Gabriel Teles

The beautiful colors from real world!

Nice as usual, James.

Great shots!

There's one thing I loved about this aircraft: energy management in descents. The Bus can save you from high speeds on approach very easily. For me this is a big deal...  :ph34r: 

I honestly think this is pretty much the first pre-war aircraft shots I've seen in this forum.

When aviation was young...

Very realistic! Great set!

Thank you very much, everyone. I'm really glad you like it. :smile:

Your evening lighting in FSX slaughters my p3d setup! You aren't making the wait for p3d version easier with these great shots BTW

Excellent!

Haha, but I think the P3D version is just around the corner.

Believe me: it will be worth the wait. FSLabs did an awesome job.

I am teaching myself the Bus too! I have my hands full and am learning slowly. Really enjoy flying it. Nice pictures thanks for sharing.

The workload for a single pilot can be very high.

I'm always forgetting something relevant... what a difference from the 777!

This is actually kind of funny. I have always flown Boeings (blame PMDG ), so it's a whole new world and a new fantastic point of view for me now...

I'm still struggling with throttle detents and stuff like that, but I'm learning (and sending a lot of A320s for repairs in the meantime).

So here's some screenshots of several flights I did in the last few days... and kudos for Flight Sim Labs -- it was worth the wait! 

Hope you like it. Thanks for viewing!

PS: Yeah, don't mind the A/THR off in the first shot... :ph34r:

Thank you. I painted it myself

Great job! The screenshots look amazing!

I can totally see this becoming real in the next decades.

Great screenshots, and definitely great mood!

Dang it! I was hoping  you were using both... thinking If I remove the 2D panels, It would be better. 

But this may be the case.

Worth a try, I'd say!

Do you have both, the VC and 2D panels?

 

Just the VC. :-)

Aerosoft EGLL AND FTX England? That's crazy! OOM Simulator 2016. What is your VAS like once flying out of the area, did it increase enough for you to be able to fly to another addon airport?

Hahah, it is crazy. But it's a stress test. It must be heavy. If an addon pass this test, I know I can fly it anywhere. Already did some 2h30 flights with 777 departing from EGLL / FTX England without any problems -- flying over Europe, with detailed mesh, UTX etc. Well, depends a lot on your priorities: I don't like to fly with AI traffic, so there's room for these things...

Don't know if I can do the same flights with FSL A320, though (at least with my current settings). I feel it can be done, but I'll only know for certain once I try to do a complete flight. Will try, eventually... but I won't be sad if I don't make it. This is the kind of airport I reserve for my big birds (777 and the upcoming 747).

Oh, I never measured my VAS usage, to be honest. If I don't hear those beeps, I presume I'm ok to continue the flight.

Ok, bought it, installed it.

Had a little problem with "AOCService" -- which was crashing -- but quickly solved the issue by reading a little FAQ in FSLabs' forum.

Now everything seems to be ok. The aircraft itself is beautiful, as I expected; the cockpit is just awesome, as well as the sounds. Can't tell about the rest yet: I didn't fly it...

It seems to be a bit heavier on my PC than the PMDG 777, actually. My standard stress test is to put the aircraft at Aerosoft's EGLL (surrounded by FTX England), at dusk or dawn time, with some clouds, and see how it goes. Based on this test I configured my sim in the past until I couldn't hear that sound of high memory usage while using PMDG 777, which used to be my heaviest addon... so I knew I could fly anywhere without worries.

Well, doing a quick take-off with the Airbus in this scenario, I could actually hear some beeps while I was jumping between internal and external views (it was a stress test, bear in mind ), as the aircraft was climbing. It was just a few, and I don't think I was going to get an OOM, but it was a good way to measure performance with this addon. But I'd like to hear your experiences on this regard. I must add that I'm on DX9 FSX SP1, which isn't ideal for this aircraft, and I'm using 2048px textures (4096 definitely causes OOM for me in my stress test -- yep, I tried ).

Now, gotta read the manuals... (I don't even know how to taxi this bird. Seriously. :unsure:)

You can actually Uplink the PFPX flightplan directly into the MCDU...pretty neat. Even better, you can request a flightplan from Vatsim.

