Posts by KenR297

I conducted an experiment with ScenProc today that may be of some interest to some of you.

It occurred to me that some of the issues being reported concerning FPS reduction and occasional stutters could possibly be connected with the extra load cultivation is putting on the system, even though it is not supposed to hurt performance that much. Personally, I've been on the fence with regards to adding thousands of residential houses to the scenery, though I do prefer having POI's, bridges, industrial buildings, full airport scenery, etc. Today, in my home area, I eliminated all residential buildings (houses), and kept industrial buildings as well as whatever trees would be cultivated with ScenProc based on my OSM data. My theory was that houses show up well with a 3D look anyway when geoconverted at 1m resolution when flying, with the benefit of different shapes and roof colors done naturally at high resolution, and when making approaches or taking off enough industrial buildings would be visible to provide that populated feeling that enhances the sensation of flying and provides that extra bit of realism.

I couldn't be more pleased with how this turned out; residential houses still look good at 1m res and there are hundreds of industrial buildings everywhere in my scenery providing that 3d look that enhances the photoreal scenery. In addition, I also cultivated lights but cut out several sections of road lighting (tertiary, residential, and living street) and still maintained a pleasing atmosphere of night lighting.

Performance impact? My cultivated area is approx. 25 x 30 miles and with all data cultivated my FPS in certain areas was dropping down into the 70's in the cockpit view vs. a locked 120 without cultivation at all. With today's experiment? Steady 160's in cockpit view and 200-250 in outside views with unlimited frames selected. Now, with the FPS counter turned off you probably would not even notice what your frame rate is even with full cultivation, depending on your area and it's size, so I'm not sure what the real relevance of this is for most users, but there are some who are experiencing some performance issues that IPACS is currently trying to solve in regards to the latest update. I did this mostly for my own benefit to see what the result would be and whether or not I would be pleased with it, and I can say most definitely I like the result visually and performance wise was pretty surprised to see the resulting impact on FPS.

Here are a few screenshots to show the visual impact:

I don't promise this adjustment to your cultivation file(s) is for everyone; I would guess most users would prefer to have residential houses as well as all the available lighting in your own scenery areas. But if you've been wondering if you could remove some of the buildings like I did or reduce the lighting somewhat and what the result would be, well here you go.

Got that, just wasn't sure which variable in the code was the number of floors.

Thanks!

Quote from Rodeo

Yes,

an interesting method, many thanks for your detailed description.

I can provide another method, but only usable for single skyscrapers you want to make dominant in your scenery.

1.Go to Google Maps and locate the coordinate of the building.

2. Open the TOC file with notepad++

3. Search for the first coordinate, I start with 5 decimal places and reduce it to 4 when I don't have hits.

Notepad++ offers a special feature: Find all in current document, so you get a list of hits.

Now compare the second coordinate to find your building. Click in the list onto it and notepad zooms to the selected TOC entry.

Finally you enter a new level value for this building.

Same for me, thoughts? Improvements? Other methods?

Regards

Rodeo

Rodeo which value do you change to increase the height of a building in the toc file?

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Jeff, what about your fps in the cockpit? What do you get there? As you know I already reported I was seeing a decrease in frames in the 172 in the cockpit in high density areas. Also, is your config set for unlimited frames, 240 or 120? To do a comparison between our machines we should all use the same config settings.

Jeff, while I always appreciate every update that comes our way I must say that I am experiencing a decrease in performance of about 15 fps or so in cockpit view in some areas depending on the view. I've changed nothing in my settings and tested several aircraft, though my plane of preference is the C172.

I have version 2.0.7.3 and 20171123; re-booted my system and tested Chicago, NY and my home area with cultivation. Also have latest drivers of course.

I am confused; though I don't normally turn the FPS counter on as I don't chase framerates, I have checked FPS from time to time in the newest scenery areas with cultivation just to check performance. I won't list a bunch of numbers but I am certain that my FPS has gone down, not up with this update, and that has surprised me.

Just wanted to advise you of what I'm seeing, and get your thoughts or ideas on this. Getting ready for Thanksgiving festivities, but will check this out later.

BTW, Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Quote from Jetjockey10

Yes, any help with adding business districts to the scenery will be a big improvement to the flat towns and cities. Water towers, shopping centers, schools, churches, bridges, etc.

Regards,

Ray

Agree...

