Still in VATSIM Limbo

[Jim Rosado]

I've been flying and controlling on VATSIM since at least 1997, from what I recall. I had to quit doing both because I cannot yet keep up with either of them technologically due to the "FPS 20 or better" requirement that came out a while back. I really hated that, but I had no choice. It was really tuff to first quit controlling, then quit flying online. I still fly the Worldliner B777 offline using XP10.51 to keep my skills current. I now see that XSB is "no more" and that "Velocity" (never heard of it until I stumbled upon it today) is out and in use. I really do miss being online with VATSIM, by the way.

Anyhew . . . I think my 10-yr-old computer's main issue is its "10/100" NIC. However, if I tried to replace that, I am still not convinced that would be enough to meet the "20 or better FPS" requirement (methinks that then I'd find that the motherboard might be the culprit causing the low framerates in XP10.50 -- my frames are literally 19 to 23 FPS, but not enough above 20 to connect to VATSIM reliably). This older PC is the reason I've never tried upgrading to XP11 yet, and so now I'll likely just await XP12. However, I have a Starlink connection out here in the "countryside", and soon I will have a FIOS connection. The main reason for both of those connections in turn was to keep flying on VATSIM, so I am going to have to figure out a way to procure a new PC and XP11/12 sooner than I planned. Unfortunately, the "chip shortage" might make that pretty difficult, though I hope research shows me differently.

My question is:

1) Is there any way to "maintain" my VATSIM membership, it stats, etc. until I finally am able to buy a new PC that can handle XP11 and/or XP12 (without trying to fly offline with one of my former VA's) so as to once again join a VA with my "active" VATSIM membership? I am a bit concerned that VATSIM might think that I am uninterested in flying via their online network, when in actuality nothing could be further from the truth.

NOTE: After switching to XP years ago, I am unsure I would ever try FS2020 due to the different way the two programs "inhabit" a PC and its file structure. XP seems a lot less "intrusive"; FSX always formerly "crashed in the middle of a flight", and XP has never done that.

Please send any replies or a notice of a reply to [email protected] if you can, as I am interested in any opinion that you have on any of the above. And, as always, many thanks to my amigos on VATSIM who I've enjoyed so many online hours interacting with.

Thank you.

[Kirk Christie]

2 hours ago, Jim Rosado said:

I've been flying and controlling on VATSIM since at least 1997

4 years before VATSIM was founded in 2001, impressive.
 

2 hours ago, Jim Rosado said:

1) Is there any way to "maintain" my VATSIM membership, it stats, etc. until I finally am able to buy a new PC that can handle XP11 and/or XP12 (without trying to fly offline with one of my former VA's) so as to once again join a VA with my "active" VATSIM membership? I am a bit concerned that VATSIM might think that I am uninterested in flying via their online network, when in actuality nothing could be further from the truth.

VATSIM doesnt close any accounts and doesnt monitor your account for activity, if you dont log in for a preriod of time, they go inactive, it is easy to reactivate through https://my.vatsim.net/reactivate
VA's and VATSIM have nothing to do with each others account status, you can fly with a VA off line, there should be no requirement from any VA for you to have an active VATSIM account, if there is, then I would reconsider your options.

[Torben Andersen]

And another option would be to shift from XPlane to P3D. While XPlane is an excelent program, the developers descision to reduce sim rate, when the pc is stressed, is the problem. If this policy continues, I would never consider XPlane for the future.

[Dace Nicmane]

Why did you stop controlling? It has nothing to do with X-plane framerates.

[Alistair Thomson]

19 hours ago, Jim Rosado said:

my frames are literally 19 to 23 FPS, but not enough above 20 to connect to VATSIM reliably

Jim, you seem to be close to the requirements. Have you tried the suggested fixes posted at https://www.vatsim.net/news/important-information-x-plane-users yet?

[Luke Kolin]

22 hours ago, Jim Rosado said:

Anyhew . . . I think my 10-yr-old computer's main issue is its "10/100" NIC. ... methinks that then I'd find that the motherboard might be the culprit causing the low framerates in XP10.50

The network card is almost certainly not your problem. It's likely that it exceeds or equals your Starlink bandwidth, and far exceeds what is needed for VATSIM.

