Happy Halloween!!

Some friends were talking about how they were living in Sweden during Halloween a few years ago and they had trick-or-treaters show up on their doorstep on November 3rd.  Confused, they asked around to find out what was happening.  Apparently the response was, "We're new to this whole Halloween thing, so we just do it on the nearest weekend day."  Which makes a lot of sense to me.  After all, tomorrow I'm going to be worthless at work because I will have spent the whole night trick-or-treating and working myself into a monster sugar-coma.

Which brings me to a cool trick and treat.  For those of you who think that 12 frames is just way too many to render in a single second, I have a handy little trick for Flight Simulator 2004 that is sure to bring that number down into the low single digits (or maybe even register as seconds per frame, Yay!).  But man does it allow you to do cool looking effects like forest fires that rage for miles.  Once again, I make no performance promises and this is really to be used at your own risk, but here goes.  Create a text file called effects.cfg and put it in your effects directory.  In that text file, put the following information:

[Sprite Limit]
Medium=500
High=9999999999
Low=100

Now feel free to create any old effect with any amount of sprites and watch it quickly bring your machine to its knees. (NOTE: This particular config will only change your sprite count if your effects settings are on high.)  Happy Halloween indeed!