Some Random Questions

[BiggerBoat]

I hope you'll excuse a few miscellaneous questions. It's a pretty powerful program, so there's lots of bits and bobbles I have questions about.

is is possible to zoom into the global map on the airport screen? Most of my flights are an hour or so in light aircraft, and it'd be nice to have a better sense of the relative placement of airports when choosing a destination.

I couldn't find any references to "monitor slope" in the manual, and I notice it's deactivated by default for my GA planes. Are there any caveats to using this? I assume that the function is to determine whether or not the pilot is staying within a reasonable glide slope to the runway?

Is there any option to see cloud elevations? This would help me decide if I need to go to an IFR plan for a particular flight. I'm not seeing it in the plan.

Should I turn off the "weather changes over time" setting in FSX?

Thanks!

[Steve Waite]

All good questions; thanks you.

No map zoom unfortunately, maybe later.

You see the slope result in the assessment readout in the landing section. Check the 'monitor slope' item in the mission page, and you can lose points for falling outside 10% (settable in the monitor files) of your slope, which needs to remain consistent rather than 'on ILS', and works without a runway to land on. In next version [rg], the point of contact with the runway is reported as well.

Cloud elevations would be handy, cloudbase is calculated carefully in IF with respect to dewpoint and so on. Good idea.

Thanks for your support, all the best;
Steve

[BiggerBoat]

Thanks Steve. Much appreciated.

One question I had on my previous post that you might have missed: Should I turn off the "weather changes over time" setting in FSX?

[Steve Waite]

Weather changes over time is handled automatically. So whatever you set it to will be overridden when the sim is running. Thanks, I will try and make this clearer in the Help.
All the best;
Steve

[BiggerBoat]

Thanks for the response.

I'd love to hear more about your weather engine in general. For example .. visibility. I tend to prefer to limit my visibility in FSX to 20 miles or so, because I find that this generally looks more realistic and lets me turn down the cloud distance to improve performance. If I reduce the visibility setting in Ideal Flight below zero, I imagine I am increasing the likelihood of low visibility conditions, but I don't necessarily want to create a bunch of situations where I have only a few miles of visibility. Is there a particular setting you would suggest to generally achieve around 20 or 30 miles of visibility in normal conditions? Perhaps you might consider adding a configuration setting to define the maximum and minimum visibility the user wants to display, and let the engine adjust within that range.

Sorry for the continued questions. I'll lay off ... I promise

[Steve Waite]

Yes I see your point; IF could use a visibility override that limits between a range and smoothly transitions. That's what it is doing right now but with 7 presets. IF creates the visibility of the conditions, but you can increase/decrease the overall visibility with them. It won't make a clear day any less clear, but it will give a dull day less visibility. Try choosing -3 in the Visibility settings.
As far as my reserch went, the weather didn't make much difference to fps compared to scenery, or worse addon aircraft. I have been using Max weather in FSX since it came out, back then I had no scenery sliders up at all.

[BiggerBoat]

Thanks, Steve.

Yeah, I generally find better performance limiting my cloud visibility to 70m or so. To avoid the blue band on the horizon in cloudy skies, it's best to keep my weather visibility well under this (i.e. around 50m). Plus, having that haze in the distance just looks better. So, it'd be great if I could set some visibility limit (min/max) in Ideal Flight, but it's certainly not a deal-breaker. I know you probably want to avoid feature creep, and I could always purchase the registered version of FSUIPC to enable visibility limits.

BTW, your weather transitions are the smoothest I've seen (and I have used dedicated weather programs such as Active Sky). There's some nice variety to. I had a flight into Orbx's Concrete airport yesterday, but it was socked in by low clouds. Had to divert south, and it was a bit of a nail-biter whether I could find an airport out of the clouds before I ran out of fuel.

Maybe another reason to report cloud elevations

[Steve Waite]

Cloud elevations are coming to an IF near you very soon. In the meantime let me brag about the weather in IF

[Steve Waite]

IF works out the cloudbase from the conditions, so I can pull the height from the data. I'm building that into the briefing for you rght now.
Also I am addressing your requirement for the maximum visibility distance setting, since you are the one millionth customer. Check out the report page for progress on [rg].

[BiggerBoat]

You are awesome. I sung your praises over on the Orbx forums the other day (http://www.orbxsystems.com/forum/topic/37277-ideal-flight-10/page__view__findpost__p__330266), and I'll continue to do so. The program and the support are great.

One millionth customer, huh