Starship VC progress

Been getting into the habit of doing just a little work on the Starship each evening. It is the only way it is ever going to get finished. I am currently focusing on getting the VC geometry and texturing done. I am creating gauges as I go along, but they are mostly non-functional yet (that [...]

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Running FSX under Windows 7

Lately there has been a lot of talk about how Windows 7 will run faster than Vista, and how this should be great for gamers (apparently it runs a little faster than XP did). With FSX however, often the standard ‘gamer tweaks’ do not actually affect performance, because it has a fairly odd architecture compared [...]

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Homebrew FSX MCP

Confession: This project is the geekiest, nerdiest thing I have done yet. More so than spending a year writing code to support an indie tool to a major anorak piece of software. This one reeeeally takes the cake. It is almost of benheckian proportions. I built the actual hardware almost two years ago, but only [...]

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Downloading FSDSxTweak now that AVSIM is down

The flight sim community is having a bad year. First the product get canned, and now AVSIM, one of the largest community sites, has been effectively destroyed (we are guessing it was some kind of SQL injection attack). Here’s hoping those guys recover and put the site back up. In the meantime, you can visit [...]

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FSX error – or is it?

Lately I’ve been getting an odd error popup when starting FSX – and now I notice I can trigger it by turning the aircraft lights on.

Funny thing is, 100 is in fact greater than 0. Is FSX rediscovering maths all over again and freaking itself out with this profound discovery every time I toggle the [...]

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A little more Starship progress

I am trying to put in a couple hours each week into the Starship. Here is this week’s efforts – the audio control panel:

And the reversionary system and controls and misc alerts (these switches don’t actually control anything in the sim):

Next think to do will be the sideslip indicator (which I will make using 3D [...]

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FSDSxTweak_Plugin 2.3

I have added the ability to add switches to XtoMdl (/Keep, /Nogui, /Batch, /NoCrash, /BMP2DDs and /XMLSample) to the XtoMdl runs. NoCrash should be quite useful for folks who want to make scenery.
To turn this new feature on, hit the Advanced button on the exterior or interior model options

And then select whichever switch you need

You [...]

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Getting the most of FSX in DX10 mode

UPDATE (9/20/09): If you are running FSX under Win7, read this: Running FSX under Windows 7
With the recent news that ACES studio has been closed, it is going to be a more than a couple of years until we see a new version of Flight Simulator (although people are talking about the end of the [...]

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Starship engine gauge

Yesterday I decided to give another push to the Starship – this time I started on the engine data display. Luckily I had a nice clear photo of the real display, so it was fairly easy to get something that looks like the original.
Here is how it looks in FSX:

Here is the real thing:

I forgot [...]

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Work resumes on FSDS Starship

The first version of Microsoft Flight Simulator that I got seriously into was FS2000. One of the interesting things about it was that you could get Flight Sim Design Studio Pro, a new model editor by Abacus, to design new aircraft for it. I have always been a fan of the Beechcraft Starship 2000A, so [...]

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