Heya!

This week has had its ups and downs with simulation. I’ve had a difficult time getting into civilian sims, namely X-Plane. The lack of VR support doesn’t bother me as much anymore, but flying airliners does.

I don’t get it. I’m having no difficulty flying an A-10C Warthog or a F-15C Eagle, shooting down tanks, and flying back to base. Yet, when it comes to trying to set up approaches in an airliner, I have a difficult time and it’s simply just not fun for me.

Perhaps I just need more patience, or perhaps it truly isn’t that fun for me as I’ve spent a majority of my time in smaller prop-planes. Just this morning for instance, I made a quick IFR flight over the Puget sound in a small Cessna 172 and I enjoyed every minute of it. I may consider flying in a Baron 58, a Cirrus SR-22, or a DA-42 later. That to me is more fun.

So perhaps I’m just taking X-Plane the wrong way and trying to force myself to play it as others do when they share their pictures of 737’s or Airbus’s…instead of enjoying it in my own way.

Today though, my mission is to rerender some areas of X-Plane. I had nearly 200GB of Orthos that I deleted, they took simply way too much space. I found ZL15 a good balance in space and texture resolution. For now just rendering commonly flown areas in WA. Should take a few hours or so. Afterwards I plan to render parts of Southern California, Las Vegas, and Arizona. After that I want to render parts of Florida, Colorado, and parts of the UK (Because I always wanted to visit the UK). It’ll be a good weekend project.

I’m also considering doing some sort of cross-country tour, I’d like to fly down the West Coast using a variety of different aircraft and perhaps Livestream it and post a lot of pictures as well.

In non-simming news, I’ve been replaying Red Dead Redemption in anticipation for RDR2. I never finished the first game, so this will be a great excuse to actually get into it and finish it up! Farming Simulator 2017 is coming out next week, which I have already preordered and am totally excited for.

Other than that, my ISP gave me a notice saying as of next month I’ll be capped to 1TB. On one hand, it sounds like a good reason for me to stop using them and switch to another provider…but I’m going to use it as an excuse to cut back on playing newer games and spend time on games I already have. While my focus is on RDR for PS3, I’m also wanting to focus on Rise of the Tomb Raider on PC…perhaps do some live streaming as well. Also the upcoming Farming Simulator 17 will be taking much of my time too.

That’s it for now. I’m busy with other stuff in my personal life so I’ll be at home a lot. I’ll be on a nice little stay-at-home vacation :).