Wow!

Got all my hardware in and sort of mocked it up on my desk last night. Was up until 3:30AM dinking around with it all. The HannsG monitors are pretty much what you'd expect for $170. Two have dead/stuck pixels on them (one has one stuck and a grid of 4 dead on it) and they all seem to get some very characteristic "sparklies" on them in certain places (it looks like it is obvious stuck/coupling row very near the stuck pixel). Also, the image isn't that crip or clear, maybe that is just a function of it going through the analog interface and the triplehead2go, but somehow, I don't think so.

But the visuals of playing with 3-wide monitor in FSX...wow. I'm pretty sure I'm just going to have to try to find a better display (possibly get some higher cost 20" displays, I think, and maybe I'll keep one of these 19" for gauges/MFD's, because it really needs that).




I've bought a LOT of "gadgets" and strange input devices in my life, and I was skeptical about the TrackIR 4 motion monitor, but I can honestly say that it is possibly the best working input device I've ever seen. The head movement in the flight sim (all 6-axis) is almost FREAKY it is so realistic, even right down to leaning and looking around dashes and the 3D cock pit instrument panel. I'm not sure where I take it from here, but it almost certainly needs to move to a dedicated cockpit and a 5 monitor setup (triple wide main displays with two MFD's for the glass cockpit instrument panels to the lower left/right). Flying the F/A-18 Hornet up around Cascade is simply amazing. Need to try a winter date and see how it does, but it is very cool.

There are three different things that FSX does for rendering scenery.

1. Is the terrain mesh data, which is all elevation information. There are quite a few different ones out there besides the default. One really good one for North America, is FSGenesis.
   
2. The second is the actual texture map that FSX applies to the terrain height mesh data. The default one is not too bad, but it is pretty generic and you really don't get a good feel for being at the exact site, but it does all for autogeneration of houses, trees, buildings, etc. and for different times of the year for snow and stuff. If you get Tile Proxy, which is as sourceforge community project, you can have it hook into most of the major satellite mapping services out there and it will on the fly skin the scene with real mapping texture. This obviously has problems with seasonal changes and you get no "autogen" structures (the next topic). Here is a sample of default FSX vs. Tile Proxy.
   
3. The last one is what is called "autogen". Normally, FSX will generate trees and buildings that actually stand out of the landscape. When you do photo realistic satellite skinning, like Tile Proxy, it is more difficult to support this reasonably, but it only affects really low level flight, and there is work to get some level of autogen back enabled.