X-Plane 10.20 beta 9 is out and (hopefully) fixes missing library paths. Alex and I spent a good chunk of yesterday trying to clean up the tools that generate the autogen library, but it is a very complicated problem, as indicated by the 4786 distinct entries in the library.
Beta 8 and 9 introduce a change in how the rendering settings work; my suspicion is that users seeing a framerate drop in the new betas are seeing the effects of the intermediate rendering settings acting differently; the minimum and maximum for the settings should produce nearly identical results.
I’m not going to try to explain how the settings used to work – the actual results were extremely convoluted due to quirks in the engine. This change is one of several we want to make to both improve how the settings work (from a usability standpoint) and improve the look of the autogen at lower settings.
- The “objects” popup controls the amount of autogen and 3-d stuff in general. Besides adding more autogen, it adds more detail to the autogen as it appears and can even add more detail to custom scenery. (This behavior isn’t new.) In particular, if you use an a complex library element like an “AGP” scene (e.g. the control tower or FAA building) the amount of detail of that mini-scene will increase with the objects setting. The goal here is to have the objects slider control the amount of 3-d.
- The “forests” popup now strictly controls the density of all vegetation in the sim. This includes both the natural forests (.for files for DSF nerds) and the vegetation that is part of the autogen (e.g. the trees that Alex puts down on the lawns of houses). Lower forest settings tend to prioritize the rural forests over autogen trees to save framerate.
- The distance to which 3-d is drawn is controlled by “world detail distance” – this is how far anything 3-d is drawn out to. Finally with this change, this affects the forests as well as the autogen and the roads – everything runs to the same distance.
A few tuning tips:
- If you are running 32-bits, turn “world detail distance” down by at least one notch; having a shorter distance for 3-d will allow the sim to save some memory.
- If you run with full autogen, moderate forests, and highest world detail distance, you may now need to turn forests up and world detail distance down to create the equivalent of what you used to see. In older betas, the forest setting modified world detail distance in some very strange ways.
Our eventual goal is to keep the autogen base footprints even when the object count is very low; the footprints of the autogen contain views of the building tops, allowing for the equivalent of ‘orthophotos only’ for users with very low rendering capabilities. This will help avoid the ‘sea of green’ effect on lower settings. (The behavior now, where whole city blocks disappear) will eventually go away, to be replaced by the “footprint” with roofs of the city block when 3-d is turned down.
These pictures illustrate the effect of world detail distance. Note that the ground images attached to the buildings are still present even as the buildings begin to disappear with lower settings. The last picture shows the autogen with most 3-d buildings stripped away to reveal the ground tiles underneath.
As we keep working on the autogen system we’ll get more and better ground textures in place, more and better ground tiles on the autogen, and yet more buildings; the result should be a reasonably seamless urban experience at a range of rendering settings.
Some cities are “over-green” in their underlying data in the DSF – this happens when the source land class is difficult to ‘fit’ into the grid system efficiently. (Typically a little bit of vegetation or water area affects zoning and ‘greenifies’ a large area.) We will have to address this problem in DSF tile recuts. (In other words, zoning errors are a failure of accuracy compared to the source data, to be recut; adding more autogen improves plausibility by providing a wider variety of “stuff”.)
Could you explain how “airport detail” fits into the “eventual goal”. I found and find it confusing that “objects” controls the amount of airport 3D-stuff as well…
Thanks
Flo
PS: I think picture order is messed up. The last pic shows full autogen at least in my browser.
We’re not sure yet. Airport detail currently only controls apt.dat generated stuff. We may have to replace it with a different type of setting all-together, as the “airport detail” label often confounds users.
Picture order fixed, thanks!
So what are the chances for a seperate road detail slider? The street signs add a lot to the immersion, but they unfortunately pop up very late on the objects slider. Since roads are the most relevant VFR object and also, as mentioned in an earlier post, the star of XP10, they reall deserve their own slider. Simplicity goes a long way, but maybe not all of it if we’re talking about a serious – the serious – world simulator.
The chances are good, but it may not do what you want. We do want to change the road setting from “how many roads” to “how detailed roads” because the current road tech, with only partial roads, makes really silly looking interchanges. (For example, a highway’s overpass might actually just be a lot of ‘ramp’ type roads, resulting in a gap in the highway at low settings.)
But we may not get the level of granularity you want. At some point we need to keep the amount of controls lower.
Funny, I even forgot there is a road slider…. because I never changed it from “a lot” which seems to be the perfect setting. But thank you for considering changes here.
What I am trying to say is, the actual amount of autgen buildings is a rather aesthetical issue. Roads however are critical to VFR, and make XP10 look good even with very few autogen stuff. It’s just unool that less buildings also means less road details.
Right – this sort of goes to our idea that even if you are at low road detail, all roads should be present – the alternative is neither plausible nor particularly good for VFR. (You can say “highways only” but in practice the road types from OSM are varied enough and change enough that you can’t easily mark “navigation-critical”.)
Hi Ben,
Good work on the beta; textures are getting a lot better. I also seem to be getting better frame-rates.
I still have the very first beta of X-Plane ten (2011, I think), and every so often I fire it up to compare the latest with the very first version. You’ve done a great job; massive performance differences between them.
Just a quick question; does the world distance level affect tree draw distance? Only asking because even on medium draw they can be seen far off, unlike buildings which ‘pop’ into view far sooner.
Cheers
Dom
Draw distance does affect trees. But the base distances are different, and the draw distance is a scaling factor, more or less.
Is there any chance we can downgrade back to 10.20b7? The drop in frame rate is terrible no matter what combination I set it to.
Also, has the issue with the really dim runway lights been looked into yet? I really love how they use to look in XP9. They stood out really well, even during the day and from a long distance. In XP10 how do you turn runway lights on during the day? I know this is possible in XP9 because I’ve seen landing videos during the daytime and the runway lights are very noticeable.
b7: no. If you can’t get perf back by tuning settings, please file a bug and be sure to include the settings you are using and the resulting fps in some kind of controlled situation.
I’m not going to get into runway lights now – it requires a longer blog post, but what you saw in x-plane 9 is completely unrelated to anything you will ever see in a real airplane.
Ben
I know this is off-topic, but Google Chrome is blocking x-plane.org as an malware site!
Are the techies onto it?
Rich
Laminar Research is unaffiliated with x-plane.org.
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Fred: besides being off topic, this blog is _not_ going to become a referendum on any of the many third party x-plane community pages. We are not starting posts on them, and I am going to apply the off-topic commenting policy liberally to avoid this blog turning into a factionalized he-said-she-said about other people’s forums.
There are plenty of other places to discuss this, but _not here_.
Noticed this, too, early this morning. The org administrator is aware of it and working on the issue. It is possible the org forum was serving an ad banner that was hijacked at the ad server to distribute malware.
I keep reading the word “slider” which implies more increments of control than the drop-down selection boxes I see on the Rendering Options dialog.
Am I missing something here, or is “slider” just the chosen word for this topic.
Slider is my poorly chosen word – in fact the current UI is using drop-downs.
Thanks a lot for the explanation of the autogen system! It helps a lot!
I already noticed that since some time the ground textures of buildings are drawn in low settings. This is a good idea to keep the urban look while saving frames — like it very much!