I saw it. Pretty neat indeed!

1. Yes, I believe so

2. It does generate the V speeds, just as the PMDG aircraft do. There is a great freeware app for calculating V Speeds.

Just on the second point, the V-speeds we provide in the MCDU are only very rough guides; we'd definitely recommend using an app like TOPCAT (or there seems to be a good freeware one called TPC around) to get proper V-speeds, as well as FLEX and Flap settings

Ahh, sorry. I guess the guy I was watching just didn't want to use the generated V-Speeds, after all. Thanks for the tips!

Awesome! Just a few questions, folks:

1. Can I export a flight plan from PFPX before firing up the sim? Just as I do with PMDG... Because after my sim is loaded etc., it's kind of... dangerous to minimize it or something...

2. When I was watching some videos, I noticed the A320 doesn't give you the V speeds automatically, as PMDG Boeings does. Well, this is something I'd like to do "manually" with my iPad... for the very same reason as question nº 1. Is it possible? Is there any performance app for this? If not, is there any program on PC which I may use to get V speeds before firing up my sim?

Thanks, everyone, and forgive me. This will be my first contact ever with an Airbus... :smile:

Gorgeous scenery and gorgeous aircraft! :smile:

Wow! How did they get the layout of airports showing in the ND? The aircraft loads AFCADs?

Anyway, looking forward for this. :smile:

Thanks, all...FS9 can still show its dance moves

Indeed!

Great shots.

Wow. I had no idea, but I used to follow Nick's instructions...

Probably didn't pay much attention.

Just made the change. Let's see how it goes.

Thanks.

Very close both in FPS and VAS usage,  However I have to say with a bit of messing around with my settings and deleting shaders I am getting a steady 30 at the gate at FSDT KLAX with mytraffic6 AI on 20 percent 

 

I am going to fly to fly to flightbeam KSFO..  I am not using the orbx regions but I have vector open LC and global textures installed, using AS16 for weather.   

This is good to know. I was worried. The 777 runs fine here, so I guess the A320 won't be a problem...

Thank you! :smile: 

Still waiting on an answer on screen mode you are using 320 on - you have to use windowed mode guys ? - thanks 

Hey Rich, I don't have the Airbus, but I feel there's no need. Seems just a recommendation, which is understandable when we are talking about FSX (P3D is a bit more stable, I think).

I'm just posting this because I saw some videos on YouTube from early adopters and there was some of them using full screen without any visible issue.

Gabriel - I wasn't disagreeing with you. not intentionally anyways. I was just giving my input to try and help.

 

When I said the sky doesn't compress, what I guess I meant was that the sky texture doesn't compress in a way that I think would be best. You are right that the sky does compress to some degree and, as far as I can tell, the zenith is just the next higher line mixed with the line currently being used. The mix changes with altitude and this can be seen clearly with a test texture made up of colorful lines.

 

But what I think would be best is if the portion of the texture you see from the ground would compress down to about the height of three or maybe four rows and there wouldn't be any hard changeover lines. The sim would just stretch and compress different portions of the texture so you could have both a bright sky when flying low and a dark sky with bright horizon for flying high.

Hi Dave, don't worry. I just felt my previous explanation was incomplete and dubious. It was an opportunity to show some tricks of texture "design" for everyone. :smile:

Your post was great and taught me some things I didn't know.

And this is one of the few opportunities I had to explain a bit some choices I did in my set that always caused questions from users (which are totally legit, by the way). It's cool to talk about these things sometimes.

As for the way FSX handles sky, I think it's just... outdated. We needed something like Outerra, but I don't see this happening in FSX-based sims in the near future. Until then, we just do what we can. :smile:

Well, I have the temptation. I just don't have the money.

just an FYI - if anyone is interested... what I did to learn about how FSX handled the sky texture as far as altitude is concerned (and I also made variants of this idea to learn about haze and lighting pixel effects) -- what I did was to create a set of textures that used red, green , blue and yellow alternating lines starting at the bottom row and working up to the top (just below the lighting row). you can then slew up to altitude and see that the sim doesn't compress the lower half of the sky...it simply adds a line on top of it. it would be so much better if it compressed it and Ive suggested it many times but I get nowhere.