What is your CPU, and your GPU?

Cheers!

[Jack Deeth]

There's no way to use XP10 on Vatsim since the Velocity update and XSB's retirement, as the only other XP clients (xPilot and Swift) are XP11-only. (I'd love to be corrected.)

Also you can follow threads and get email notifications - no need to get people to manually send emails to notify of replies(???)

[Andreas Fuchs]

On 2/26/2022 at 4:12 AM, Kirk Christie said:

4 years before VATSIM was founded in 2001, impressive.

There was SATCO, before VATSIM started.

[Jim Rosado]

Wow! A lot of great information here, and I truly appreciate every bit of it. My thanks to you all!

I do apologize that it took this long to see your posts, much less to reply to them. I now realize that the truth that is becoming evident is that with my dad now living with my wife and I (for a year thus far -- I'm loving all the time I now get to spend with him, and he is much more important to me than simming), I have zero time to fly or control on VATSIM anyhow. And I'm fully retired! Ha! BTW,  I am the ONLY one in my entire family that has any interest in aviation. Crazy!

Kirk: Thanks for that "Reactivate VATSIM account" link, I've bookmarked it and will use it eventually. I also appreciate you telling me that VATSIM accounts don't get closed, because when I finally am able to return, it'd be nice if all my stats are still in there.

Torben: Thanks for the suggestion about P3D, I will keep that handy if I ever get time to fly online again and have a machine that can do it (though my current and equal limitation is spare time -- I have none).

Dace: I controlled for 2.5 years at ZFW, then at ZHU for 2.5 years, then aimed to stop controlling on VATSIM (even though I used to be a rw "weapons controller", which is a non-FAA-certified ATC, on the USAF E-3 AWACS planes) due to the "managerial politics" that forced me to leave both of those posts. Finally, a great ZAN controller talked me into giving ZAN a try (no politics there at the time), and I hung my ATC hat there for around 7 years or so. Then, my rw job turned sour (forcing me to make a difficult decision to retire from there earlier than I'd planned, due to a tyrannical change in management) at the same time that politics started to creep into ZAN. To keep what little sanity I had left, I had to leave ZAN and stop controlling. Oh, when AVC came became the new voice client for VATSIM, that also prevented me from being able to control in busy events (and even non-events, very often)  --  I suspect that it was the same limitation of my bad connection that killed my VATSIM-piloting days. Now I have Starlink internet, which "might" allow me to jump back into controlling again -- but I have zero time to do that.

Alistair: Thanks for that helpful link. Yes, I tried all of that, and none of them fixed my issue. I still use the add-ons listed on that page, with the possible exception of "FPS Boost + Auto LOD (it is listed as being for "XP11"" (I cannot recall, but I do think that I tried everything on that page including that, and still had FPS below 20 -- I even put almost all of my personal PC data files on memory sticks to help free up RAM, and that didn't do the trick). I will likewise keep that link handy in case I am ever able to return.

Luke: I've attached 3 screenshots that I hope might help answer your questions/comments; and thank you. The "Advanced" tab of the "Properties" of my "Broadcom NetLink (TM) Gigabit Ethernet Network Adapter (which I assume is my NIC) . . . for "Speed & Duplex", the highest "Value" listed in the drop-down list is "100Mbps Full" ("Auto Negotiation" is selected). I am no computer whiz, obviously; to me, though, that leads me to believe that my NIC has a highest speed of 100Mbps (modern NICs have a top speed of at least 1000Mbps, I think). That is why I have to wonder if my NIC is way outdated. Oh, and I have the settings in the Device Manager "Advance" tab "tweaked" as much as possible (after doing a lot of internet research about that), and sadly there is no "Jumbo Packet" setting for my graphics card(s). My PC is a Dell "Studio 7100 XPS"; it is listed as "ACPI x64-based PC"; I use the 64-bit version of XP10. Also, my graphics card(s) is/are the "AMD Phenom(tm) II X6 1055T Processor 2.80 GHz". In Device Manager, it/they is/are listed as "AMD Radeon HD 5800 Series" (it/they is/are 5870 card(s), which I know is fairly outdated; so much so that they no longer provide updates for it/them). The PC came with 8 GBs of RAM, I doubled that with another 8 GBs a couple of years ago to total 16 GBs (that is maxed out for this PC). I use the AMD Catalyst Control Center's "AMD OverDrive" and the "AMD Fusion" Utility to keep this machine as tweaked as I can while not overheating it.

