WIBFL

WIBFL = What I've been flying lately. Actually, I haven't been flying too much. Life has been busy, and when I do have time to play, it's been mostly tweaking. I just did a serious hardware upgrade, going from a 128 MB Radeon 9600XT to a 512 MB Radeon X1600. This necessitated upgrading my power supply too, which is a fairly basic procedure but a little intimidating the first time you try it.
The new card hasn't made much of a difference in terms of framerates. From what I read on the forums I knew not to expect any noticiable improvement, but I did harbor a hope that maybe my configuration was an exception.
What did improve is what I call texture retention. I was always able to display the highest resolution textures, but they would frequently disappear into blurry land when the going got tough. Now they stay sharp--I have yet to see cockpit textures blur, and when the scenery blurs it is only momentarily.

So here's what I've been flying. The first shot shows my local neighborhood-- looks great with the 1 meter ground resolution. There is an actual golf course pretty close to this spot, though I think it is only a lucky guess on Microsoft's part. Next is another local scenery shot with my first glimpse of traffic (I've got that slider pretty low).

The third shot is from an actual flight (believe it or not). Last night I did some cross country flying, and this is me flying over Manchester, NH on the way from Sterling MA to Laconia NH. This was a "progressive flight", something I like to do from time to time. This means fly to an airport in one airplane, then at the airport hop into another airplane for the next leg.

Finally, I've started to dabble in the Missions. I would do a lot more than dabble, but I usually don't have the time to devote to doing complete missions. What little I've seen is quite impressive. Fascinating weather on the way to the oil platform, and the detail of th platform itself is amazing. I crash landed on the pad just as the well-know surprise was starting.