 

Gabriel - nice explanation there. I notice you are using six lighting pixels. Im only aware of the first 5 (top left). Would you mind sharing what the sixth one does?

I think what I wrote in those images will need a better explanation. When I began to work on my textures, I did pretty much the same test as you in order to understand how FSX renders the sky. You are right, and we don't disagree. FSX doesn't load the whole texture compressed; rather, it loads portions of the texture -- more of it as you climb. So let's see what I wrote: "(...) while you climb in FSX environment, the sim "loads" a bigger portion of the sky texture and compresses that texture in those "walls", while the zenith is enlarged and receives only one color (...)".

What do I mean with "compresses that texture in those 'walls' (...)"? In order to explain this, I'll show a quick test that hopefully will be very illustrative.

Here are two different noon sky textures (magnified). The first one is a generic texture that I just made for this test -- a simple gradient of blue. The second one is from my pack -- pretty much the same one I showed in my previous explanation.

1.

2.

They look very similar, but the way they are designed will affect the sim more than one may think. Let's see.

All following screenshots were made using the same graphic settings, same zoom level, same angle, same time of day, without any post-processing.

This is how sky looks like with texture nº1, at ground level:

With my previous explanation in mind, take a close look at how the zenith is being depicted.

At ground level, the zenith seems somewhat smaller than at high altitudes, so the effects of a simple gradient texture are less pronounced. But one can get the idea: zenith is flat, and a solid color. Horizon isn't solid -- its aspect is given by the shades of blue as seem in the texture. A simple gradient of blues will cause some "not-so-beautiful" effects in high altitudes. Let's see...

This is texture nº1, at FL390:

So you can see more of the texture but in less space. This is what I had in mind when I talked about "compression". The visual aspect of the sky is, in my opinion, harmed in these conditions.

I'm pretty sure a lot of simmers don't care about this, but well... when I designed my textures, I wanted to diminish this "issue". Now, with my previous explanation in mind -- about the lack of variation in a certain portion of my texture -- you can see how the "issue" is... "solved":

This is how sky looks with texture nº2, at ground level:

...and at FL390.

Naturally, by making the textures the way I made, depicting the deep blues you can see at high altitudes in real life is a difficult task. When you keep the same blue tones for a certain range on your textures -- as I did --, you'll be effectively decreasing the shade variation...

Sky texture design is all about compromises... and personal tastes, I guess. One may prefer texture nº 1, with its problems. One may prefer my version, with its problems. This is one example to show how we have to make choices in a very limited design environment...

Oh, about your question on that pixel: I have no idea.

Did a lot of tests, nothing conclusive. But I colored that pixel because I thought it could be something that FS9 used... or something, haha.

Great information Gabriel ... thank you, I may just tackle this.  Your sky textures work very well at certain times of dusk/dawn, but during mid day they tend to make everything darker (ground, aircraft, etc.) ... P3D HDR system is now somewhat adjustable with two major light sources (sun and moon) -- this adds to possible permutations.

 

Time to experiment ... 

 

Cheers, Rob.

Yep. My set uses some concepts from "Shade for FSX". I adjusted shadows and lighting in order to improve contrast in terrain. I was also concerned with lighting at dusk / dawn. Knowing that lighting of morning and afternoon could affect dawn and dusk lighting, the morning / afternon lighting in my set are a bit less brighter than at midday, for instance. 

With my ENB settings, things actually get even darker. It suits my tastes, but my tastes are very... controversial...

Again, I could never antecipate that so many people would download my sky textures -- or I'd be more careful in my choices, lol...

P3D seems to give new exciting possibilities... Unfortunately, I'm far from getting my hands on that sim.

Guys, sorry if this has been asked before, but... does anyone knows how much time the "early adopters" system will take?

I mean... is there any prevision on when will the rest of us be able to enjoy this bird?

Right... now I seriously want this bird.   

Amazing shots!