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VRFW 007- Flight Simulation Interview with the Famous Bel Geode
Welcome to Episode 7 of the VR Flight World Podcast. In this episode we dive into VR Flight Simulation with a flight sim expert, Drew BOLTON. Drew is better known to his fans as Bel GEODE. Bel has a ton of experience in flight simulation, as he started flying in 1986. In this interview we go into details on what type of system you need to get started in VR flight simulation. Bel also gives us some great information on what he uses for flying, as well as what add-ons you need to have to improve your flight experience.
Hope you enjoy!
Here is how to find Bel Geode:
Youtube- https://www.youtube.com/user/belgeode/
Facebook- https://www.facebook.com/BelGeode2015/
Twitter- https://twitter.com/belgeode
Show Note Links
Please note that most of the links below are affiliate links, which means that I make a small commission if you use my link. This doesn’t cost you anything and helps me to keep producing great content. If you use my link, I truly do appreciate it. I only recommend products that I have used or I believe in. Thanks!
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Transcription for the Podcast
John Melley: Welcome to the VR Flight World Podcast, the place where flight training and your home office collide. Get tips, tricks and in depth interviews about flight training, virtual reality and flight simulation. With your host Dan Caston.
Dan Caston: Hey guys, and welcome to episode number seven of the VR Flight World Podcast. Today on our show, we have a very experienced guest that has been involved in flight simulation for a very long time. He is now flying in VR and is always showing off his flights on YouTube. His online name is Bel Geode. Please welcome Drew Bolton. Hey Drew. Welcome to the VR Flight World Podcast. I’m glad to have you hear. Some of the audience may know who you are. However, for the people that don’t really know you, can you just introduce yourself and let us know a little bit about you?
Drew Bolton: Absolutely. Probably the best way that I can do that, the most recognizable way would be to say good evening everybody. This is Bel Geode.
Dan Caston: How long have you been in VR flight or actually flight sim in general?
Drew Bolton: Well VR flight is, I guess you would say, relatively new. I only really got into it last year, July, shortly after I came back from FlightSimCon in Connecticut. Flight siming itself I’ve been doing since, believe it or not, about 1986 when I was in high school.
Dan Caston: Oh wow, nice.
Drew Bolton: I’m one of those guys, yeah.
Dan Caston: You’ve been doing it a while. That’s awesome.
Drew Bolton: Yes.
Dan Caston: I mentioned before that you actually did some real world flying. You did some hours as a real world pilot or a student pilot I guess?
Drew Bolton: Yes.
Dan Caston: Was that before or after you were in flight sim?
Drew Bolton: It was technically after. When I was in high school, part of the things that I did there, I was part of the ROTC. The Air Force ROTC in my high school, that was one of the first things they had us do was they introduced us to flight simulation back at a time when it was just vector graphics. It really didn’t take until many, many years after that, I would say when I was in my mid 30s. I’m currently 47. I got into my mid 30s, the job that I was working at the time allowed me to take flight sim lessons, but unfortunately, since life has a way of throwing curve balls, I ended up losing that job and thus losing the income to take the flight lessons.
Dan Caston: Oh no.
Drew Bolton: I’ve got about four and a half hours total including the half hour that I count at the last convention when a friend of mine had me fly his Cessna around Connecticut.
Dan Caston: Yeah, exactly. You’ve had a little bit of experience in the real plane as well.
Drew Bolton: Oh yes.
Dan Caston: Now that you have some experience in the real plane, you have some experience in VR, do you really have that connection, like it’s very similar or is it completely different to you?
Drew Bolton: Absolutely. It is, as I’ve been telling everybody who will listen, a game changer. Before when you’re flying on a monitor, of course you can get the procedures down, which honestly that’s really what flight simulation is best at is learning all the various procedures. It really doesn’t help as much learning how to actually control the aircraft. Anybody can teach you that, any CFI or flight instructor can actually put you in the cockpit and teach you how to do that in a couple of hours basically. The actual procedures and everything is where flight simulation shines.
Now VR has really blown that out because of the fact that not only do you have the procedure trainer, but you can couple that with the feeling of flying, the fact that you’ve got your depth perception, and that’s probably the biggest thing that VR adds to flight simulation. You can now judge your distances when you’re coming in to land, if you’re flying patterns and so on. It’s just amazing to see the world unfold. You can judge your heights from the ground and so on. It’s just incredible. It’s really, really opened up flight simulation for both the student pilot and the one that’s never even planning on getting into an actual real cockpit.
Dan Caston: Yeah, that’s what I found as well. I have a few hours as a student pilot, but I don’t have too, too many and I don’t have my pilot’s license, but really I found it was really realistic once I threw that headset on. I did some flying before, being in VR, but once I threw that headset on and was flying in VR, it was a whole different world, and I could move my head around to look beside me. I just found it was pretty amazing.
Drew Bolton: Yeah, that’s probably the major thing is the fact that you can move your head around and actually take in the world. Of course, it still feels right now, with the state of VR, like having a scuba mask on your face, which is probably the perfect analogy for me since I used to do scuba diving. Even with that limitation that VR currently has, you still can’t replace that feeling of depth being in there. When I see new people get into the flight sims and of course they might get a little bit nauseous or motion sick, I tell them this is part of the “initiation.” It has to feel like that. You do get used to it after a little while, but VR just basically pays for itself once you get past that stage.
Dan Caston: Yeah, exactly. Did you have some of the nausea when you started?
Drew Bolton: Believe it or not, it only happened to me twice, and that was at both of the conventions. FlightSimCon was an annual convention that they had in Connecticut. I went to the one in 2016 and the one in 2017. It’s since split into two separate conventions, and I think that the last one that we had was in Vegas and there was another one in Dallas. When I was at the two Connecticut conventions, I had the opportunity to try this thing called Fly Inside, which was basically the precursor to the whole native VR that a lot of sims have started doing. It was an add-on program that you purchase, and you would use it with things like flight simulation, X, FSX or prepared or in recent cases X-Plane as well.
The first time that I tried it, they had me go up and basically do a circuit around Boston Logan. I miscalculated my turn to final from base leg, and of course I had to adjust because I could see from the VASI lights, the PAPI lights that I was basically off my glide slope. I overcompensated a little bit, and I could feel it in the pit of my stomach. I got everything down safely. I got out of the VR headset, I stood there and my buddy Tristan, Novawing24 is his name on YouTube, was looking at me and was like, “Dude, you look like you saw a ghost.” It was just crazy.
Dan Caston: Yeah, because the feeling is so real, isn’t it?
Drew Bolton: Yeah, but once I actually got my own, the first thing that I did, I hoped into DCS, Digital Combat Simulator world, hopped into the Huey and basically just flew it around, just for the sake of flying it around. The story that I tell people is once I actually took the headset off after landing my Huey, it felt like I was having flashbacks of Vietnam.
Dan Caston: Oh yeah?
Drew Bolton: Bear in mind, I’m born in 1970, around the time, the height of the Vietnam War. There’s no way I could have been in that war, but it was just that real to me.
Dan Caston: No doubt. That’s pretty cool. What sim would actually be your favorite? You’ve mentioned a few now, the DCS and X-Plane. I know your recent video you actually started using Prepar3D, a new version of that.
Drew Bolton: Yeah.
Dan Caston: Right now, what’s your go-to or your favorite sim?
Drew Bolton: It varies depending on the day. I’ll be honest with you, it does vary depending on what I feel I need to record for YouTube. If I’m just getting in there and putzing around, believe it or not, the one that I enjoy the most is actually Aerofly FS2. Now yeah, I do have a series on that as well, but I haven’t been keeping up with it lately until recently when they implemented Vulcan which is the API that a lot of the other sims are looking to implement because it completely optimizes how the CPU and the GPU are both accessed when you’re using the sim. As far as a pure flying experience, just get in the plane and fly, don’t have to worry about any of the other things that come with that, no flight planning or anything like that, that is the one that I have the most fun in.
DCS of course, I will always have a great time in because it’s a combat sim, and I was that kid who always wanted to be Maverick, always wanted to be the Top Gun. I’m still waiting for them to come out with the F14 Tomcat so that I can fly that around in there and make things go boom flower, which is one of my little trademark phrases.
Dan Caston: Yeah, I’ve heard that a few times.
Drew Bolton: X-Plane is definitely another favorite simply because it’s got a lot of my favorite types of aircraft, mainly helicopters. The physics is more real, so if I were to treat flight simulation as a training tool for getting back into the cockpit, more than likely would be X-Plane that I would use more than anything else. I don’t also want to discount Prepar because since the latest update the version 4.3 update that they recently came out with, it’s actually optimized VR and made the experience a lot smoother and a lot better, and of course it’s got some of my favorite planes. For example, the aforementioned Tomcat in there. That right now is my go-to whenever I want to fly around as Maverick.