Pleased to report I solved my issues and have created a new cultivation file for the area I was working on. I don't know how many trees are there, in my run through late last night I had trees set at minimum in my AFS2 settings. I will re- check that today. I most definitely want to see trees in my city area, if my OSM data does not have many forest areas we need a way to produce trees without doing individual trees, that will just be too tedious.

I know cultivation improvements will be coming; I would like to suggest that one of the first additions be tall buildings for city skyscrapers if that is doable.

Thanks again for the tutorial Rodeo plus the encouragement, and Ed as well for your support!

I think I am going to stick with just adding the occasional hires scenery area with FSET and a flashing light on a tower at the simple airports I have added for now. Last night I was able to finally get a toc file created by scenproc but when I opened AFS2, the program crashed on me for the first time ever. Don't know the actual cause, it could have been yesterday's update would not work with my video drivers. I had to do an update of my drivers, plus remove the newly added toc file to fix the problem.

I know improvements are on the way to the scenery development tools currently available, and it is fun working with such tools, but AFS2 is going to need a full blown simple to use airport and scenery design program for the mainstream user in order for most users to enjoy dabbling in scenery creation. Whether this program comes from IPACS (unlikely anytime soon) or a third party, I hope such a program will become a reality at some point. It will be sorely needed in the future and will greatly enhance the popularity of AFS2.

Thanks Ed, much appreciated.

Ed, can you post a sample kml file I can modify to use with my testing?

Thanks

Well, I have watched the tutorial video several times but have yet to be successful in creating a toc file for the scenery area I attempted cultivation with. I get error messages in scenproc saying the file doesn't exist but cannot find the mistake. So, question: does scenproc have to see an exclusion file to work even if one doesn't want one, or do you need to comment out those lines? I'm going to work on this some more later today.

Ok, thanks for the explanation of how the braking is set up in AFS2. I'll look for an adjustment of some kind in the future.

Thanks...

I'm thinking the brakes on the C172 need to be adjusted and made a little less powerful; at slower speeds nearing taxiways or on the ramp nearing parking spots I try to just tap the brakes and if I was in the plane for real severe whiplash would probably occur for anyone in the aircraft.

If one could point out the brake setting location in the aircraft file I would be more than happy to tinker with the parameter and adjust it to my personal liking... if that is an option of course.

Thanks...

Wrigley Field should be in the scenery; perhaps ORBX will correct this oversight soon.

Quote from Spit40

I didn't find it easily, but when I searched steam for "colorado" I found it that way. Downloading...

Yeah, that's how I got it. Thanks for the tip... glad to have it and begin exploring. Thanks IPAC!

Must be a "rolling" release; I'm not seeing it yet...

Glad that is working for you... I generated a new area yesterday and included 3 1m small areas within it's borders. I was careful to make sure the large area's borders would not be too close to the small 1m areas, and the result was good with no problems.

On another note, I found that although a 4m area allowed for a large coverage of scenery quickly, the result is just not pleasing enough to my eyes to continue with it. Any future areas I produce will be done in 2m res, with 1m enhancements.

Ed,

I have no other suggestions at this time. My only other thought on your situation is perhaps the second airport you added is too close to the northern border of your "big area".

Again, it appears that the issues we see with low res tiles seem to occur around the borders of scenery additions. Perhaps you could re-do your original "big area" and expand it to the north a bit so your new northern airport is not to close to the upper, or northern border.

Hope you get this sorted out!

Ed,

Not sure we are having the same issues. My first attempt at Geoconvert gave me a problem similar to yours and I had to start over when I could not fix it. I then created a 2m area approx. 140 x 75 miles; then placed a 20 x 20 1m city area just about in the center of that. No issues, worked fine. Yesterday I attempted to attach a new area to the northeast quadrant by closely aligning the borders, but experienced the problems I wrote about earlier. My experiment which I attempted and worked was to redo the new area but extend the bottom, or southern border of it, about 10 or 15 miles down into the original or first area. It is also 2m res, by the way, and this worked fine.

Hope this gives you a better idea of what worked for me, at least this time. Please update the thread if you find success with your project, and I hope you figure it out.

Ed,

Problem solved (I think ).

Solution: I took extra pains to be sure and overlap my new scenery area generously with the old, and reran FSET and Geoconvert. I'm not sure just how much of an overlap is necessary, but apparently I added more than enough as the scenery is being generated properly now with no low res default tiles showing through the scenery.

This has more than likely been emphasized by Jeff or Rodeo in the forums and I've missed it; hope this helps you and others who may be experiencing the same issue.