There are things in life that move with a comforting clockwork predictability. The tides, the travel of the sun through the sky, the changing of the leaves... and the whining and moaning surrounding a new FS release.
FSX is here! You can tell by the bright glow on the horizon from a thousand forum posts blazing. To listen to the majority of the posters, you'd think the Aces team were days away from being brought up on charges and spending the rest of their geeky lives rotting in a Turkish prison for crimes against simanity. Before you take too much of the ranting to heart, though, stop and take a breath.
Breathe in... breathe out... better? Okay, time for some reason.
It's true that FSX will run on current mid to high-end hardware. It's also true that it will thrash said hardware badly unless the display settings are dialed back substantially when run straight from the box. However, hope is already pushing up through the ground despite the nay-sayery. Autogen scenery seems to be one of the biggest complaints in this version, with many saying they can only get good frame rates if they disable it altogether. This understandably brings howls from the masses of 'simmers who've grown accustomed to seeing a populated world in the past two versions. Here's the hope part: a
forum post on Avsim detailing changes Matt Fox has made to the autogendescriptions.spb file shows that with a little tweaking, even the power-mad FSX autogen can be brought under control. I've tried out this tweak, and it's true that I can now run autogen on "normal" in FSX with smooth and thoroughly enjoyable performance and acceptably nice looking trees and buildings.
Jon Patch mentioned some FSX settings he's found to be helpful on
his blog, and has also listed FS veteran
Katy Pluta's thoughts on settings as well. Pay these people heed and read through what they have to say carefully. What you'll find is that, far from being a lost cause, FSX is a fantastic new sim that's simply ahead of its time. With the kind of brains the FS community usually brings to problems, it's obvious that relief for early adopters is coming fast and furious.
