OK Thanks. I am in the middle of doing a smaller area in Florida right now but, I will try the New Orleans. Do you think the .0001 vs .0025 may be a factor in the long crunch time?
Yes, increased tree density does increase processing time, but in my testing only from 1 minute to 3 minutes, for a city and suburban area with some forested areas around. But it will be longer for areas with more plants areas. Ver 5 of the template runs a little quicker but pulls in more data than before, so it is swings and roundabouts for processing time.
It may have something to do with your computer specs perhaps. When you try New Orleans, compare it with my results which was a total running time of 580 seconds and of that 471 seconds was for plants. The New Orleans area seems to have a lot of wetland areas which are a new inclusion in the latest template, and I notice scenProc spends some time on these areas for New Orleans, creating 650,000 wetland plants. Areas designated as wetlands in my neck of the woods are full of Mangrove forests, so I use a high density here. Wetlands in different parts of the world may require a lesser density. As I used the shrub tree type, they are only visible at low altitudes, so you could reduce the density for wetlands without much impact. Wetland areas may be the same with Florida.
I'll experiment with plant densities and see if I can find a sweet spot for density vs processing time, and include that in a later release. At present the values are set to give the best visual effect.
Since we are downloading your newest versions, if we add documentation to a given version, it will have to be added again
Thanks for your comments Dave. Unfortunately any end user added detail will always be lost and replaced with mine after you download a new template. Not sure I could get around that with my limited knowledge. My comments are limited to areas I have learned and tested. Haven't had much to do with lights yet so no comments and they seem to work pretty well without me changing them.
I usually test my script in Australia (City, suburban & rural), UK (near Heathrow) and US (New Orleans & Hawaii) but I may be missing features that you have found and tested. Perhaps you might like to share the comments and updates you are adding in each time, and I'll see if they could be included in a future release. No promises though as too much detail can be counter productive.
I had also thought of offering users varying levels of detail so they could either pick high detail (longer processing time) or lower detail (quicker processing time). Combined with my plans for temperate and tropical plants, they then just need to uncomment the lines with the level of detail and zone they require before running scenProc. Similar to what I have done for European houses in the current script.
I would encourage anyone to share scripts of there own (or just individual lines of code) as mine are not the definitive answer to cultivation, just a reflection of what I have managed to learn and test so far. There are forum members with far greater knowledge and skills than mine.