not yet heard so far.

651: My Cockpit Rev #24

Plan can’t catch up with change — my cockpit rebuilding project is a good example.  It was virtually completed right before the launch of the MSFS 2020 a couple of months ago.  Many components I built for P3D then have to be reworked to cope with the new simulator now.

For  example the Flight Instrument Panels (FIPs) that were networked and now have to be connected to the main PC directly; and the two TVs on both sides are no longer usable for surround purposes as they are in different sizes (main TV 65-inch; side TVs 49-inch) that MSFS doesn’t support.

Fortunately, new plan is catching up.  Except the avionics set, others have been set properly even though finetuning is still needed.

Also, there are new components to be added soon. 

650: Location of my Gauges for MSFS

A friend’s friend who asked him where would be the best place to put my gauges for MSFS.  The question was referred to me later.   Although I already replied to him, I think it would still be useful to put a post about it.

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For those who are installing my new gauges for MSFS:

1.
If you are using the Logitech’s Plugin for MSFS, just run the installer in the gauge package, the new gauge(s) will be placed in the plugin folder accordingly and the corresponding PluginPages.xml will be updated automatically.

2.
If you are using SPAD.neXt, the location is all up to you, because you’ll have to add the gauge folder(s) in SPAD.neXt so that SPAD.neXt knows where to find the gauges.

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For those who have/are installing my gauges for FSX/P3D, there are three options to use the gauges in MSFS:

649: 4K Monitor Refresh Rate for MSFS

Since my new PC with an RTX3090 graphics card was straight out from the box, the framerate steadies around 30 under Ultra settings.  Even though I was a bit surprised by this low number, I didn’t pay much attention to it since everything seems to be working fine.

Until the last weekend I had some time seriously looking at the new system.  I found the framerate didn’t change much no matter what I did to the settings.  The framerate still sat around 30 somethings.

I started to wonder why since the framerate on my other computer with an i7 6850 CPU and 1080Ti graphics card gains a lot more than that under Ultra settings.

Excluding the CPU and the graphics card, the most suspicious cause of the low framerate seems to be from the monitors I found lastly.

648: My MSFS Vegetations Mod

Vegetations in MSFS are generally regarded oversized and look unrealistically.  There are tips on the Internet to help improve the situation by reducing the MAX and MIN values of all entries in the 10-asobo_species.xml file under “/fs-base/vegetation” folder to about 60% – 80% (or about 4 – 8 points) of their originals.

Vegetations look more realistic with the mod

My personal preference after tests is to keep the minimum values unchanged but to lower the maximum values to the same values of the minimum; or to 5 when the minimum values are less than 5.

Reducing all the maximum values to the minimum values is also good.

Here’s the download link to the five Vegetation files

647: Logitech MSFS Plugin Won’t Work Alone

When I installed the Logitech’s MSFS Plugin onto my two computers (one new, one rebuilt) a couple of weeks ago, I got puzzled because all my Logitech’s Pro Flight Panels worked nicely with MSFS, except the Flight Instrument Panels (FIPs).

There were nothing on the displays — no serial numbers, no product images.  All screens were blank.  And the most frustrated was Windows recognized them all and said they worked normally.

On my last computer I just replaced, the MSFS Plugin works seamless without any issue.  I just have the Plugin installed and off it goes.

It took me nearly a day to figure out that

646: G Flight Yoke 180° Mod Completed

Remember Alexey’s G Flight Yoke 180° modification and repair project in Post 586 ?  He just notified me that the project has completed.

The last step was to install the Leo Bodnar’s custom controller board instead of the broken Saitek’s board. As the result, the yoke kept 90% of its previous functionality except for the mode switch and the timer display. With the new board the yoke’s input became smoother, so the 180 degree rotation mod applied earlier now allows better control of the aircraft. The last mod will also help people whose yokes are broken to bring them back to life with the help of Leo Bodnar’s controller board, said Alexey.

Anyone interested in his project could see the videos showing the last modification and testing here: