Comments on: Third Party Cars Should Really Be Instanced

By: MarkV

MarkV — Fri, 26 Feb 2016 23:00:16 +0000

I would really like to see are my custom objects instance-friendly but I just can´t figure out how to “Load the airport in X-Plane and in DRE set the art control “terrain/kill_clusters” to 1.”
Could someone please come up with step by step instructions how to archieve this?

Thanks,

MarkV

By: Ben Supnik

Ben Supnik — Tue, 23 Feb 2016 19:53:37 +0000

In reply to Gal Cohen.

Facades are never instanced. They can’t be. There are two broad categories of 3-d stuff: OBJects and “everything else.” Everything else includes terrain, POLs, forests, facades, and roads. The “Everything else” bucket is never instanced because it is never repeated; no two facades are identical.

Only some of the OBJs can be instanced.

But…If you have a type-2 facade, it can have attached objects and those can be instanced – same with roads; the attached objects can be instanced even if the underlying entity is not.

By: Gal Cohen

Gal Cohen — Sun, 21 Feb 2016 18:53:25 +0000

Thanks for this informative post!

Are facades supposed to be instance-friendly?
or is it a specific thing for OBJs?

I tried “terrain/kill_clusters” and it showed me a few OBJs that aren’t instanced in a scenery Im creating a thing that I will change of course , however because it covers a big area at some places I imported OSM data and use facades for them in Xplane.

By: Ben Supnik

Ben Supnik — Sat, 20 Feb 2016 19:23:30 +0000

In reply to Kirill.

Hi Kirill,

Please: no more off topic posts requesting seasons. I am aware that you really, really, really want seasons because you have posted this to the blog many times.

Please do not post about seasons again on any post that is NOT about seasons in the original topic; such blog comments by you will be deleted from now on.

By: Kirill

Kirill — Sat, 20 Feb 2016 18:13:45 +0000

Hi Ben I have a question what PC you modify X-Plane 10?
The release of version 10.50 will not be resource-intensive textures such as for example water quality, which in other flight simulators regardless of the level of quality (very high) does not affect fps in flight simulator and X-Plane at this moment they are very resource-intensive, is it not possible to optimize the shaders to the program worked smoothly. Again, very strange decision not to develop the textures of the seasons depending on the climatic conditions of the landscape,while even in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004 was attended by snow and drifts. while FS2004 was released in 2003. I think many simmery would have been happy to this innovation. Thank you

By: Ben Supnik

Ben Supnik — Fri, 19 Feb 2016 14:26:11 +0000

In reply to Pablo.

It’s a design limit of the library that regions are 1×1 – it’s a feature meant to stylize an entire area (e.g. an entire continent), not to modify a single airport. We may someday be able to improve this, but it’s not going to happen any time soon.

Higher priority to me is to remove a limitation: the library doesn’t substitute airport furniture from apt.dat. This is just how the original library was coded, but it would be better if we could make at least some of this stuff regional.

By: Pablo

Pablo — Fri, 19 Feb 2016 13:09:40 +0000

Hi Ben, instance objects are very great, but i personaly have a little problem i can t define a library definitions for instanced objects for a small area.
The only way to make this is defining an area from 1×1 tile and include all arround tile so the area extend to 4 tiles and this is huge area.

How is recomendable define library for small area ? Or you looking in futere for made this more acesible?
Thank you!

By: Ben Supnik

Ben Supnik — Thu, 18 Feb 2016 20:54:28 +0000

In reply to myb. I'm not sure how soon the release will come -you can try the branch in github now. There will probably be an AGP exporter at some point but it's not our first priority.

By: Ben Supnik

Ben Supnik — Thu, 18 Feb 2016 20:53:58 +0000

In reply to jarchCA.

Vulkan is necessary (but not sufficient) to have totally smooth rendering, which is a long term goal of ours.

When I first started using X-Plane (version 6) X-Plane would actually pause for a second or two while scenery paged. So it was never a design goal at the time to have ‘no stutter’ flight. So we’re in a situation now where we have been trying to make everything as efficient as possible, but there can still be stutters.

What we’ve started to do lately is write code that -never- stutters, e.g. all expensive operations are asynchronous on another thread. But once we work through all of our systems, we’ll also need to be on a driver that makes good guarantees about what is fast and what is slow, which Vulkan does and OpenGL (and DX11 and earlier) do not.

By: jarchCA

jarchCA — Thu, 18 Feb 2016 19:45:22 +0000

The Vulkan API appears to be very interesting; in my experience, X-Plane with the PRO tools is quite adequate for casual simulation (i.e., home simulation or cases where folks don’t care about steady update rates). But for cases where 60-Hz steady-state frame rate is really important, X-Plane falls short, largely due to massive frame rate stutters (probably during scenery paging) even on high end GPUs (Kepler, Maxwell). If X-Plane solved this (with a new Vulkan API implementation or other), it would go a long way in our organization to being take more seriously as a real-time 3D simulation solution where we need at least 60 Hz steady state update rates (or even higher for some studies we are doing).