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Flight Unlimited III Patch 2.0
11.01.99

The US, UK and German versions of the patch are below.This file is self-installing and contains a Readme doc. The patch will enable most users to achieve a modest increase in frame rates, typically with minimal or no tradeoff in visual quality. Beyond framerate, we have addressed some other problems and shortcomings people have encountered. For a complete list of the fixes, see below and be sure to read the readme for more information on joystick configuration.

Simply download the patch to your local drive and click on the new FU3Patch.exe file. The patch will then self-install if you have Flight Unlimited III on your machine.

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Flight Unlimited III Patch 2.0 List of Fixes:

These items should help your framerate:

• Taxiway lines and signs will now be automatically created and destroyed depending on your location from an airport.
• Taxiway lines and signs can now be turned on and off via a hotkey - shift-F11. Turning these off when not at an airport should increase your framerate.
• Taxiway lines and signs can also be turned off via a configuration variable in your configuration file. This file is located in your C:\Program Files\Flight3 directory. The file is called flt3.cfg. Open this file and add the following line anywhere: no_taxi_lines
• Airport lights can be turned on and off via a hotkey - ctrl-F11. Turning these off when not at an airport should increase your framerate.
• Airport lights can also be turned off via a variable in your configuration file. This file is located in your C:\Program Files\Flight3 directory. The file is called flt3.cfg. Open this file and add the following line anywhere: no_airport_lights
• The terrain detail slider has been adjusted to provide more benefit for slower machines.
• For the building density slider set to the minimum, framerates in downtown Seattle will be improved.
• This new console command may improve the frame rate on video cards which have small amounts of texture memory:
  
  model_detail_scale <0.0 ... 1.0>
  
  This console command changes the distance at which the game switches between model texture resolutions. The default value is 1.0. The game picks what model texture resolution to use based on how far the user is from the model. Decreasing the model detail scale will make the game use a coarser texture than it normally would for a given distance between user and model. At a setting of 0.0, model textures are usually reduced to a single color per model polygon. For example, while in game hit the colon key ( :) to bring up the console at the top of the screen. Then type model_detail_scale 0. This will change all the buildings to one flat color and may improve your framerate.
  

These items are also addressed in the patch:

• Lockups when using the NVidia TNT1 and TNT2 Detonator 3.53 drivers have been fixed.
• You can now disable any hotkey by adding a line to joykeys.cfg. If you haven't already, you will need to create the joykeys.cfg file in your flight 3 install directory. For example, to disable the alt-x (quit_game) hotkey, simply add the line 'alt_x off' to joykeys.cfg. This will disable Alt-x from quitting the game.
• The dump_hotkeys command has been fixed. Using the console command (:) while in game, you can now dump the current hotkey bindings to a named file. For example, while in game hit the colon key (:) to bring up the console at the top of the screen. Then type dump_hotkeys mykeys.txt, where mykeys.txt is your new named file. This will dump the current hotkey bindings to the file mykeys.txt. To add new keybindings (or change the default ones) you can cut and paste lines from mykeys.txt into your joykeys.cfg file. For example, if you wanted to change the key which controls the landing gear from lower case 'g' to upper case 'G', you could find the line in mykeys.txt which says "key_g Toggle_Landing_Gear", copy it to joykeys.cfg and change it to "key_G Toggle_Landing_Gear".
  
  

  NOTE: There is a problem with redefining the escape key, which exits flying mode and also exits from one UI screen to the previous UI screen. We strongly recommend that you do not have any lines in joykeys.cfg which define what key_esc does.

  
  
• For those of you who found the ATC text colors hard to read, you can now
  configure the color yourself. To change those colors, add lines to your flt3.cfg which specify your desired colors. The new config variables are:
  
  radio_default_rgb - background for default choice
  radio_preferred_rgb - background for preferred choice (if any)
  radio_highlight_rgb - background for choice selected by mouse cursor
  radio_selected_rgb - background for choice when clicked on
  radio_warning_rgb - background for warning messages like "your radio is not operating"

• The ILS frequency popup for airports under flightplan turnpoints has been fixed. In the shipping version, if the user had made a flight plan with turnpoints on top of airports (the most common case), the turnpoint buttons would hide the airport buttons, so you couldn't get ILS frequencies for airports which were in your flight plan. Now, clicking on the turnpoint buttons in the inflight map will bring up the runways/ILS popup.
• The program now consistently prompts for the insertion of the scenery disc into the CD-ROM drive, which is required for a 'typical' install. In this circumstance, with some 3d graphics cards, upon entry into fly mode the game freezes or exits. The patch results in the game uniformly prompting for insertion of the appropriate scenery disc for both Seattle scenery and FU2 San Francisco scenery, given a 'typical' install.
• The landing gear inconsistency that occurred in recordings has been fixed. Now if the user records his/her flight, during playback the gear will only appear damaged if it was damaged during the original recorded flight.
• The water sound will no longer continue to play after you have taxied your seaplan onto land.
• Flight plans that are loaded into user Challenges should now be compatible.
• If you have multiple joysticks attached to your system, and one of them is not working, you can now select which of your joysticks will be used with the joy_device command, described in the "Joystick Configuration" section below.
  
