Cultivation Stutters and Shimmering Buildings

  • I have noticed in my recent home made Germany cultivation two problems not encountered previously.

    One is difficultly in FS 2 loading the cultivation sometimes it doesn't appear at all for the entire area of photo scenery made. When it does appear the sim stutters and the FPS is around 20 then after more stuttering, freezing of the picture for a few seconds whilst the sound of the aircraft engine still runs OK eventually it seems to clear and the FPS increase to the 120 locked level.

    The second problem is that some of the buildings cause shimmering which deters from the reality of having buildings to look down on.

    Going back to my home made UK, Ireland, Finland and Malta photo scenery with cultivation it loads and looks perfectly fine with no stuttering, locking up or FPS problems.

    All scenery has been made with AeroScenery at level 9, zoom level 16, 2.389 M/Pix using Bing satellite images.

    The only changes made to my computer is that ScenProc has the latest updates used for the cultivation area of Germany.

    I have updated to the latest Nvidia driver for my GTX 960 4 GB memory GPU with no effect.

    My PC has 16 GB of RAM and uses a 2 core Intel processor at 3.2 GHz and the OS is Wn 7 64 bit.

    Anyone else had similar problems?

    Kindest Regards,

    Michael.

    Best wishes, Michael :)

  • There are many reasons for this happening. The shimmering is caused by having too many cultivated buildings in one small area, and also can be caused by poor performance. Shimmering along with floating houses are both related to this. Your other problem is also related to poor performance. You have a slower GPU to begin with (GTX 960) so you should work more on optimizing your scenery and cultivation a bit better, and also try lowering your graphics settings.

    IPACS Development Team Member

    I'm just a cook, I don't own the restaurant.
    On behalf of Torsten, Marc, and the rest of the IPACS team, we would all like to thank you for your continued support.

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    Jeff

  • Thank you very much Jeff for your rapid response. Yes I realized I have my graphics set at ULTRA I must lower them and re test.

    Retested with the flight sim se to VSNC (60 FPS) and the graphics quality to Mid and the stutters have disappeared.

    Which Nvidia GPU would you recommend for highest performance please?

    Thanks again.

    Kindest Regards,

    Michael.

    PS Installed older driver for the GTX 960 and everything working OK. So much for keeping drivers up to date.

    Best wishes, Michael :)

    Edited 3 times, last by IZ0JUB (January 23, 2019 at 11:59 AM).

  • Hi, large cultivation surface creates freeze. More small cultivation surfaces are better but needs more works.

    The shimmering is caused by having same buildings to the frontier between 2 cultivation .toc, when you create cultivation with osm without change coordinate in open street map. You have to shift the coordinate a little.

  • That's a very interesting answer "coromon" and thank you. I looked at the TOC files in my UK Cultivation and the largest are around 1.6 to 2.2 GB.

    The Germany Cultivation has much larger TOC files, because the OSM Data is very good, and the largest are 2.8, 3.6 and 4 GB.

    Update.

    I downloaded an older driver for my GPU and this seems to have fixed the freeze and cultivation loading problems.

    RTX 2080 Ti ?

    Thank you.

    I don't think I will be rushing out just yet to part with over 1000 Euros on a new GPU.

    Best wishes, Michael :)

    Edited 2 times, last by IZ0JUB (January 23, 2019 at 12:00 PM).

  • (...)I looked at the TOC files (...) and the largest are around 1.6 to 2.2 GB.

    The Germany Cultivation has much larger TOC files (...) and the largest are 2.8, 3.6 and 4 GB.

    Ouch ! This cannot work ! Whenever AFS2 has to load such giant files inflight you’ll get a freeze.

    My advice for cultivation consists of cutting down the area to cover into a set of tiles AFS2 can load on the fly with minimal stutter.

    1 tile = 1 toc file and 1 tsc file to call it.

    Therefore toc tiles must be as small as possible to prevent large file loading in a single block. An optimum has however to be found otherwise when the file becomes too small, access time might become predominant.

    As previously said, cultivation tiles must be ideally loaded after highest resolution of the mesh has been loaded, for autoheight to match. Otherwise you'll get floating houses.

    The highest compiled Level of the scenery mesh also dictates thus the max tile size you should use for cultivation.

    You have a convenient Splitgrid step in ScenProc to automatically cut down your cultivation into toc tiles named after tile corners coordinates.

    Currently I setup Splitgrid with 0.1 x 0.1 deg tile size.

    I systematically use then IPACS SDK’s object converter to compile the text format toc files into a much tighter binary format.

    Eventually I use a selfmade script to automatically generate a tsc file for each toc tile.

    Cheers

    Antoine

    Config : i7 6900K - 20MB currently set at 3.20GHz, Cooling Noctua NH-U14S, Motherboard ASUS Rampage V Extreme U3.1, RAM HyperX Savage Black Edition 16GB DDR4 3000 MHz, Graphic Card Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1080 8GB, Power supply Corsair RM Series 850W, Windows 10 64 bit.

    Edited 3 times, last by Trespassers (January 23, 2019 at 1:04 PM).

  • Hi TomB,


    I changed from this..........

    to this

    Kindest regards, Michael.

    Best wishes, Michael :)

    Edited 2 times, last by IZ0JUB (January 26, 2019 at 9:47 AM).

  • Thanks, but it does not really explain why there is no stuttering anymore. One is a single cultivation tsc for the grenoble region and the other seems to be an airport tsc with a malta.toc reference.

    Regards,

    Thomas

    i7-14700KF @ 5.6 GHz, Geforce RTX 4090, 32MB RAM, 1TB SSD M.2, 1TB SSD M.2, 2TB SSD M.2, 32" Monitor 4K, Pimax Crystal

  • Well, I think I know why you don’t see the stuttering anymore: you set a very high size value for a Malta cultivation.

    I’d then assume you takeoff from Malta and fly around to check your cultivation, aren’t you?

    With your setting, the Malta cultivation is loaded at flight start and remains as long as you don’t fly outside the load range, which you set very high.

    So, no visible stutter because AFS2 doesn’t need to load anything.

    But if you fly from abroad, say from Sicilly, then suddenly you’ll have a stutter when AFS2 has to load your single TOC file on the fly.

    Malta cultivation is probably not very dense (little vegetation, moderate buildings density) so as the case may be the stutter is not so big in that very case.

    But it’s really not what you should do for cultivation. If you do yhe same for instance in Germany with your GB+ toc file you will encounter strong stutters when AFS2 loads your gigantic TOC files.

    My 2 cents

    Antoine

    Config : i7 6900K - 20MB currently set at 3.20GHz, Cooling Noctua NH-U14S, Motherboard ASUS Rampage V Extreme U3.1, RAM HyperX Savage Black Edition 16GB DDR4 3000 MHz, Graphic Card Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1080 8GB, Power supply Corsair RM Series 850W, Windows 10 64 bit.

  • Sorry chaps I have edited both files to the correct place Berlin in Germany.

    The OSM Data for Germany is extremely good and very dense in most areas compared to my UK and Ireland scenery which is not as good.

    Kindest regards to all, Michael.

    Best wishes, Michael :)

    Edited once, last by IZ0JUB (January 26, 2019 at 9:57 AM).

  • The OSM Data for Malta and Gozzo is very poor. I have cultivation for both islands but not too happy about it as its very limited with only a small amount of buildings showing up.

    However I am more than happy to upload it onto flight-sim.org

    Looking forward to our trip to both islands later this year.

    Kindest regards, Michael.

    Best wishes, Michael :)

    Edited 2 times, last by IZ0JUB (February 18, 2019 at 12:15 PM).