Virtavia Supermarine Scimitar

[DaveB]

Lovely shots as per Noddy

ATB

DaveB

[cheithus]

A pleasing model to the eye and representative of a big powerful beast. However, as mentioned by DaveB, it does have a prediliction to stall too readily. I have also found that with my i7 and FSX acceleration with sp2 the wing vapour and tip vortices appear as black smoke 'cubic blocks'. I mentioned this to Alphasim in days of yore, who were not helpful, and in several forums without response. Any ideas at this stage will be most welcome.

Personally, I would like to see more Cold War icons in FSX, eg. a decent F-101 Voodoo - any thoughts there please?

Rgds

Cheithus

[Garry Russell]

Hi Cheithus

Welcome aboard

Smoke is actually a textured 'part'

The blocks you mention seems to be an inability to render the effect and you are seeing the 'part'.....perhaps a memory issue or the effect texture missing??

[DaveB]

Hi Cheithus and welcome

I've not flown the old devil for yonks but I'll dig it out and try it in FSX. My system is no yardstick mind you.. only of what not to have these days

ATB

DaveB

[cheithus]

VMT Gary and Dave for your rapid responses.

I have 6.0 GB of memory on a 64 bit operating system. Missing textures makes sense - I have the Scimitar v1.1 and there are 8 files in the effects folder, including 2 each for vapour and vortices. Any advances on these?

I look forward to your findings Dave, and any of your what not to have.

Rgds

Cheithus

[DaveB]

Hi Cheithus

Well.. it's been a long time since I've flown the Scimitar and was pleased to see it already in FSX (FS9 is still my day-to-day sim). It must be v1.1 too as the initial release had issues around the nose gear so a patch came out pretty sharpish. No problems in or around the nose gear so this must be the patched version
I'm chuffed to say (surprised I guess) that I quite enjoyed my little blast around Wake Is and although mindful of it's propensity to stall, I didn't stall it! All effects worked as intended and having checked the effects folder, I have the same number of fx files (8) Throttle response at on/off on approach is knife edge.. the slightest touch will have it off like a scolded cat but both landings felt comfortable and ones I could walk away from Note this was Wake Is and not Ark Royal IV

I've 28 files in the shared folder (inc the cfg) and 7 in the bump folder (inc the cfg) and there's no reason why you shouldn't have the same. An i7 based system with 6gb of ram on a 64-bit OS is enough to hustle a small country along so that shouldn't be an issue. I'm running XP SP3 (32-bit), 2gb ram, intel E8400, Nvidia 8800GTX 768mb with FSX patched SP1-SP2-SP2 removed and ACC installed.. all under DX9c. Two things spring to mind. Are you running DX10/DX10 preview (the effects may not like DX10)? Other than that, it could be a driver issue. The drivers on my 8800 are not quite but almost as old as Gods dog but are of a similar age to the Scimitar which may explain why they run ok. I dunno mate to be honest. There are plenty of guys here with more modern systems who run Win7 which may have seen your problem and know a way around it. Fingers crossed one pops up and sheds a little light for you

ATB

DaveB

[Garry Russell]

Smoke effects are often a grey area....excuse the pun

They can work on some systems but not others for reasons that are never clear.

Any developer can only see and fix any problems on the setups used by the testers.

So all that can be done outside of that is trial and error, but it is cler to see why sometimes a developer has no answers.

Dave's point about DX10 is a good start

[DaveG]

Textures for effects usually are in a texture folder inside the effects folder, and are called from the .fx itself. If you open the .fx file in notepad (it's just a text file) you should see the filename for the texture in there somewhere. You can then have a look and see if that file is missing.

[cheithus]

Many thanks DaveB, Gary and DaveG for your time and efforts on my part. I have looked at and tweaked as much as I understand and there is no change. I use DX9, but when I switch to DX10 the only change is the colour of the 'blocks'.

No 1 son is going to absorb your comments and have a look at it again for me this evening, so I will come back to you in due course. It is frustrating as it is the only model which has this texture error. Meanwhile, I will play with my abacus. Once again many thanks.

Rgds

Cheithus

[DaveB]

That's right DG

A quick check in mine shows 7 (obvious) Scimitar bmp's called by the 8 fx files. If they're not present Cheithus, I'll be happy to zip them up for you

ATB

DaveB