Dan Caston: You mentioned a Vulcan? What’s the Vulcan?
Drew Bolton: Vulcan is an APR program. Basically it will be integrated into the sim, and the idea behind it is really quite simple. The whole objective is to allow the simulator to make better use of your CPU, especially multi-core CPUs and of course a lot of the newer graphics cards out there that happen to have a lot of memory, VRAM onboard, and optimized chips included. Right now the state of most of the flight sims, Aerofly FS2 being the obvious exception, they’re really not taking advantage of what your computer can really do. One of the prime examples, X-Plane. As beautiful as X-Plane can be once you get everything set up correctly, it’s still running on one core and it’s not optimized as far as your graphics card.
You have little bottlenecks here and there. The idea behind the whole Vulcan programming, or the Vulcan API as they call it, is to help eliminate all of that. It streamlines that whole process so the computer can more intelligently use the parts for your simulator. Sims are probably the most demanding game genre out there. Really, this is something that we’ve all been waiting for.
Dan Caston: That’s pretty exciting, because whenever they talk about getting CPUs and GPUs, you always want to have essentially the fastest CPU but not necessarily the most amount of cores because, like you say, it doesn’t really help you in any way.
Drew Bolton: Right.
Dan Caston: Having that fast single core, or not single core, but less cores with faster speed probably helps you more than multiple cores with slower speeds.
Drew Bolton: Yeah, up to now that has been the case. Once Vulcan gets implemented for both X-Plane and DCS, I don’t know which one of the two of them is going to come first, you’re going to see a marked improvement in how everything gets utilized.
Dan Caston: That’ll be exciting. What kind of system are you running?
Drew Bolton: Currently, the system that I have is a hexa core i7. I’m trying to remember the speed. I want to say it’s within the 6,000 range. I know it’s not one of the incredibly fast ones like an 8,800 or anything like that, but I had to also consider my budget. I kind of skimped a little bit on that, but I got something that I thought was going to be fast enough. Currently I’ve got 32 gigs of RAM, but to be honest with you, I’m still on Windows 7 Home Premium, which means it’s only using 16. Eventually I’m going to upgrade to Windows 10 once I get an SSD, and when that happens, it’ll take all 32 gigs basically. As far as hard drive, basically this computer is like a Frankenstein. I’ve got about four hard drives in this thing currently.
Dan Caston: Oh wow.
Drew Bolton: The biggest of which is the two terabyte main drive that I’m currently using for things like P3D and X-Plane, but there are other external drives that I’ll have my ortho photos for X-Plane and so on just so that they’re not interfering with what’s going on with the sim. Of course, couple that with the actual flight controls that I use, I only use the Saitek X52. It’s really all I’ve needed. I have not really had much of a need to get into the whole Thrustmaster Warthog or any of the other fancy stuff that is really good. I have used it; it’s just not what I feel I need.
Dan Caston: Right.
Drew Bolton: Then of course VR. As far as the graphics card that I’m using, I tend to be a bit of a rebel from what most people would suggest. Ideally most people say that you should go with the Nvidia cards, and honestly I can’t really argue with that. I’ve used Nvidia for years. I went with the Radeon RX480 primarily because of my budget, but I found that it’s performed just as well as, say for example, a 1080 or 1070. In fact, it also has eight gigs of VRAM onboard, so pretty much it’s the equivalent to that without getting bogged down in the price and whatnot. Really I don’t have a reason to change it. Not just yet anyway.
Dan Caston: Okay. It runs pretty well with that?
Drew Bolton: Oh yeah.
Dan Caston: What framer do you normally run at, or do you even watch that at all?
Drew Bolton: It depends greatly on the flight sim. A lot of it is dependent on what I was talking about before, the fact that it’s not utilizing everything to its fullest potential. For something like X-Plane, I would say it probably performs the worst in, but that is also partly my fault because of the way that I have this thing set up. Because I do the videos, what I’ve done is I choose to set my monitor resolution to double its possible resolution. Normally your monitor’s set to like 1080p. I have it set to twice that, so it’s basically a 2k monitor. The reason for that is so that I can actually get the proper aspect ratio in the final video. That has a tendency of dropping your FPS down to crap.
In something like X-Plane, I average anywhere from about 22 1/2, which is really low end to about 45 frames per second, and ideally with VR, you probably want to be closer to the 45 range, per I. In something like P3D, I get better experience because they just optimized it with a 4.3 update. That’s a solid 45. If I wanted to, I could probably push that up to 90, but I’m trying to keep the overhead down on the computer, so I try to keep it at 45. Aerofly FS2, on the other hand, easily 90. If I wanted to, I could get way more than 90, but I deliberately have it throttled at that FPS. Then of course DCS is somewhere in the middle because right now DCS is one of the better optimized ones for VR. They’ve actually been working on it a lot longer than most others, except it still doesn’t have Vulcan in there.
There’s areas of improvement. Usually with DCS I’ll get anywhere from 30 to 60 frames per second, depending on where I am, what map I’m on.
Dan Caston: Okay. That’s pretty good. From the looks of it, you have your settings actually pretty high.
Drew Bolton: Yes. Again, that’s a deliberate thing because of the way that VR normally looks, whenever you see videos on YouTube, a lot of the time it’ll have that vertical aspect ratio. I can’t stand that. I have to have that wide screen view. In a way, I’m kind of gimping myself and gimping my computer by making it go larger than it should, but the end result doesn’t seem to be affected too badly, except of course when YouTube tries to dumb everything down once you upload it.
Dan Caston: Right. You use a lot of freeware, payware, different scenery. We were talking about one earlier that you’re actually testing in your newest video there. Where do you find all these different sceneries and what are your favorites?
Drew Bolton: Well again, depending on the individual sim, I mean right now sims like FSX, P3D, you’re going to find the most scenery for either of those sims basically because it’s been around the longest. I mean we’re talking about a program that’s been around for, what, 12 years or so. A lot of the times, a lot of the freeware sites, places like Fly Away Simulation or Flightsim.com or Sim Outhouse, just rattling off names, you can find a lot of interesting things that you can import into the sim world for that. X-Plane is starting to get the same way. There are a lot of developers that are starting to look more at X-Plane. In particular one of the biggest names in flight sim, ORBIX, they have started bringing their stuff into X-Plane.
Really with X-Plane, the go-to site is X-Plane.org, or X dash Plane.org. That’s where you’re going to find a lot of the freeware stuff. In the case of the scenery that we were talking about earlier, that my current P3D series is about, it’s the Hawaii folder real scenery, and believe it or not, I found those guys on Facebook. Of all places, Facebook. I stumbled across some of the screenshots that they had. I started talking with a developer, and they were like, “Well give it a shot, see what you think.” I told them that I wanted to do a miniseries on it, just to give folks a teaser. As soon as they told me that they had introduced the auto gen, which was the missing piece of the puzzle, they wanted the trees to be perfectly color matched with their scenery itself, that’s when I decided, okay, I really want to get this video or this series of videos done.
A lot of the times, the other way that I’ll find out about sceneries, people will simply IM me or email me. It’s gotten to the point now where the Bel Geode name is I guess known enough, it’ll still never be as big as Frugal or anything, but it’s known enough to the point where I will actually have developers contacting me and say, “Hey, I have this scenery. Why don’t you check it out for me, see what you think. If you do like it, maybe you can do a video or something and a lot of the times, I will say yes especially if it’s some place that I really want to fly.
I ran through that recently with I believe it’s called Koh Poda Island. It’s for X-Plane. It’s completely free of charge, and the gentleman who made it, a gentleman by the name of Stefan Schroen also made Bamboo Island. Now the claim to fame with those, it’s just off the coast of Thailand, where he used to live for many years, and it’s kind of his homage, if you will, to that entire area. There’s all these little areas, these little islands that you can explore, and of course he throws all kinds of little goodies for you to find. It’s ideally generated for helicopter flyers, because there’s helipads everywhere on a little island so you can explore everything. I love stuff like that.
I love finding little off the wall places to just showcase to people that they wouldn’t normally think of.
Dan Caston: Yeah, that’s pretty cool. With the scenery, you have lots of choice there, but what about weather? I feel like with people that are learning to fly as part of flight training, weather’s probably one of those important ones to have. Where would you send people if they were looking to get into a weather app of some sort?
Drew Bolton: If you’re going to be sticking with the ESP platform, that being FSX or P3D, your main go-to is going to be Active Sky by HiFi Simulations. They have Active Sky Next and the successor to that, Active Sky 16 and Active Sky 17, which is specifically geared towards P3D Version 4. They also have Active Sky Cloud Art. One of the reasons why I like that one is it’s easy on the frames, even if you’ve got some absolutely horrendous weather. To give you an example, a couple of years ago my good buddy Novawing and I, we decided to make a video for his channel where we actually flew into a hurricane. I kid you not, we get to the eye of this hurricane, and you could see a well defined wall exactly as it would appear in real life.
