Basic question on downloading FSX add-ons

[cmking65]

I'm extremely new to Steam, and just downloaded FSX to replace the terrible experience of running FS 2004 on a 20-year-old desktop. I downloaded and flew the new program successfully on my laptop, then decided to pick up two add-ons (regional scenery, and airport enhancement). I successfully "purchased" both, but in the course of answering the "confirm" emails from Steam and switching screens (i.e., getting lost), I don't think I actually managed to download them (although I have the receipt). At present, I haven't found any guide on how to do this, and there seems to be no "download" option at this stage. There is a "play" button associated with the add-ons, but I can't tell if this merely opens the already installed version of the main program without reflecting the add-on. Is there a definite step to downloading add-ons, or do they somehow get automatically folded into the main program? Thanks for entertaining this moronic question.

[kalnon]

Welcome to FSX: Steam Edition, you're really late to the party but it's never too late to start now

To answer your question:
Buying and installing DLC's on Steam for FSX is just like any other Steam game, Once you purchase them, they usually install automatically. If you go to the FSX page in your Steam Library, scroll down a bit and look on the right side of the screen, you'll see a section just called "DLC's" and you'll see a button called "Manage My DLC's", click on this and you'll see a list of all the Steam DLC's you purchased. Make sure they are check marked, if they're not, check mark them and Steam will then download and install them. This is how you manage your DLC's for any Steam game.

You can also check in the FSX Scenery Library to see if your content is installed, just like in FS 2004.

One thing you should know is while there are some good Steam DLC's to get for FSX, you are better off buying much of your 3rd party payware from other places like simmarket, simshack, Aerosoft, Just Flight websites, etc. Though with the Steam sale going on I am tempted to get a few things too.

Let me know if you need any other help. Good luck.

[kalnon]

Btw I have a few tips for you to get started with FSX since you are new to it.

{fsx.cfg Edits}
This file can be found here: C:\Users\"user name"\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\FSX

(must have Folder Options set to show hidden files and folders to find this)

There's a couple fsx.cfg edits that can help make FSX run better. You can just open it in Notepad (do not use Wordpad or Word) or any text editor you like. Always make sure to copy the file and make a backup just in case something goes wrong before you make changes. On the web there's lots of guides and info on how to edit this file and what everything in it means.

-Adding high PoolSize will increase the amount of GPU power FSX uses and increase performance.

[BUFFERPOOLS] (You have to add this section to the file, you can try these settings)
UsePools=1
PoolSize=20000000 (higher PoolSize = more GPU usage)

(You just need to keep tweaking this one until you find what works best for your system)

- Under [Graphics] add HIGHMEMFIX=1 (some say this is not needed in the Steam version of FSX but it can't hurt to add anyway)

-Learn how to calculate an Affinity Mask, this allows FSX to use all of your CPU cores and threads, by default it just uses one singe core only. There's even Affinity Mask calculators for FSX on the web you can use like this one: https://www.gfsg.co.uk/affinitymask.aspx?SubMenuItem=utilties

(just use easy mode and enter how many cores and threads your cpu has or that you want to use for FSX & click calculate button)

Your results should look something like this:
[JOBSCHEDULER]
AffinityMask=65532 (don't use this number, you need to calculate your own)

-WideViewAspect=True under [Display] section (set to False by default)

(Change this to True if using a wide screen monitor, it greatly improves VC and external visibility)

There's other fsx.cfg tweaks that can help as well but these are the main ones.

{VAS Usage}
Unlike FS2004, in FSX, it's very important to always monitor and manage your VAS (Virtual Address Space) usage if you are going to add a bunch of high end scenery add-ons. VAS is a 4GB limit (similar to RAM usage but not the same) that FSX has since it's a 32 bit program and FSX loads ALL enabled scenery and other textures at the beginning of a flight. If you go over this limit, FSX will crash.

The main culprits that use a lot of VAS are high resolution textures because there are a lot of high end scenery and aircraft as well that use 2K or 4K textures. 4K textures use 16 times the amount of data than 1K textures use for example, which eats up your free VAS quickly. FS2004 only allowed for up to 1K textures so most FS2004 users rarely had to deal with this issue even if they have a bunch of scenery enabled.

Best way to manage VAS usage is to only enable the scenery (in the scenery library) that you are going to fly over during your flight. Yes this is a pain but necessary if you have a lot of scenery installed. Also lowering settings like autogen density, water quality and traffic density helps significantly. You just have to keep playing with the settings until you find what works for you.

Here's the VAS monitor tool I use:
http://spilfred.com/VASMonitor/publish.htm

Also I highly recommend this Scenery Library Config tool for managing your scenery. It's much easier to use than the clunky built in FSX Scenery Library editor. It's also a very good idea to backup your scenery.cfg file too.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/fs-sceditor/

[cmking65]

Many thanks for the detailed reply. I will follow up to the best of my geriatric abilities. It's true that FSX is just the tiniest bit retro, but it looks like it will provide all the enjoyment and challenges I require at this stage -- at least until my multi-thousand-$$$ custom desktop build, any day now. Again, thank you for the wealth of material and guidance.

[kalnon]

Postat inițial de cmking65:

Many thanks for the detailed reply. I will follow up to the best of my geriatric abilities. It's true that FSX is just the tiniest bit retro, but it looks like it will provide all the enjoyment and challenges I require at this stage -- at least until my multi-thousand-$$$ custom desktop build, any day now. Again, thank you for the wealth of material and guidance.

Anytime, it's my pleasure.

