So I was flying into Cushman Meadows USA Pacific NorthWest which was a good flight but had to keep low due to the low cloudbase.
Feel free to click on the pics to view full screen.
All good and well so far, landed successfully, nothing out of the ordinary and do need to refuel.
Now fueled up and taxiing to fly my 3 passengers and their loads of luggage to the Salt Lakes, a long flight.
Lots of clouds on the route
Given I've installed Oxygen into the cabin I thought I'd take it up over the clouds for a cleaner flight.
Was a bit of a struggle to get the plane up to height, but lucky I did because all of a sudden, the plane dropped its wing and we started heading for the ground, lucky there was a close airfield and given the height I managed to get the plane under control (barely though). If I'd been lower it would have been a ground slam.
Once on the ground the damage turned out to be a broken flap LHS. It's not the first time I've broken a flap in flight, however it is the first time I've managed to successfully land and not ground slam upside down when its happened :-)
I don't imagine they break often IRL, but I suppose the plane does get a bit more rough treatment in the sim (like who does maintenance ?)
Great story and visuals. I also fly the A2A 182 but have not had the issues you illusrate.
Your pictures and settings are gorgeous. Please share your settings in the sim and list whatever outside programs you are using such as Envshade, Active Sky, etc.
Thanks.
I've had the flap failure a few times now, origionally it happened ages back when I was in FSX, mostly I'd say it's due to my relatively poor treatment and non-maintanence schedule ;-)
But back to P3D...
The sort of detailed settings as shown have only just become feasable for myself with the release of new CPUs and GFX cards, where there is actually enough raw power to reduce compromises otherwise required. I'm running an AMD motherboard I purchased back in 2017 with the first Ryzen 1700 and where BIOS updates and socket compatibility have allowed me to drop in a 5800 Ryzen. Note the Ryzen has SMT disabled and is overclocked with a massive Noctua to pump out the heat produced. GFX card is a 3080 Ti - but I recommend the next level (e.g. 4090) as I've both used all available GFX mem and maxed out the GPU, don't get me wrong, it's a great card and is now in the affordable range but it's just not quite enough to run P3D with full settings.
P3D v4.5 HF3 is the version I run, on top of this there is Orbx base, vector and various LC pacakges along with their HD buildings and TerraFlora v2, custom shoreline waves, custom airports also factor in for places I like to fly to and from, like the AP shown which is fictional but certainly deserves to be at that location.
I've also customised the road traffic to a lower road speed, and made custom changes to sun, stars, nightsky and HD moon, the p3d.cfg is also heavily customised to max out settings and improve alignments and shadowing far beyond what's in a default P3D config.
On top of the above is another layer being Rex Textures and soft clouds, and their default airport repacement HD buildings, a very customised cloud shader, Tomato shade with my also heavily custom config, a few further custom shader mods and the addtion of Reshade to provide in sim on the fly adjustablity, where I use Moncular_Cues for an Ambient Occulsion effect, along with sharpening, colour, temp, bloom, contrast and CMAA2 anti-alisaing.
Additonally I've a ton of aircraft and am runnng AIG and the Orbx traffic packages which I've hacked together for PBR models, also the AI uses FSReborn for lighting providing a huge visbility improvement. Active sky also features for weather both past, present and downloaded.
Screen mode is a 30hz vsync 1080P running DSR for 2560x1440.
It's something I've built up over time (FSX and FSX-SE for around 3200 hours, then P3D since 2017) where I've migrated over what I did have in FSX and then expanded upon due to overall improvements that came with a 64 bit engine running DX11 and I certainly don't miss planning a flight based around avoiding a VAS OOM.
I do have P3D v5.3, however I've found it to be quite the disappointment, I mean the lighting is better overall but I'd have to give up too much for what is a relatively minor perfomance increase which to myself seems to have arrived at the expense of removel of various featured items. Plus the clouds aka truesky leave a lot to be desired.
I know not everyone thinks the same way, but for myself it was a simple Pro vs. Con list and P3D v4.5 won out.