Dan Caston: That’s cool.
Drew Bolton: That’s the kind of thing that I look for. X-Plane is a whole different Animal. Honestly with X-Plane, there’s not that many choices. There’s SkyMaxx Pro and XEnviro, both of which are payware. If we’re talking for VR, I don’t recommend either right now. I do know that XEnviro in particular is updating to the 1.10 version, but until that comes, we can’t really say how it’s going to play out in VR, but the other versions that are out there do have a problem where you’ll only see it in one eye. That’s just no good for any kind of flight in weather. Honestly with X-Plane, I would say just go with the default clouds for now.
I do know that Laminar Research is going to be updating their particle systems, so I’m hoping eventually that will lead to improved clouds, but I haven’t heard anything concrete just yet.
Dan Caston: Okay. I’ve actually heard a rumor that Active Sky, I don’t know if the rumor is true, but I’ve heard that there’s a rumor that Active Sky might be coming to X-Plane.
Drew Bolton: It is true. It is true. I spoke with them 2017, at the convention about it and they offered me a spot on their beta testing team once it was ready. The problem is it’s not ready.
Dan Caston: Right, so it might be a while.
Drew Bolton: It might be a while, yeah. It’s a completely different animal that they’re having to code for. Plus they really don’t know what Laminar Research plans on doing. A lot of the times whenever Laminar comes out with something, it throws everybody ten steps backwards. They’re doing the cautious right now. They’re proceeding as slowly as possible to ensure that once they actually are able to step on the scene, it will be a product that people would actually want to get.
Dan Caston: Right, that makes sense. If you were brand new to flight sim, whether it’s VR or just flying on a monitor, what would be the first things you’d want to get, even before you have a system? What would be the first things you’d look at?
Drew Bolton: One of the key things that I enjoy is just the ability to hop in and fly, no matter where in the world it is. Automatically that would put stuff like Aerofly out because it’s not the whole world. You only get portions in very high quality and then th rest of it is all pixelated. They’re working on that. I need to know that at any moment’s notice I can decide tomorrow I want to fly in Papua, New Guinea, and I can do that. I can hop in there and fly around. Weather of course is another consideration for me because there are some times when I actually want to hop in there and try an approach where I probably should know better, and if it were real life, I’d probably be grounded, but just to see if I can do it, like to challenge myself.
Graphics are a big thing for me. It’s a running joke with me that I really get into trees. I guess I’m like a virtual tree hugger. You got to have really good trees in your flight simulator, so that’s something that I look for. Especially since most of the time I’m flying around in the helicopter. Helicopter pilots have the unique perspective of being low and slow. A lot of stuff matters more to us than to the guys that fly at 35,000 feet.
Dan Caston: Yeah, true.
Drew Bolton: The objects, the scenery, all of that stuff really matters the most to me. Failing that, just versatility. I want to know that at any given day I could fly anything I want. If I decide one day I want to fly an F14 Tomcat, I can. If I want to fly a tilt rotor the next day, I can. If the strange itch should take me over and I want to fly a Boeing 717, I want to know that I have those kinds of options. Luckily the state of simulation the way it is right now, we do have those options in a lot of the sims, and there’s just better things coming down the pike.
Dan Caston: Sure. What about controls? If they’re just starting out, what would you recommend they get first?
Drew Bolton: Definitely a joystick. If you can afford it, if it’s within your budget, go with either a HOTAS system, if you know you’re going to be doing a lot more fighter jet type flying or even in the case of helicopters. A HOTAS does help with a helicopter, except of course you’ve got to set your throttle to the opposite throw, otherwise, its just going to mess with your head. Failing that, investing in a Yoke and rudder pedals would also be a pretty good idea if you believe that you’re going to stay mostly with airliners or with GA. In my case, the reason why I’ve stuck with the Saitek X52 is because I consider it to be the jack of all trades. I can do all of those things just with this HOTAS setup.
Dan Caston: What was that one again?
Drew Bolton: The HOTAS setup that I use is called the Saitek X52. Saitek has been taken over by Logitech recently, so you may find it actually under the Logitech websites or the Logitech pages, but Saitek is the original company that came up with that.
Dan Caston: Right. Okay. I got a Saitek Yoke as well. I would think it’s slightly different than the one you have, but yours is actually Yoke and rudder pedals or it’s the joystick?
Drew Bolton: Well because it’s the HOTAS it’s hands on throttle and stick.
Dan Caston: Right, yeah.
Drew Bolton: For me, that works because I’m doing the military aircraft, so pretty much that’s what you’re in when you’re in a military aircraft. You’ve got a stick, you’ve got a throttle, but I find that it also works great for helicopters because with the helicopter, instead of stick and throttle, you’re talking about cyclic and collective. Cyclic being the stick, collective being analogous to the throttle but not quite. It’s a completely different animal with the helicopter, but it still works.
Dan Caston: I found that to be a little awkward with the Yoke.
Drew Bolton: Yeah. It’s kind of difficult to do that with that, and because of the fact that I’m always flying so many different types of aircraft, I had to go with something that was going to be like a one stop shop basically.
Dan Caston: That makes sense. Just going back to VR a little bit. Do you have any problems when you’re using VR other than of course it being a little bit hard on the computer, bogs down a little bit, but with gauge clarity and any stutters or anything like that?
Drew Bolton: Initially yes, and I do see that come up a lot in particular on Facebook or occasionally people might comment on videos and ask for advice and so on. One of the things that I’ve done to address that, I use the Oculus Rift first off. We’ll get that out of the way. I don’t know much about the HTC Vive. I’ve only ever used it at the convention. With the Oculus Rift, there is a free program you can download called Oculus Tray Tool. Matter of fact, I believe you can get it from the Oculus site, even though it’s not actually created by the people who create Oculus. It’s actually created by just a random guy who wanted something more convenient.
The idea behind it, it will allow you to adjust your pixel density or super sampling. The terms are interchangeable, so you can increase the clarity inside the flight simulator. In the case of something like, say for example, DCS World. DCS World already has that built in, but if you’re utilizing something like Oculus Tray Tool, you can minimize the resources that DCS itself is using by turning the built-in slider in DCS down to say one, 1.0. Then you would adjust that in Oculus Tray Tool to increase your clarity in there, and it really doesn’t affect how much energy DCS is using or so on and so forth. It works the same for all the other sims too. You can adjust everything on the fly, it’s got its own profiles, and you can set it up for each individual sim. It will even tell you when it’s loading a profile for a given sim.
You can set it up based on how much you’re going to need for that particular sim or in the case of something like Aerofly FS2, you really don’t have to set anything because that is just naturally already a high performing sim. One thing that I would definitely recommend people do which might seem a little counterintuitive, turn your anti-aliasing down for two reasons. Number one, it’s an incredible FPS hog. It will eat your frames alive, the more anti-aliasing you’ve got. If possible, use your graphics cards built in anti-aliasing and override whatever the simulator’s trying to do, but even so don’t set it very high because that’s one of the number causes of blurry cockpits basically. If you don’t mind look at a little bit of jaggedness inside the sim, then set it down to the bare minimum that it can go.
You’re going to find that you’ll have an increased clarity in the cockpit. The jaggedness probably won’t even bother you after a while of actually using it, but it’ll still translate to a smooth experience, which is of course ultimately the most important thing.
Dan Caston: Yeah, I’ve noticed that as well. I’m always playing with my settings to see what I can do, see if I can get more out of my sim. One thing I found is that the smaller gauges are a little bit difficult to see. You have that zoom button, but even the zoom button sometimes it just doesn’t bring you any closer.
Drew Bolton: Right.
Dan Caston: Maybe I have to bring my anti-aliasing down even more and get some more clarity with it that way.
Drew Bolton: Yeah. Something like X-Plane, generally I don’t run anti-aliasing at all. I just keep it totally off. Like I said, I’ve got the graphics card in the background doing minimal anti-aliasing, so it kind of balances out and whenever the finished video comes out it does look a little bit smoother. It’s not nearly as jagged. Something like P3D, I might have to have a little bit of anti-aliasing in there because let’s face it, it’s still that old technology even though its been brought into the current age. It’ll get jagged on you really quick.
Dan Caston: Yeah, no doubt. You do a lot of military flying, right?
Drew Bolton: That is correct. If I had to give a ratio to it, I’d say probably 60/40 in favor of military flying, which of course includes helicopters versus GA flying, which of course also includes helicopters.
Dan Caston: Right. Do you do most of your military flight training, or not flight training, but flying on DCS?