Jack: Thanks for reconfirming my realization that XP11 is pretty much necessary for online flight in VATSIM. And I Have tried both Swift and xPilot in XP10, and got them to work only very briefly; it was a great tool to let me learn the basics of using those. But, yes, my only solution will be a new PC (if there are any chips left by then) with W11 and XP11 on it (by the time I ever get around to that, it'll probably be up to W12 and XP13!!!).

Andreas: Thanks for that note about SATCO. I retired from the USAF in November 1997. Then, the following spring, I starting using something called "ATC Simulator" (an offline ATC program, pretty good for what it did) as well as MS Flight Sim offline. Ot took me another couple of years to finally find SATCO/VATSIM, or whatever it was called back then. I just looked it up, finally, and found that I registered with VATSIM on 2004-02-21 16; my CID is 896019. So that's about 17 years that I was pretty active on VATSIM, all in VATUSA and ZAN. So, it appears I jumped on VATSIM 3 years after its inception (thanks for correcting me on that, Kirk; I'm nothing if I can't claim a good bit of senility now and then!

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Oh, and now you see why I included an email address in my original post. For some reason, as busy as I stay with everything at home, I am able to check and reply to email much much quicker than the Forum here. I will try . . . try . . . to start checking this post routinely. I am surprised that I got no email letting know of any of the replies above, though I seem to recall that VATSIM settings used to allow for that (and I thought I had all that turned "on", I will take a sec to try and go into the forum settings and recheck that).

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Many many thanks again; you have reminded me of why I really enjoyed simming on VATSIM so much  --  lots and lots of friendly experts to share with and learn from. God bless you all, I truly appreciate each of you that took the time to help out this ol' retiree.

[Alistair Thomson]

Thanks for showing us your machine specs. I took a look at the PC reviews and found one comment which said that "the machine is now five years old and that's pretty old so you shouldn't expect much" - and that comment was made seven years ago! Bottom line is that you really should consider a new PC. If your PC use is focussed on VATSIM - and that's a very good reason to have a PC  🙂 - then a new machine will easily drag you out of limbo!

[Luke Kolin]

8 hours ago, Jim Rosado said:

The "Advanced" tab of the "Properties" of my "Broadcom NetLink (TM) Gigabit Ethernet Network Adapter (which I assume is my NIC) . . . I am no computer whiz, obviously; to me, though, that leads me to believe that my NIC has a highest speed of 100Mbps (modern NICs have a top speed of at least 1000Mbps, I think).

No, that just means that the driver allows you to force the speed lower. The "gigabit" in the name means it supports 1000Mbps operation. And unless it's plugged into a non-gigabit switch, that's what it's doing Either way, it's irrelevant. Your network bandwidth (which is still more than sufficient) doesn't affect your frame rates.

Alistair has the correct answer. You need something newer than a 12 year old PC.

Cheers!

 

[Jim Rosado]

Alistair and Luke: Thanks for those detailed replies, and for confirming my suspicions about acquiring a new PC. Our PC is not primarily used for VATSIM, but a new PC would be. Again, my dilemma is that all of my spare time now goes to my dad while he is still around (he is 87). So I will now be satisfied to just fly offline, and if the day ever comes that I have again the time to do so, I'll jump back into VATSIM. I do really appreciate you two taking the time to reply to me about this issue, and I've had a great time on VATSIM (lots of great memories  --  some not so good, but the good vastly outweighs the bad).

You two take care, and again, thanks!!!