Hey World,

Been a somewhat eventful weekend.

First off, had some issues with P3D. The program crashed about 30 minutes into a flight, which frustrated me. When I tried to restart the program, it would no longer load the flight and would crash every time. Turns out my weather generator was pointing to the wrong directory, which caused a lot of issues.

I think I fixed it, although there was a couple crashes last night when I tried to move my camera around. I think it had to do with me moving it while scenery was still being generated…I’m not sure yet, but I do not like these crashes at all.

I’ve been working with X-Plane 11 instead while I figure things out. I did a FSEconomy flight from Wenatchee, WA to Victoria, BC using the xEnviro weather engine and some new orthos from “Forkboy”. It turned out well at first, then the frame rate started getting choppy mid-flight, and by the end of the flight my plane was bouncing all over the place with impossible crosswinds (it was reported at 4kts, but the engine was generating winds from upper layers). I still managed to land the plane under very, very difficult circumstances.

I ended up shelving xEnviro for now and just sticking to Ultra Weather XP + FSGRW since it doesn’t give me those sort of issues.

The frame rate issues seem to stem from the new orthos/meshes I installed. I found a feature in my ortho generation program though that enhances airports and the surrounding area to a higher quality, so I’m reworking all of the areas I had previously generated with the higher resolution since that’s a big deal for me.

In the meantime as I was trying to come up with solutions for these issues, I had to take a break from civilian flying and installed the new beta for DCS World to fly the new F/A-18 Hornet. It’s a huge deal and a high detail plane with intricate and realistic systems. I look forward to flying this plane soon!

Anyways, it still brings up some questions, P3D versus XP11. I still prefer both for different reasons, but when I can’t do a flight due to P3D crashing at random. It’s frustrating…

I’m leaning a bit towards XP11 again, if anything due to the improved flight dynamics, graphics engine, up-to-date navaids and airport layouts, and the free ortho scenery. It’s just that P3D has better addon planes, better weather, and better addon scenery.

Still, if I can’t even fly the better simulator due to random crashes…what’s the point, right?