Drew Bolton: It really varies a lot. I would say that yeah, with DCS hands down, that’s going to be the most militaristic of all of the sims, so I do tend to gravitate towards that when it comes to getting that military itch scratched. With X-Plane, I do have a number of military aircraft. Of course, tilt rotor and so on, that I like to use there, and P3D, well F14 Tomcat’s my all time favorite and I love doing carrier ops in P3D, even though it’s not nearly as realistic as DCS or whatnot.
When I’m not doing that, nine times out of ten I will go to either P3D or more notably X-Plane for my GA flying, especially if I actually just want to take some time and run over what my CFI used to teach me. I’ll hope in the original Cessna, the default Cessna that comes with X-Plane, and I’ll just do some patterns, run through the procedures and so on.
Dan Caston: With this, you said you practice some of what your flight instructor went over, but for flying in these military jets and different planes like that, where do you learn about the procedures? Do you do it trial and error or is it training? Do you find this stuff on YouTube? How are you finding your information?
Drew Bolton: Hands down, I would say YouTube is my biggest learning tool. I guess it would make sense since I spend a lot of time on YouTube. Especially with, like say for example, in DCS they have the Hornet that just came out, the FA18. There have been a couple of gentlemen that have posted videos. Lex Talionis is the name of the one guy. I think the other guy goes by AEW, so Alpha Echo Whiskey. Both of those guys are real life Hornet drivers. That’s what they did for a living for the U.S. Navy. They’ve been creating videos for the benefit of those of us who utilize DCS World so that we would actually learn how to do it right. I found it absolutely illuminating. I’m riveted to every single episode, because I want to get this right.
Even though there’s no pop quiz at the end of the day, I still want to make sure if I’m doing it, like Maverick, I’m going to do it like Maverick.
Dan Caston: Yeah, exactly. That’s what I was wondering, where do you find this information, especially on military because you’re not going to go to your average flight trainer and say, “Hey, can you teach me how to fly a military jet?” They’re going to hop into a Cessna 172 and say, “This is what we got.”
Drew Bolton: Yeah, pretty much. Pretty much. One of my dreams …
Dan Caston: That’s kind of cool.
Drew Bolton: … is to actually fly an L39 Albatros, which is a check made aircraft. It used to be the Russian trainer. I don’t believe it is now, but there was a point in time were everyone in the Soviet Union who were training to be pilots in the middle of the Cold War, that was what they used. I found especially in VR, because it’s available for DCS as well as P3D, they don’t have it yet for X-Plane, it is quite frankly one of the most realistic experiences that I’ve had. It’s got all the quirks of the real aircraft as verified by a couple of guys that I know that actually fly this thing in real life. Whenever it comes to stuff like that, I rely on some of the people that I know to learn more about the aircraft, and then I try to put into practice everything that they’ve taught me.
I still want to fly one in real life though, so I’m trying to get one of my buddies to at least bring their aircraft here to Pennsylvania so that I can fly it.
Dan Caston: Yeah, that’d be a great experience, that’s for sure. What would be your number one tip for anyone that’s looking to get into flight training or VR flight for that matter?
Drew Bolton: For VR in particular, do the tutorial, make sure you set everything up right. It might seem like it’s a pain in the butt initially. It might take you, I don’t know, half hour, anywhere up to two hours. In my case, I had my son helping me to set it up so it actually went a little bit quicker. It probably would have taken me six hours to get the stupid thing set up, but as long as you run through the tutorials and make sure that everything works fine with your system, that’s the most important thing. Now when it comes to the actual VR siming, especially when you’re dealing with aircraft that you might not have ever experienced before in VR, read the manual. It’s as simple as that.
If you’re not the kind of person who likes to do a lot of reading, guess what, YouTube exists for a reason. There are a number of us who have done tutorials on just about any other kind of plane. One of the things that I like to do, especially with DCS, is sometimes I’ll do startup tutorials. With X-Plane, I almost always start my videos with a full cold and dark startup. People have told me that it really helps them. I actually ran into a guy at the convention a couple of years ago who said that he has bookmarked a lot of the helicopter videos that I have done in X-Plane because of the fact that I always go through the startup procedure, so he knows what to do now. Basically he’s taught himself through me.
I just pay it forward that way. Yeah, definitely read the manual, definitely make sure your equipment is set up properly and above all else, just have fun. You don’t have to take it seriously. The FAA is not going to go come knocking on your door if you bring your Cessna or your helicopter or your fighter jet down in flames. Just have fun with it. That’s the most important part. If it wasn’t fun, I really would not do it.
Dan Caston: Yeah, totally. I remember one of your videos there recently where you’re flying through I think it was Chicago or somewhere. You were flying through the town, between buildings. It looked like a lot of fun.
Drew Bolton: Yeah, that’s one of my typical shenanigans type things that I’ve got to throw in there because I really don’t want people to think that I take this thing as seriously. There’s a time to be serious and there’s a time not to be. If I’m doing a startup tutorial, of course I’m going to teach you what to do. If I’m just showing off scenery or whatnot, then I’ll get into what I call tour guide mode. Then there’s just things where, with the case of the video you’re talking about, Aerofly FS2, I basically wanted to show off my performance that this thing is giving me. Yeah, I did something that would be highly illegal if you try to do it in real life. I’m weaving through the skyscrapers in the Chicago skyline. Don’t recommend you try it at home, but hey, it’s a simulator, you can get away with it.
Dan Caston: Exactly. It’s cool. I think you’ve given us a ton of information to work with. Where can people find you or where can people watch your videos and all that? Do you have the address on hand?
Drew Bolton: Everything I do is under the name Bel Geode, which is spelled B-E-L, G-E-O-D-E. It’s actually two words. It’s supposed to be a first name and a last name. It came about as a stage name back when I was a musician in the late 90s/early 2000s. It just kind of stuck as my internet net. Pretty much everything I do is under Bel Geode, whether it be two words or one together. In the case of YouTube, it’s always one word together, B-E-L-G-E-O-D-E and you can find me there. You can find me on Twitter. You can find me on Facebook, Google Plus. It’s all going to be the same thing. It’s all under Bel Geode.
Facebook of course I have my own personal account where you’ll find me as Drew, but nine times out of ten, if it’s something related to the actual videos that I’m doing, you can just check out Bel Geode 2015 on Facebook and that’s the best way to find me. I’m always on it, unless I’m asleep.
Dan Caston: Sounds good. Last question here, just because I’m curious. Your hat has become, it’s on like every photo of you, you have this hat on. I was curious how that came about? What’s the story behind that?
Drew Bolton: Believe it or not, that hat was a gift. When I first decided that I wanted to do Twitch and YouTube, which I haven’t done Twitch for a while now, I was playing a game called Guild Wars 2, and I was playing with a really good friend of mine at the time, Amy. When we created our characters, I decided my character was always going to run around in purple. That was his thing. He always had to have a long purple coat, a fancy coat no less, and of course a fedora, which just happened to have a little green feather in it. Amy thought it would be absolutely hilarious if she just out of the blue ordered a full purple suit and hat to match and had it FedEx to my house.
Bear in mind that time, she had no clue what my suit size was. She just guessed and got it right, by the way.
Dan Caston: Nice.
Drew Bolton: I wake up this one morning and I’ve got FedEx knocking at my door. I’m like, “What is going on here?” I open up this package and there’s this suit and this hat. It just kind of stuck since then. It’s been the official Bel Geode suit.
Dan Caston: That’s funny.
Drew Bolton: The hat eventually just became a logo for all of my YouTube videos and I was like, “Well you know what, might as well run with it.”
Dan Caston: Yeah, it’s like your trademark.
Drew Bolton: Yeah, basically.
Dan Caston: That’s funny.
Drew Bolton: I’ve actually had people ask me all the time where to get the hat and so on and so forth. I actually told people where Amy had initially gotten it, but I haven’t seen anybody else wear it. As far as I’m concerned, it’s still my trademark.
Dan Caston: For sure. That’s awesome. Cool. Thanks for being on our podcast.
Drew Bolton: It’s my pleasure. Thank you for having me.
Dan Caston: All right, well there you have it. An interview with the famous Bel Geode. I’ll leave links to Bel’s Twitter, Google Plus, Facebook and YouTube accounts in the show notes as well as any links mentioned in the podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, please hit the subscribe button to ensure that you don’t miss any of the future episodes. Also, if you’re interested in being interviewed on our podcast, please check out our interview page at Vrflightworld.com/interview. That’s Vrflightworld.com/interview. To see the show notes and links for this episode, either check out the iTunes subscription or go to Vrflightworld.com/seven. That’s Vrflightworld.com/seven. Thanks again for listening, and I hope you guys have a great day.
John Melley: Thanks for listening to the VR Flight World Podcast, online at Vrflightworld.com.
