I’m contacting you again because I noticed something strange, I’m experiencing a sudden loss of FPS for a second or two, let’s say, from 40 it drops to 19. I’ve asked in the Argentinian XPlane FB group and many other users are experiencing the same.

Any clues?

Regards!

Hi Ben, thanks for the prompt reply.
I was able to make the rotating beacon object “disappear” by creating a transparent texture for that particular object and deleting the light animations by opening the object in the text editor.
There was really no performance improvement, and I didn’t do the same process for the other objects, as this mode is not the correct way to solve the problem, as these objects are required by XP.
The amount of these objects in the ground is huge, I did not find the source of this bug.
Please kindly request that you load the city of Sao Paulo in Brazil at Congonhas Aerodromo (SBSP) and take a look around at night, you will notice several groups of these helipads, just look for the rotating headlights.
It has no custom scenario installed and no library, X-Plane is loading standardized, even in version 1.36 you can already see these helipads.
We also check in Rio de Janeiro and Brasilia, and the Helipads are all over the ground, in the middle of houses and streets.
We are waiting, thank you.
Cheers.

I don’t know why you think this would be a performance problem – there’s nothing expensive about drawing helipads. They can look silly if the real world helipad is integrated with the scenery and we simply draw one on the ground.

Right. At times when we have an opt-in behavior change and a new feature, you can’t get the new feature and keep the bug-for-bug compatibility. We’ve had authors TRY to do this by hacking the file writer version number in the .pln file. This is a _terrible_ idea! Since the .acf contains OTHER info written by the new sim, when x-plane tries to read an “old” file with secret new data in it, things may get weird – we never test that hack.

I don’t know if it will help – it depends on your usage case. But if making the window _smaller_ doesn’t make your FPS faster, a bigger GPU won’t help, because it’s not the bottleneck. We also do’nt use any of the crazy AI or ray tracing stuff on the 2080 so you’re paying a premium for some hw you wouldn’t be using.

Understood. So if we don’t re-save in Plane Maker, we can only get the functionality that was available to the older saved version in the X-Plane simulator itself, even if the simulator has progressed to a new version with new functionality. If we re-save, we may still need to opt in to the new features explicitly by adjusting the default behavior, otherwise we get only a default behavior, which may be no improvement at all. Makes sense, and keeps older aircraft basically functional in the sim. But for payware authors, it makes sense to take note of the new features and adapt.

Thanks again!

Thanks a lot in advance,

Guillermo.

Hi Steve,

When a new option appears in Plane-Maker that’s _not_ experimental only (e.g. some of the new controls of afterburners), if there is a value to that new setting that would have matched the OLD behavior, we just stuff that value in as a default. For example, with 11.35 and the bungee cord steering, having a max bungee degree offset of 0 disables the feature, so that’s what old aircraft get when they are re-saved.

Also, as a general rule, the file writer version should be pretty transparent to you – that is, saving in Plane-Maker has no effect unless the release notes say “if you resave in plane-maker, buggy behavior X will go away and your FM may change”. That’s basically the only time we use that trick.