  

Other Valuable Information

Important Notes Regarding Changes to your Configuration

• If you increased the size of your haze cache, we recommend reducing it back to the default, which was 512000. In your flt3.cfg configuration file it should read haze_cache 512000.
  
• If you deleted the files which define taxiway lines from your airport directories to boost your framerates, you may want to re-install those files, since you can now turn the taxiway lines off with hotkeys or config variables. To get the taxiway line files back, you can get them back by copying the directory flt3\regions\seattle\airports from the first install CD (labelled "Installation Disk") to the directory regions\seattle\airports in the hard drive directory in which you installed flight3. If you also installed the SanFrancisco region, you can restore its taxiway lines by copying the directory flt3\regions\sanfran\airports from the first install CD (labelled "Installation Disk") to the directory regions\sanfran\airports in the hard drive directory in which you installed flight3.
  
  

  Note that if you have modified the Seattle or SanFrancisco region airports using FLED, you will lose those changes by restoring the airports directories from the CD. This only affects changes that were made to the airports that were shipped with Flight3, and will not affect any airports created by end users.

  
  
• If you have modified your flt3.cfg configuration file to include the line "IWorkHere", the patch will overwrite the Seattle model placement files so you will lose any models that you have added to the Seattle area using FLED. If you want to avoid this, make a backup copy of your regions\seattle\models directory and restore that after doing the patch. If you do not have this line in your configuration file you should not see any changes since your models are stored inside their packages.
  
  

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Flight Unlimited III Patch 2.0 top

Read information above for details.

FU3PATCH.exe US version (1,324KB)

FU3UKPAT.exe UK version (1,322KB)

FU3DEPAT.exe German version (1,276KB)

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Flight Unlimited III Patch 2.0 Benchmarks top

Download these videos to test your system. To play the videos back, place them in your C:\Program Files\Flight3\RECS directory. You can then play them from the Flight Recorder screen in the game. Note that these tests were done with the default settings after installing the patch unless otherwise stated.

b004.zip Mount Ranier Video (70KB)

bb005.zip Seattle City Video (42KB)

sea.zip Seatac Final Approach Video (74KB)

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Flight Unlimited III Patch 2.0 Troubleshooting top

The following information should help users who are still having frame rate or video card problems after installing the patch.

Video Card Driver List

The following is a list of video cards, which we have used in our testing and the drivers, which we have used to test them.

Video Card Driver List
3dfx Voodoo1	3dfx 3.01 reference drivers
3dfx Voodoo2	3dfx 3.03 reference drivers
3dFxVoodoo Banshee	3dfx 1.02.03 reference drivers
3dFxVoodoo3	3dfx 1.02.18
nVidia Riva128	nVidia 3.37 reference drivers
nVidia TNT	nVidia Detonator 2.08 reference drivers
nVidia TNT2	nVidia Detonator 2.08 reference drivers
nVidia GeForce	nVidia Detonator 3.53 reference drivers (only works with patched version, not with unpatched)
Matrox G400	Matrox 5.30 drivers
Matrox G200	Matrox 5.30 drivers
Savage4	S3 Savage4 production drivers version 8.02.11
ATI Rage 128	ATI Rage 128 drivers version 4.11.6114
ATI Rage pro turbo AGP 2X	4.10.2440
ATI 3D Rage Pro	4.10.2312
STB Velocity 128 AGP 8	MB3.01b
Hercules Terminator Beast AGP 8	MB1.02
ATI RageAGP 2X 8MB	4.10.2515

Important driver information

The unpatched version of Flight Unlimited 3 will not work with the nVidia Detonator 3.53 drivers. This is fixed with the Patched version of the game.

Checklist for Optimal performance with Flight 3:

• Scandisk, and defrag your hard drive before installing the game.
  
• Close down any programs you have running in the background. Mail programs and Web Browsers are memory hogs, and will adversely affect your framerate.
  
• Close down any unnecessary start menu programs you may have running. Some anti-virus software will cause major slowdowns in Flight3.
  

Tweaking your Flight Unlimited 3 Installation

We recommend that you start the game with the defaults and then customize your configuration from there. The following options are the most sensitive for framerate.

Terrain detail. This slider is extremely sensitive to terrain altitude. We recommend that if you want to increase the detail, you should go into the mountains, and adjust the detail in small increments, until you find a setting which is both visually appealing and also has acceptable frame rates.

Building Density. This slider will affect the number of buildings in the world. We recommend the default setting. This setting gives you a reasonable downtown Seattle, and airports with the most important features rendered. Increasing the building density will give you a more detailed Seattle, and more populated airports, but will be a frame rate hog.
Any buildings added to the world by a Fled Package will appear on any setting other than 0 building density.

Distance clipping. This slider sets up how far away the horizon is. There is a small framerate hit when you raise the distance clipping.

Distant mountains. This will make mountains in the distance more distinctive. Turning distant mountains on will cause a frame rate hit.

Wind Accuracy. If you are planning on riding the thermals in the Stemme you will want to set wind accuracy to the max level. This will cause a small framerate hit. If you are not gliding having wind accuracy set to the middle level would be recommended.

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