Intro

My goal is to make a RTW (Round-The-World) tour using Microsoft Flight Simulator X as simulation program, coupled with TileProxy. I can hardly claim to be the first one who has decided to make a tour with FSX, however I am not sure there are many people who tried it with TileProxy.

There are quite a number of things I need to sort out before starting the tour: ground-rules, aircraft of choice, route, which FSX add-ons (sceneries, tools, gauges, external applications) will be integrated. I have only a preliminary list of key elements:

• Rex/Rex2 for the weather. Rex is a wonderful application that handles all the weather changes, it is payware but well worth the price. Read here for more details

• GA Traffic for additional General Aviation (that is, GA) Traffic in FSX. GA aircrafts are usually small propeller aircrafts such as Cessnas, Pipers, Diamond and so on. As my tour will be low-altitude, VFR, with take-off and landings from small to medium airports, GA Traffic can help a lot in creating additional aircrafts flying. The good thing about GA is that it works with any GA aircraft and you can configure it in such a way to choose even which aircrafts you would like to see most often. It is freeware, sadly not anymore supported by its author and can be found here.

• TileProxy will take care of the scenery. It is a very interesting application that downloads in real-time satellite imagery of the ground and convert the images (typically jpeg files) in "tiles" suitable to be used by FSX. TileProxy runs in parallel with FSX and replace the standard images of the ground with photorealistic ones. As TileProxy depends on the satellite images to generate tiles, the result is not always good. There are many places on Earth whose satellite coverage is extremely poor (in terms of image resolutions). The images are downloaded by image providers such as Yahoo Maps or Microsoft, and are basically the same images you see when you want to see a certain location. TileProxy could also download images from Google Maps, however Google does not accept this, so the only available images at this time providers are the ones mentioned before. Depending on the location, an image provider may have better imagery and roughly speaking Yahoo Maps has good US imagery whereas Microsoft has better coverage for Europe. Also, TileProxy is quite resource-intentive (CPU, HD and RAM) so you need a powerful pc to run FSX and TileProxy in parallel. Last but not least, if you fly faster than 200 knots, TileProxy can't generate tiles quickly enough. TileProxy is freeware, requires a bit of work for setup and tuning and if you are interested, the best thing you can do is read this guide to begin with.
  

• Failures/Emergencies: I would like to experiment some "unexpected" problem while I am flying... This should add some spice to the tour. A failure can be anything ranging from an instrument failure (e.g. the GPS stops working), a mechanical one (rudders, elevators, flaps, engine...) or something else, such as a bird strike. FSX itself has a built-in failure system, and there are also third-party applications that can feed such events. I fly routinely with FS Passenger X, an airline simulation program and it has a nice set of in-flight emergencies. More on this later...

Well, this is enough for the first post. There will be several posts about the preparation and most probably the next one will be about the aircraft to use for the tour.