Yes FSX retro but it's still legendary, one of the main reasons why I still use it even though I use modern sims too now, is because FSX is the most mod-able flight simulator there is. It's like a "build-your-own" simulator with vanilla FSX acting as the base. There's literally thousands of freeware and payware add-ons out there on the internet for it making the possibilities endless which to allows you to build up and shape the simulator exactly the way you want it. No two FSX installs are the same, everyone has their favorite add-ons and tweaks for it.

When I have some more time later I'll post a few more tips and information that may help help too. Even though the Steam version is better (Dovetail fixed a lot of issues with the box version before Microsoft stole FSX back from them) it can still be a finicky beast to learn and use.

[kalnon]

Oh and here's some of the best, most beautiful freeware aircraft you can get for FSX:

Milviz/Blackbird - https://blackbirdsims.com/flight/freebies.php

Make sure to download and install only the ones that say they are FSX compatible, many of these beauties are but not all.

Orbx Central - https://orbxdirect.com/central

Install this app, once installed and you have it configured, go to the airplanes section of the store and look for aircraft from Airplane Heaven, they're all free, you just download them into your sim directly through Central.

Orbx also offers some other free products on Central like the city of Portland cityscape and some free small airports & seaports, Yellowstone National Park, etc. You'll notice Orbx is having a sale on their scenery right now. They make some of the best payware scenery you can get for FSX. I own a lot of Orbx products and it makes the 17 year old FSX look stunning for it's age.

If you have an old pc with low specs than you can try GEX (Ground Environment X) & UTX (Ultimate Terrain X) instead from Flight1 (also on sale rn), it's more frame rate and more VAS friendly too though not quite as nice looking as Orbx. Install the Flight1 Agent app here: https://www.flight1.com/view.asp?page=agent They even have a couple decent freeware planes too.

Airplane Heaven and Miviz used to sell their aircraft as payware but dropped out of the market and re-released their aircraft as freeware. They are the best you can get really.

Just figured I would help you have a happy start to FSX as you begin your journey

[[57th] AngryHatter]

Depending on what you prefer.
GA - A2A
Liners - Quality Wings, Flightsim Labs, Aerosoft

[kalnon]

Postat inițial de 57th AngryHatter:

Depending on what you prefer.
GA - A2A
Liners - Quality Wings, Flightsim Labs, Aerosoft

Yeah that's the best quality payware for sure. I always liked Just Flight aircraft too for both their in house GA and their unique classic airliners. Maybe not as quite as high quality as the others but still good payware imo.,

And don't forget the A2A Captain of the Ship airliners, the Constellation and the Boeing 377 Stratocruiser. The B377 is another reason why I still use FSX since they never made it P3D compatible. God I love that plane.

[cmking65]

To quote the Seinfeld episode: "That's gold, Jerry -- GOLD!" Thanks again.

[kalnon]

Postat inițial de cmking65:

To quote the Seinfeld episode: "That's gold, Jerry -- GOLD!" Thanks again.

LMAO I always loved that show

No problem, if you need anymore help feel free to ask. I know all this info may be overwhelming at first but just pace yourself and learn everything in time, no rush.

Edit: I recommend you bookmark your topic here in your browser or save all the information in a text file so you can always refer back to it because I guarantee you won't remember all of this right away.

[kalnon]

Few other important tips I forgot to mention.

Open Windows explorer and navigate to (drive letter):\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\FSX and look for a file called fsx.exe then right click on it and select Properties and go to the Compatibility tab.

Here you will want to make sure "Run this program as administrator" is checked, then check mark "Disable full screen optimizations", next click on "Change high DPI settings" and check mark "Override high DPI scaling behavior" and choose "Application" in the little drop down menu. click Ok, then hit Apply then hit Ok.

It's always important to run FSX as administrator otherwise some things in the sim won't work right. As for the other settings, I find these allow FSX to run better in Windows 10 (and probably Windows 11 too).

(GPU Control Panel Settings)
Open your graphics card control panel (Nvidia Inspector or AMD Adrenaline) and you can make some changes here that will make FSX look a lot better.

I don't know all the exact settings for Inspector as I always have used AMD gpu's so you may want to search the web for a little help, but you can use the Anti Aliasing settings in the control panels to Multisampliing (MSAA) or Super Sampling(SSAA,DLAA) and you can crank up the AA to get rid of all the jaggies and shimmering. Adjusting AA settings makes FSX look a lot better this way than using the in game AA settings.

I use 8x SSAA in AMD Adrenaline and I have no jaggies or shimering at all.

You'll also want to use the Anisotropic Filtering settings here as well instead of just in game settings because you can crank it up to 16x. This also makes the sim look a lot better.

Edit: If you choose, you can run FSX in "Direct X 10 Preview Mode" but you need to do it using something called "Steves DX10 Fixer tool" which you can find on his blog here: https://stevesfsxanalysis.wordpress.com/features/

Scroll to the bottom of the page and click on the little "Buy Now Fast Springs" button and you purchase it through there. This is payware but it's cheap, around $10 or so and definitely worth it imo, I usually run FSX in this way myself (there are some older planes out there that won't work in DX10 mode due to their design but most do in my experience).

FSX DX10 Preview mode was never properly implemented in the sim, if you run FSX you'll see lots of blinking textures and other visual artifacts, this tool gets rid of most of that. It's worth it because you will see a noticeable performance improvement in DX10 mode and you get the benefit of extra visual features that or not in DX9 mode.

(He also has another cool add-on that adds cloud shadows which FSX doesn't have.)