Had an email from SkyUnlimited ( http://www.skyunlimited.net/ ) pushing their new Grasshopper. It doesn't look too bad but as it's FSX only.. can't see me parting with any folding. Price is $25.95 and I believe you get 14 liveries plus paintkit for that. Engine is modern 90hp version. Anyone got it yet??
For a shade under £18 I think I'll be picking it up soon. I do wish the pound hadn't crashed so much against the dollar, I'm so used to picking up addons that are priced in dollars ridiculously cheaply.
I picked it up as soon as I saw it- I'm a big fan of the little Gwasshoppah.
Initial thoughts are that it's quite good, definitely nice, but-
It's 1.3gb when installed- no texture fallback is used at all.
No sounds- they are aliased to the default J3.
It seems to effect my fps- I was flying from YSCH and got around 12, if that, with the L4, and then around 20 with the Aerosoft Beaver.
One last real niggly- the prop disc, or lack thereof. I investigated the prop texture with dxtbmp and it's just a feathered, solid disc. YMMV but I changed that to a more traditional prop disc.
That is a shame, I bought the Me262 for FS9 and it is a very good product, this one looks like it needed a ´final polish´before it went on the market. Why are things (like the FSX Wellington too) so bloody big on FSX now, 1.3 gig for such a little plane!!!!
Is it just an FSX 'thing'?? Am I rignt in thinking that FSX textures are much bigger than those for FS9?? Even so.. 1.3gb is a lot of download isn't it!! The Wellington does come with scenery too
As a quick test.. I've just looked at DG's Rapide. Each dds texture is 16mb and with 15 paints plus model.. sounds e t c, it weighs in at 269mb of disc space. The FS9 model has 61 textures (hmm.. I do quite like the Rapide!) and each one is between 9 and 13.5mb. Total with the model, sounds e t c is 651mb of disc space. The FSX model is 20.7mb against 3.04mb for the FS9 version :o
Edit.. A quick bit of finger work in the old calculator shows that if I had all those FS9 textures in FSX as dds.. the textures alone would come to 975mb!!
With the Wellington, the base textures are 2048x2048 so that'll account for a lot of the disk space.
The more 'detailed' a model (not always though), the larger the filesize for the mdl. If a model has a lot of bump, spec, and diffuse maps, along with a lot of polys and/or animations, the filesize will be big. Even with the later xtomdl (with better compression than the original) it'll be big.
I chopped my L-4 installation down to just the AGF and Liason birds, with texture fallback, and it's still 903mb.
Seeing as the L4 and the J3 have the same powerplant -- An FS's sound file for the Cub is reasonable facsimile of the real thing
then I guess cloning it makes sense
