Comments on: Musings on Framerate (Just a Test)

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 06:14:00 +0000

this comes a bit late I think, but anyway… about number of objects. How about having a parameter which let you configure the maximum about of displayed objects per tile? Then on sparse areas it could load every available object but when flying on more tense areas it starts reducing the percentage thus avoiding fog?

By: Benjamin Supnik

Benjamin Supnik — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 06:12:00 +0000

I'm not sure what you mean by "runtime" - I would define that as anything while the sim is running, of which we have two settings.

- Object density is run-time but requires a scenery reload (it doesn't reset your flight) so it's moderately inconvenient to change, but still accessible. The reason for the reload: we actually delete the filtered objects from memory with this setting...this is important because it cuts down the RAM footprint for users who aren't going to use the detail anyway.

- World LOD cuts down far away objects and is completely dynamic.

Perhaps you mean automatic or dynamic? There's definitely no need to restart the sim for these settings to take effect. (Restarts were necessary in the past.)

Fine grained settings: email Austin and tell him you want more granularity. :-)

By: Jilles

Jilles — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 03:41:00 +0000

A nice improvement would be to make the object density at least run-time configurable. Right now if I "enter the fog" my only option is to reconfigure x-plane and restart it (takes a few minutes). In practice this means that most of the time, I'm looking at scenery of less quality than my hardware is capable of because of a few areas that bring it to its knees. I have to keep it configured conservatively because of a handful of problematic areas.

A second improvement would be to make the settings a bit more fine-grained. The visual difference between default and tons is huge and so is the performance gap. Having some intermediate settings would be helpful.