Increasing cultivation draw distance

1st Official Post

    A scenery area usually has several/many tsc files that reference the streetlight cultivation files. Within those tsc files is a SIZE parameter that defines the distance (in meters) when the cultivation files and other objects are loaded (dist = aircraft location - tsc file location/coordinates).

    The first hurdle is finding the problem tsc files - not all tsc files have a cultivation file reference at the bottom.

    Once you find a tsc file with cultivation reference that you want to edit, look for the SIZE parameter and double the current value, save the file, then restart FS2 and see if the streetlights have improved (no popping on). You can continue to increase the SIZE value but it will likely impact load times / stutters.

    When I created lighted radio towers for the South Florida scenery, I wanted them visible from great distances so I had to use a very large SIZE value. Often the SIZE parameter is defaulted to 5000 meters.

    Thanks for the tip ken, I'm using your script to make some streetlight scenery, great stuff.

    Increasing the area size helps but I think the problem lies within the engine itself and how it handles draw distance in general, the lights are part of the high-lod radius and that's about half of the total draw distance I think.

    Right now the only way to avoid the lights turning on in the distance is to either fly low or decrease the visibility and add some clouds to hide the issue.