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The post VRFW 007- Flight Simulation Interview with the Famous Bel Geode appeared first on VR Flight World.
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By Dan - Flight Sim EnthusiastWelcome to Episode 7 of the VR Flight World Podcast. In this episode we dive into VR Flight Simulation with a flight sim expert, Drew BOLTON. Drew is better known to his fans as Bel GEODE. Bel has a ton of experience in flight simulation, as he started flying in 1986. In this interview we go into details on what type of system you need to get started in VR flight simulation. Bel also gives us some great information on what he uses for flying, as well as what add-ons you need to have to improve your flight experience.
Hope you enjoy!
Here is how to find Bel Geode:
Youtube- https://www.youtube.com/user/belgeode/
Facebook- https://www.facebook.com/BelGeode2015/
Twitter- https://twitter.com/belgeode
Show Note Links
Please note that most of the links below are affiliate links, which means that I make a small commission if you use my link. This doesn’t cost you anything and helps me to keep producing great content. If you use my link, I truly do appreciate it. I only recommend products that I have used or I believe in. Thanks!
My Equipment and links
Transcription for the Podcast
John Melley: Welcome to the VR Flight World Podcast, the place where flight training and your home office collide. Get tips, tricks and in depth interviews about flight training, virtual reality and flight simulation. With your host Dan Caston.
Dan Caston: Hey guys, and welcome to episode number seven of the VR Flight World Podcast. Today on our show, we have a very experienced guest that has been involved in flight simulation for a very long time. He is now flying in VR and is always showing off his flights on YouTube. His online name is Bel Geode. Please welcome Drew Bolton. Hey Drew. Welcome to the VR Flight World Podcast. I’m glad to have you hear. Some of the audience may know who you are. However, for the people that don’t really know you, can you just introduce yourself and let us know a little bit about you?
Drew Bolton: Absolutely. Probably the best way that I can do that, the most recognizable way would be to say good evening everybody. This is Bel Geode.
Dan Caston: How long have you been in VR flight or actually flight sim in general?
Drew Bolton: Well VR flight is, I guess you would say, relatively new. I only really got into it last year, July, shortly after I came back from FlightSimCon in Connecticut. Flight siming itself I’ve been doing since, believe it or not, about 1986 when I was in high school.
Dan Caston: Oh wow, nice.
Drew Bolton: I’m one of those guys, yeah.
Dan Caston: You’ve been doing it a while. That’s awesome.
Drew Bolton: Yes.
Dan Caston: I mentioned before that you actually did some real world flying. You did some hours as a real world pilot or a student pilot I guess?
Drew Bolton: Yes.
Dan Caston: Was that before or after you were in flight sim?
Drew Bolton: It was technically after. When I was in high school, part of the things that I did there, I was part of the ROTC. The Air Force ROTC in my high school, that was one of the first things they had us do was they introduced us to flight simulation back at a time when it was just vector graphics. It really didn’t take until many, many years after that, I would say when I was in my mid 30s. I’m currently 47. I got into my mid 30s, the job that I was working at the time allowed me to take flight sim lessons, but unfortunately, since life has a way of throwing curve balls, I ended up losing that job and thus losing the income to take the flight lessons.
Dan Caston: Oh no.
Drew Bolton: I’ve got about four and a half hours total including the half hour that I count at the last convention when a friend of mine had me fly his Cessna around Connecticut.
Dan Caston: Yeah, exactly. You’ve had a little bit of experience in the real plane as well.
Drew Bolton: Oh yes.
Dan Caston: Now that you have some experience in the real plane, you have some experience in VR, do you really have that connection, like it’s very similar or is it completely different to you?
Drew Bolton: Absolutely. It is, as I’ve been telling everybody who will listen, a game changer. Before when you’re flying on a monitor, of course you can get the procedures down, which honestly that’s really what flight simulation is best at is learning all the various procedures. It really doesn’t help as much learning how to actually control the aircraft. Anybody can teach you that, any CFI or flight instructor can actually put you in the cockpit and teach you how to do that in a couple of hours basically. The actual procedures and everything is where flight simulation shines.
Now VR has really blown that out because of the fact that not only do you have the procedure trainer, but you can couple that with the feeling of flying, the fact that you’ve got your depth perception, and that’s probably the biggest thing that VR adds to flight simulation. You can now judge your distances when you’re coming in to land, if you’re flying patterns and so on. It’s just amazing to see the world unfold. You can judge your heights from the ground and so on. It’s just incredible. It’s really, really opened up flight simulation for both the student pilot and the one that’s never even planning on getting into an actual real cockpit.
Dan Caston: Yeah, that’s what I found as well. I have a few hours as a student pilot, but I don’t have too, too many and I don’t have my pilot’s license, but really I found it was really realistic once I threw that headset on. I did some flying before, being in VR, but once I threw that headset on and was flying in VR, it was a whole different world, and I could move my head around to look beside me. I just found it was pretty amazing.
Drew Bolton: Yeah, that’s probably the major thing is the fact that you can move your head around and actually take in the world. Of course, it still feels right now, with the state of VR, like having a scuba mask on your face, which is probably the perfect analogy for me since I used to do scuba diving. Even with that limitation that VR currently has, you still can’t replace that feeling of depth being in there. When I see new people get into the flight sims and of course they might get a little bit nauseous or motion sick, I tell them this is part of the “initiation.” It has to feel like that. You do get used to it after a little while, but VR just basically pays for itself once you get past that stage.
Dan Caston: Yeah, exactly. Did you have some of the nausea when you started?
Drew Bolton: Believe it or not, it only happened to me twice, and that was at both of the conventions. FlightSimCon was an annual convention that they had in Connecticut. I went to the one in 2016 and the one in 2017. It’s since split into two separate conventions, and I think that the last one that we had was in Vegas and there was another one in Dallas. When I was at the two Connecticut conventions, I had the opportunity to try this thing called Fly Inside, which was basically the precursor to the whole native VR that a lot of sims have started doing. It was an add-on program that you purchase, and you would use it with things like flight simulation, X, FSX or prepared or in recent cases X-Plane as well.
The first time that I tried it, they had me go up and basically do a circuit around Boston Logan. I miscalculated my turn to final from base leg, and of course I had to adjust because I could see from the VASI lights, the PAPI lights that I was basically off my glide slope. I overcompensated a little bit, and I could feel it in the pit of my stomach. I got everything down safely. I got out of the VR headset, I stood there and my buddy Tristan, Novawing24 is his name on YouTube, was looking at me and was like, “Dude, you look like you saw a ghost.” It was just crazy.
Dan Caston: Yeah, because the feeling is so real, isn’t it?
Drew Bolton: Yeah, but once I actually got my own, the first thing that I did, I hoped into DCS, Digital Combat Simulator world, hopped into the Huey and basically just flew it around, just for the sake of flying it around. The story that I tell people is once I actually took the headset off after landing my Huey, it felt like I was having flashbacks of Vietnam.
Dan Caston: Oh yeah?
Drew Bolton: Bear in mind, I’m born in 1970, around the time, the height of the Vietnam War. There’s no way I could have been in that war, but it was just that real to me.
Dan Caston: No doubt. That’s pretty cool. What sim would actually be your favorite? You’ve mentioned a few now, the DCS and X-Plane. I know your recent video you actually started using Prepar3D, a new version of that.
Drew Bolton: Yeah.
Dan Caston: Right now, what’s your go-to or your favorite sim?
Drew Bolton: It varies depending on the day. I’ll be honest with you, it does vary depending on what I feel I need to record for YouTube. If I’m just getting in there and putzing around, believe it or not, the one that I enjoy the most is actually Aerofly FS2. Now yeah, I do have a series on that as well, but I haven’t been keeping up with it lately until recently when they implemented Vulcan which is the API that a lot of the other sims are looking to implement because it completely optimizes how the CPU and the GPU are both accessed when you’re using the sim. As far as a pure flying experience, just get in the plane and fly, don’t have to worry about any of the other things that come with that, no flight planning or anything like that, that is the one that I have the most fun in.
DCS of course, I will always have a great time in because it’s a combat sim, and I was that kid who always wanted to be Maverick, always wanted to be the Top Gun. I’m still waiting for them to come out with the F14 Tomcat so that I can fly that around in there and make things go boom flower, which is one of my little trademark phrases.
Dan Caston: Yeah, I’ve heard that a few times.
Drew Bolton: X-Plane is definitely another favorite simply because it’s got a lot of my favorite types of aircraft, mainly helicopters. The physics is more real, so if I were to treat flight simulation as a training tool for getting back into the cockpit, more than likely would be X-Plane that I would use more than anything else. I don’t also want to discount Prepar because since the latest update the version 4.3 update that they recently came out with, it’s actually optimized VR and made the experience a lot smoother and a lot better, and of course it’s got some of my favorite planes. For example, the aforementioned Tomcat in there. That right now is my go-to whenever I want to fly around as Maverick.
