User manual

Manhattan X 1.00
Page 6 of 19
Season
For some reason Microsoft decided that half the world is covered with snow in winter
time and New York is in the zone that has 3 months of snow in FSX. We think this is
not very realistic and did not include snow textures. The scenery looks best in
summer season.
Framerates
Is Manhattan X a ‘slow’ scenery? No, certainly it is not, more than half the
development time has been spent optimizing the code and we believe that we
reached levels of optimizing that have not been reached before.
Can Manhattan X be slow on your computer? Yes, certainly. It’s most likely the
most complex city scenery done to date and this will be felt. But as with the previous
version that was very slow on many systems when we released it, hardware will get
faster and the scenery will stay the same.
Apart from using the advised settings further up in the manual there are some
special tips we learned about during the construction of the project. Some of them
could very much be related to special machines or special circumstances but could
nevertheless increase the enjoyment you get from this project.
• Put away the mouse cursor. Perhaps the strangest tip. On some systems
keeping the mouse cursor on the FSX window dropped the frames by 40%.
So when you use FSX in a window (often the best for framerate) slide your
mouse cursor away from the FSX window when you don’t need it.
• Open and close the WORLD | SCENERY LIBRARY dialog and click [OK]. This
will rebuild the scenery library and on at least two systems instantly doubled
the framerates.
• Do try Direct X 10 when possible. On at least one system the DX9 mode was
very slow under Vista and Windows 7 (beta). DX10 mode was more than
150% faster.
• We strongly recommend setting the framerates to UNLIMITED. Not doing so
can reduce FPS by 40%.
In the end, you simply pay in frame rates for all that is seen. As the objects are very
professionally designed you can be sure they are drawn as fast as is possible.
Contradictory to belief, FSX is not slow in the display of 3d objects. But no matter
how well designed, depending on your settings this scenery can bring any current
computer to single digits. However with some care it should be rather easy to keep
20 fps using a PC with the system requirements for this product.
Water textures
This scenery looks a lot better with some of the many third party freeware water
textures. Search your favorite website to find some and do try a few. You’ll want one
that has small details avoiding the effect of huge ocean swells in the Harlem River
and one that makes the water look dark green, certainly not bright blue as FSX
shows.