Dan Caston: You mentioned a Vulcan? What’s the Vulcan?
Drew Bolton: Vulcan is an APR program. Basically it will be integrated into the sim, and the idea behind it is really quite simple. The whole objective is to allow the simulator to make better use of your CPU, especially multi-core CPUs and of course a lot of the newer graphics cards out there that happen to have a lot of memory, VRAM onboard, and optimized chips included. Right now the state of most of the flight sims, Aerofly FS2 being the obvious exception, they’re really not taking advantage of what your computer can really do. One of the prime examples, X-Plane. As beautiful as X-Plane can be once you get everything set up correctly, it’s still running on one core and it’s not optimized as far as your graphics card.
You have little bottlenecks here and there. The idea behind the whole Vulcan programming, or the Vulcan API as they call it, is to help eliminate all of that. It streamlines that whole process so the computer can more intelligently use the parts for your simulator. Sims are probably the most demanding game genre out there. Really, this is something that we’ve all been waiting for.
Dan Caston: That’s pretty exciting, because whenever they talk about getting CPUs and GPUs, you always want to have essentially the fastest CPU but not necessarily the most amount of cores because, like you say, it doesn’t really help you in any way.
Drew Bolton: Right.
Dan Caston: Having that fast single core, or not single core, but less cores with faster speed probably helps you more than multiple cores with slower speeds.
Drew Bolton: Yeah, up to now that has been the case. Once Vulcan gets implemented for both X-Plane and DCS, I don’t know which one of the two of them is going to come first, you’re going to see a marked improvement in how everything gets utilized.
Dan Caston: That’ll be exciting. What kind of system are you running?
Drew Bolton: Currently, the system that I have is a hexa core i7. I’m trying to remember the speed. I want to say it’s within the 6,000 range. I know it’s not one of the incredibly fast ones like an 8,800 or anything like that, but I had to also consider my budget. I kind of skimped a little bit on that, but I got something that I thought was going to be fast enough. Currently I’ve got 32 gigs of RAM, but to be honest with you, I’m still on Windows 7 Home Premium, which means it’s only using 16. Eventually I’m going to upgrade to Windows 10 once I get an SSD, and when that happens, it’ll take all 32 gigs basically. As far as hard drive, basically this computer is like a Frankenstein. I’ve got about four hard drives in this thing currently.
Dan Caston: Oh wow.
Drew Bolton: The biggest of which is the two terabyte main drive that I’m currently using for things like P3D and X-Plane, but there are other external drives that I’ll have my ortho photos for X-Plane and so on just so that they’re not interfering with what’s going on with the sim. Of course, couple that with the actual flight controls that I use, I only use the Saitek X52. It’s really all I’ve needed. I have not really had much of a need to get into the whole Thrustmaster Warthog or any of the other fancy stuff that is really good. I have used it; it’s just not what I feel I need.
Dan Caston: Right.
Drew Bolton: Then of course VR. As far as the graphics card that I’m using, I tend to be a bit of a rebel from what most people would suggest. Ideally most people say that you should go with the Nvidia cards, and honestly I can’t really argue with that. I’ve used Nvidia for years. I went with the Radeon RX480 primarily because of my budget, but I found that it’s performed just as well as, say for example, a 1080 or 1070. In fact, it also has eight gigs of VRAM onboard, so pretty much it’s the equivalent to that without getting bogged down in the price and whatnot. Really I don’t have a reason to change it. Not just yet anyway.
Dan Caston: Okay. It runs pretty well with that?
Drew Bolton: Oh yeah.
Dan Caston: What framer do you normally run at, or do you even watch that at all?
Drew Bolton: It depends greatly on the flight sim. A lot of it is dependent on what I was talking about before, the fact that it’s not utilizing everything to its fullest potential. For something like X-Plane, I would say it probably performs the worst in, but that is also partly my fault because of the way that I have this thing set up. Because I do the videos, what I’ve done is I choose to set my monitor resolution to double its possible resolution. Normally your monitor’s set to like 1080p. I have it set to twice that, so it’s basically a 2k monitor. The reason for that is so that I can actually get the proper aspect ratio in the final video. That has a tendency of dropping your FPS down to crap.
In something like X-Plane, I average anywhere from about 22 1/2, which is really low end to about 45 frames per second, and ideally with VR, you probably want to be closer to the 45 range, per I. In something like P3D, I get better experience because they just optimized it with a 4.3 update. That’s a solid 45. If I wanted to, I could probably push that up to 90, but I’m trying to keep the overhead down on the computer, so I try to keep it at 45. Aerofly FS2, on the other hand, easily 90. If I wanted to, I could get way more than 90, but I deliberately have it throttled at that FPS. Then of course DCS is somewhere in the middle because right now DCS is one of the better optimized ones for VR. They’ve actually been working on it a lot longer than most others, except it still doesn’t have Vulcan in there.
There’s areas of improvement. Usually with DCS I’ll get anywhere from 30 to 60 frames per second, depending on where I am, what map I’m on.
Dan Caston: Okay. That’s pretty good. From the looks of it, you have your settings actually pretty high.
Drew Bolton: Yes. Again, that’s a deliberate thing because of the way that VR normally looks, whenever you see videos on YouTube, a lot of the time it’ll have that vertical aspect ratio. I can’t stand that. I have to have that wide screen view. In a way, I’m kind of gimping myself and gimping my computer by making it go larger than it should, but the end result doesn’t seem to be affected too badly, except of course when YouTube tries to dumb everything down once you upload it.
Dan Caston: Right. You use a lot of freeware, payware, different scenery. We were talking about one earlier that you’re actually testing in your newest video there. Where do you find all these different sceneries and what are your favorites?
Drew Bolton: Well again, depending on the individual sim, I mean right now sims like FSX, P3D, you’re going to find the most scenery for either of those sims basically because it’s been around the longest. I mean we’re talking about a program that’s been around for, what, 12 years or so. A lot of the times, a lot of the freeware sites, places like Fly Away Simulation or Flightsim.com or Sim Outhouse, just rattling off names, you can find a lot of interesting things that you can import into the sim world for that. X-Plane is starting to get the same way. There are a lot of developers that are starting to look more at X-Plane. In particular one of the biggest names in flight sim, ORBIX, they have started bringing their stuff into X-Plane.
Really with X-Plane, the go-to site is X-Plane.org, or X dash Plane.org. That’s where you’re going to find a lot of the freeware stuff. In the case of the scenery that we were talking about earlier, that my current P3D series is about, it’s the Hawaii folder real scenery, and believe it or not, I found those guys on Facebook. Of all places, Facebook. I stumbled across some of the screenshots that they had. I started talking with a developer, and they were like, “Well give it a shot, see what you think.” I told them that I wanted to do a miniseries on it, just to give folks a teaser. As soon as they told me that they had introduced the auto gen, which was the missing piece of the puzzle, they wanted the trees to be perfectly color matched with their scenery itself, that’s when I decided, okay, I really want to get this video or this series of videos done.
A lot of the times, the other way that I’ll find out about sceneries, people will simply IM me or email me. It’s gotten to the point now where the Bel Geode name is I guess known enough, it’ll still never be as big as Frugal or anything, but it’s known enough to the point where I will actually have developers contacting me and say, “Hey, I have this scenery. Why don’t you check it out for me, see what you think. If you do like it, maybe you can do a video or something and a lot of the times, I will say yes especially if it’s some place that I really want to fly.
I ran through that recently with I believe it’s called Koh Poda Island. It’s for X-Plane. It’s completely free of charge, and the gentleman who made it, a gentleman by the name of Stefan Schroen also made Bamboo Island. Now the claim to fame with those, it’s just off the coast of Thailand, where he used to live for many years, and it’s kind of his homage, if you will, to that entire area. There’s all these little areas, these little islands that you can explore, and of course he throws all kinds of little goodies for you to find. It’s ideally generated for helicopter flyers, because there’s helipads everywhere on a little island so you can explore everything. I love stuff like that.
I love finding little off the wall places to just showcase to people that they wouldn’t normally think of.
Dan Caston: Yeah, that’s pretty cool. With the scenery, you have lots of choice there, but what about weather? I feel like with people that are learning to fly as part of flight training, weather’s probably one of those important ones to have. Where would you send people if they were looking to get into a weather app of some sort?
Drew Bolton: If you’re going to be sticking with the ESP platform, that being FSX or P3D, your main go-to is going to be Active Sky by HiFi Simulations. They have Active Sky Next and the successor to that, Active Sky 16 and Active Sky 17, which is specifically geared towards P3D Version 4. They also have Active Sky Cloud Art. One of the reasons why I like that one is it’s easy on the frames, even if you’ve got some absolutely horrendous weather. To give you an example, a couple of years ago my good buddy Novawing and I, we decided to make a video for his channel where we actually flew into a hurricane. I kid you not, we get to the eye of this hurricane, and you could see a well defined wall exactly as it would appear in real life.
Dan Caston: That’s cool.
Drew Bolton: That’s the kind of thing that I look for. X-Plane is a whole different Animal. Honestly with X-Plane, there’s not that many choices. There’s SkyMaxx Pro and XEnviro, both of which are payware. If we’re talking for VR, I don’t recommend either right now. I do know that XEnviro in particular is updating to the 1.10 version, but until that comes, we can’t really say how it’s going to play out in VR, but the other versions that are out there do have a problem where you’ll only see it in one eye. That’s just no good for any kind of flight in weather. Honestly with X-Plane, I would say just go with the default clouds for now.
I do know that Laminar Research is going to be updating their particle systems, so I’m hoping eventually that will lead to improved clouds, but I haven’t heard anything concrete just yet.
Dan Caston: Okay. I’ve actually heard a rumor that Active Sky, I don’t know if the rumor is true, but I’ve heard that there’s a rumor that Active Sky might be coming to X-Plane.
Drew Bolton: It is true. It is true. I spoke with them 2017, at the convention about it and they offered me a spot on their beta testing team once it was ready. The problem is it’s not ready.
Dan Caston: Right, so it might be a while.
Drew Bolton: It might be a while, yeah. It’s a completely different animal that they’re having to code for. Plus they really don’t know what Laminar Research plans on doing. A lot of the times whenever Laminar comes out with something, it throws everybody ten steps backwards. They’re doing the cautious right now. They’re proceeding as slowly as possible to ensure that once they actually are able to step on the scene, it will be a product that people would actually want to get.
Dan Caston: Right, that makes sense. If you were brand new to flight sim, whether it’s VR or just flying on a monitor, what would be the first things you’d want to get, even before you have a system? What would be the first things you’d look at?
Drew Bolton: One of the key things that I enjoy is just the ability to hop in and fly, no matter where in the world it is. Automatically that would put stuff like Aerofly out because it’s not the whole world. You only get portions in very high quality and then th rest of it is all pixelated. They’re working on that. I need to know that at any moment’s notice I can decide tomorrow I want to fly in Papua, New Guinea, and I can do that. I can hop in there and fly around. Weather of course is another consideration for me because there are some times when I actually want to hop in there and try an approach where I probably should know better, and if it were real life, I’d probably be grounded, but just to see if I can do it, like to challenge myself.
Graphics are a big thing for me. It’s a running joke with me that I really get into trees. I guess I’m like a virtual tree hugger. You got to have really good trees in your flight simulator, so that’s something that I look for. Especially since most of the time I’m flying around in the helicopter. Helicopter pilots have the unique perspective of being low and slow. A lot of stuff matters more to us than to the guys that fly at 35,000 feet.
Dan Caston: Yeah, true.
Drew Bolton: The objects, the scenery, all of that stuff really matters the most to me. Failing that, just versatility. I want to know that at any given day I could fly anything I want. If I decide one day I want to fly an F14 Tomcat, I can. If I want to fly a tilt rotor the next day, I can. If the strange itch should take me over and I want to fly a Boeing 717, I want to know that I have those kinds of options. Luckily the state of simulation the way it is right now, we do have those options in a lot of the sims, and there’s just better things coming down the pike.
Dan Caston: Sure. What about controls? If they’re just starting out, what would you recommend they get first?
Drew Bolton: Definitely a joystick. If you can afford it, if it’s within your budget, go with either a HOTAS system, if you know you’re going to be doing a lot more fighter jet type flying or even in the case of helicopters. A HOTAS does help with a helicopter, except of course you’ve got to set your throttle to the opposite throw, otherwise, its just going to mess with your head. Failing that, investing in a Yoke and rudder pedals would also be a pretty good idea if you believe that you’re going to stay mostly with airliners or with GA. In my case, the reason why I’ve stuck with the Saitek X52 is because I consider it to be the jack of all trades. I can do all of those things just with this HOTAS setup.
Dan Caston: What was that one again?
Drew Bolton: The HOTAS setup that I use is called the Saitek X52. Saitek has been taken over by Logitech recently, so you may find it actually under the Logitech websites or the Logitech pages, but Saitek is the original company that came up with that.
Dan Caston: Right. Okay. I got a Saitek Yoke as well. I would think it’s slightly different than the one you have, but yours is actually Yoke and rudder pedals or it’s the joystick?
Drew Bolton: Well because it’s the HOTAS it’s hands on throttle and stick.
Dan Caston: Right, yeah.
Drew Bolton: For me, that works because I’m doing the military aircraft, so pretty much that’s what you’re in when you’re in a military aircraft. You’ve got a stick, you’ve got a throttle, but I find that it also works great for helicopters because with the helicopter, instead of stick and throttle, you’re talking about cyclic and collective. Cyclic being the stick, collective being analogous to the throttle but not quite. It’s a completely different animal with the helicopter, but it still works.
Dan Caston: I found that to be a little awkward with the Yoke.
Drew Bolton: Yeah. It’s kind of difficult to do that with that, and because of the fact that I’m always flying so many different types of aircraft, I had to go with something that was going to be like a one stop shop basically.
Dan Caston: That makes sense. Just going back to VR a little bit. Do you have any problems when you’re using VR other than of course it being a little bit hard on the computer, bogs down a little bit, but with gauge clarity and any stutters or anything like that?
Drew Bolton: Initially yes, and I do see that come up a lot in particular on Facebook or occasionally people might comment on videos and ask for advice and so on. One of the things that I’ve done to address that, I use the Oculus Rift first off. We’ll get that out of the way. I don’t know much about the HTC Vive. I’ve only ever used it at the convention. With the Oculus Rift, there is a free program you can download called Oculus Tray Tool. Matter of fact, I believe you can get it from the Oculus site, even though it’s not actually created by the people who create Oculus. It’s actually created by just a random guy who wanted something more convenient.
The idea behind it, it will allow you to adjust your pixel density or super sampling. The terms are interchangeable, so you can increase the clarity inside the flight simulator. In the case of something like, say for example, DCS World. DCS World already has that built in, but if you’re utilizing something like Oculus Tray Tool, you can minimize the resources that DCS itself is using by turning the built-in slider in DCS down to say one, 1.0. Then you would adjust that in Oculus Tray Tool to increase your clarity in there, and it really doesn’t affect how much energy DCS is using or so on and so forth. It works the same for all the other sims too. You can adjust everything on the fly, it’s got its own profiles, and you can set it up for each individual sim. It will even tell you when it’s loading a profile for a given sim.
You can set it up based on how much you’re going to need for that particular sim or in the case of something like Aerofly FS2, you really don’t have to set anything because that is just naturally already a high performing sim. One thing that I would definitely recommend people do which might seem a little counterintuitive, turn your anti-aliasing down for two reasons. Number one, it’s an incredible FPS hog. It will eat your frames alive, the more anti-aliasing you’ve got. If possible, use your graphics cards built in anti-aliasing and override whatever the simulator’s trying to do, but even so don’t set it very high because that’s one of the number causes of blurry cockpits basically. If you don’t mind look at a little bit of jaggedness inside the sim, then set it down to the bare minimum that it can go.
You’re going to find that you’ll have an increased clarity in the cockpit. The jaggedness probably won’t even bother you after a while of actually using it, but it’ll still translate to a smooth experience, which is of course ultimately the most important thing.
Dan Caston: Yeah, I’ve noticed that as well. I’m always playing with my settings to see what I can do, see if I can get more out of my sim. One thing I found is that the smaller gauges are a little bit difficult to see. You have that zoom button, but even the zoom button sometimes it just doesn’t bring you any closer.
Drew Bolton: Right.
Dan Caston: Maybe I have to bring my anti-aliasing down even more and get some more clarity with it that way.
Drew Bolton: Yeah. Something like X-Plane, generally I don’t run anti-aliasing at all. I just keep it totally off. Like I said, I’ve got the graphics card in the background doing minimal anti-aliasing, so it kind of balances out and whenever the finished video comes out it does look a little bit smoother. It’s not nearly as jagged. Something like P3D, I might have to have a little bit of anti-aliasing in there because let’s face it, it’s still that old technology even though its been brought into the current age. It’ll get jagged on you really quick.
Dan Caston: Yeah, no doubt. You do a lot of military flying, right?
Drew Bolton: That is correct. If I had to give a ratio to it, I’d say probably 60/40 in favor of military flying, which of course includes helicopters versus GA flying, which of course also includes helicopters.
Dan Caston: Right. Do you do most of your military flight training, or not flight training, but flying on DCS?
Drew Bolton: It really varies a lot. I would say that yeah, with DCS hands down, that’s going to be the most militaristic of all of the sims, so I do tend to gravitate towards that when it comes to getting that military itch scratched. With X-Plane, I do have a number of military aircraft. Of course, tilt rotor and so on, that I like to use there, and P3D, well F14 Tomcat’s my all time favorite and I love doing carrier ops in P3D, even though it’s not nearly as realistic as DCS or whatnot.
When I’m not doing that, nine times out of ten I will go to either P3D or more notably X-Plane for my GA flying, especially if I actually just want to take some time and run over what my CFI used to teach me. I’ll hope in the original Cessna, the default Cessna that comes with X-Plane, and I’ll just do some patterns, run through the procedures and so on.
Dan Caston: With this, you said you practice some of what your flight instructor went over, but for flying in these military jets and different planes like that, where do you learn about the procedures? Do you do it trial and error or is it training? Do you find this stuff on YouTube? How are you finding your information?
Drew Bolton: Hands down, I would say YouTube is my biggest learning tool. I guess it would make sense since I spend a lot of time on YouTube. Especially with, like say for example, in DCS they have the Hornet that just came out, the FA18. There have been a couple of gentlemen that have posted videos. Lex Talionis is the name of the one guy. I think the other guy goes by AEW, so Alpha Echo Whiskey. Both of those guys are real life Hornet drivers. That’s what they did for a living for the U.S. Navy. They’ve been creating videos for the benefit of those of us who utilize DCS World so that we would actually learn how to do it right. I found it absolutely illuminating. I’m riveted to every single episode, because I want to get this right.
Even though there’s no pop quiz at the end of the day, I still want to make sure if I’m doing it, like Maverick, I’m going to do it like Maverick.
Dan Caston: Yeah, exactly. That’s what I was wondering, where do you find this information, especially on military because you’re not going to go to your average flight trainer and say, “Hey, can you teach me how to fly a military jet?” They’re going to hop into a Cessna 172 and say, “This is what we got.”
Drew Bolton: Yeah, pretty much. Pretty much. One of my dreams …
Dan Caston: That’s kind of cool.
Drew Bolton: … is to actually fly an L39 Albatros, which is a check made aircraft. It used to be the Russian trainer. I don’t believe it is now, but there was a point in time were everyone in the Soviet Union who were training to be pilots in the middle of the Cold War, that was what they used. I found especially in VR, because it’s available for DCS as well as P3D, they don’t have it yet for X-Plane, it is quite frankly one of the most realistic experiences that I’ve had. It’s got all the quirks of the real aircraft as verified by a couple of guys that I know that actually fly this thing in real life. Whenever it comes to stuff like that, I rely on some of the people that I know to learn more about the aircraft, and then I try to put into practice everything that they’ve taught me.
I still want to fly one in real life though, so I’m trying to get one of my buddies to at least bring their aircraft here to Pennsylvania so that I can fly it.
Dan Caston: Yeah, that’d be a great experience, that’s for sure. What would be your number one tip for anyone that’s looking to get into flight training or VR flight for that matter?
Drew Bolton: For VR in particular, do the tutorial, make sure you set everything up right. It might seem like it’s a pain in the butt initially. It might take you, I don’t know, half hour, anywhere up to two hours. In my case, I had my son helping me to set it up so it actually went a little bit quicker. It probably would have taken me six hours to get the stupid thing set up, but as long as you run through the tutorials and make sure that everything works fine with your system, that’s the most important thing. Now when it comes to the actual VR siming, especially when you’re dealing with aircraft that you might not have ever experienced before in VR, read the manual. It’s as simple as that.
If you’re not the kind of person who likes to do a lot of reading, guess what, YouTube exists for a reason. There are a number of us who have done tutorials on just about any other kind of plane. One of the things that I like to do, especially with DCS, is sometimes I’ll do startup tutorials. With X-Plane, I almost always start my videos with a full cold and dark startup. People have told me that it really helps them. I actually ran into a guy at the convention a couple of years ago who said that he has bookmarked a lot of the helicopter videos that I have done in X-Plane because of the fact that I always go through the startup procedure, so he knows what to do now. Basically he’s taught himself through me.
I just pay it forward that way. Yeah, definitely read the manual, definitely make sure your equipment is set up properly and above all else, just have fun. You don’t have to take it seriously. The FAA is not going to go come knocking on your door if you bring your Cessna or your helicopter or your fighter jet down in flames. Just have fun with it. That’s the most important part. If it wasn’t fun, I really would not do it.
Dan Caston: Yeah, totally. I remember one of your videos there recently where you’re flying through I think it was Chicago or somewhere. You were flying through the town, between buildings. It looked like a lot of fun.
Drew Bolton: Yeah, that’s one of my typical shenanigans type things that I’ve got to throw in there because I really don’t want people to think that I take this thing as seriously. There’s a time to be serious and there’s a time not to be. If I’m doing a startup tutorial, of course I’m going to teach you what to do. If I’m just showing off scenery or whatnot, then I’ll get into what I call tour guide mode. Then there’s just things where, with the case of the video you’re talking about, Aerofly FS2, I basically wanted to show off my performance that this thing is giving me. Yeah, I did something that would be highly illegal if you try to do it in real life. I’m weaving through the skyscrapers in the Chicago skyline. Don’t recommend you try it at home, but hey, it’s a simulator, you can get away with it.
Dan Caston: Exactly. It’s cool. I think you’ve given us a ton of information to work with. Where can people find you or where can people watch your videos and all that? Do you have the address on hand?
Drew Bolton: Everything I do is under the name Bel Geode, which is spelled B-E-L, G-E-O-D-E. It’s actually two words. It’s supposed to be a first name and a last name. It came about as a stage name back when I was a musician in the late 90s/early 2000s. It just kind of stuck as my internet net. Pretty much everything I do is under Bel Geode, whether it be two words or one together. In the case of YouTube, it’s always one word together, B-E-L-G-E-O-D-E and you can find me there. You can find me on Twitter. You can find me on Facebook, Google Plus. It’s all going to be the same thing. It’s all under Bel Geode.
Facebook of course I have my own personal account where you’ll find me as Drew, but nine times out of ten, if it’s something related to the actual videos that I’m doing, you can just check out Bel Geode 2015 on Facebook and that’s the best way to find me. I’m always on it, unless I’m asleep.
Dan Caston: Sounds good. Last question here, just because I’m curious. Your hat has become, it’s on like every photo of you, you have this hat on. I was curious how that came about? What’s the story behind that?
Drew Bolton: Believe it or not, that hat was a gift. When I first decided that I wanted to do Twitch and YouTube, which I haven’t done Twitch for a while now, I was playing a game called Guild Wars 2, and I was playing with a really good friend of mine at the time, Amy. When we created our characters, I decided my character was always going to run around in purple. That was his thing. He always had to have a long purple coat, a fancy coat no less, and of course a fedora, which just happened to have a little green feather in it. Amy thought it would be absolutely hilarious if she just out of the blue ordered a full purple suit and hat to match and had it FedEx to my house.
Bear in mind that time, she had no clue what my suit size was. She just guessed and got it right, by the way.
Dan Caston: Nice.
Drew Bolton: I wake up this one morning and I’ve got FedEx knocking at my door. I’m like, “What is going on here?” I open up this package and there’s this suit and this hat. It just kind of stuck since then. It’s been the official Bel Geode suit.
Dan Caston: That’s funny.
Drew Bolton: The hat eventually just became a logo for all of my YouTube videos and I was like, “Well you know what, might as well run with it.”
Dan Caston: Yeah, it’s like your trademark.
Drew Bolton: Yeah, basically.
Dan Caston: That’s funny.
Drew Bolton: I’ve actually had people ask me all the time where to get the hat and so on and so forth. I actually told people where Amy had initially gotten it, but I haven’t seen anybody else wear it. As far as I’m concerned, it’s still my trademark.
Dan Caston: For sure. That’s awesome. Cool. Thanks for being on our podcast.
Drew Bolton: It’s my pleasure. Thank you for having me.
Dan Caston: All right, well there you have it. An interview with the famous Bel Geode. I’ll leave links to Bel’s Twitter, Google Plus, Facebook and YouTube accounts in the show notes as well as any links mentioned in the podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, please hit the subscribe button to ensure that you don’t miss any of the future episodes. Also, if you’re interested in being interviewed on our podcast, please check out our interview page at Vrflightworld.com/interview. That’s Vrflightworld.com/interview. To see the show notes and links for this episode, either check out the iTunes subscription or go to Vrflightworld.com/seven. That’s Vrflightworld.com/seven. Thanks again for listening, and I hope you guys have a great day.
John Melley: Thanks for listening to the VR Flight World Podcast, online at Vrflightworld.com.
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