Not only that, but the underlying assumption here is that this will fit into VRAM as is. Which isn’t necessarily the case at all, so something more clever than that kind of scheme is necessary. Which brings us into this timeline.

I cannot deny that if the entire scenery system were made up of equally spaced textures in a grid, solving paging would be trivial.

But that’s only a fraction of what the X-Plane scenery system, aircraft SDK and plugin SDK actually do.

XP has design flaws.
There should never be any stutters or texture “emergency”.
The plane does not fly or change direction fast enough to be an excuse.
There should only be a grid of full high def textures, and the rest to the horizon of low res textures.
The algorithm needs to switch out lower res textures to full high res textures.
And vice versa (behind the plane).
This is not rocket science. Other sims have mastered it already.
There is ample enough time to switch textures…
If it’s coded properly!

When it’s done it’s done.

Many thx for your responses Ben and Sidney.

“…the texture pager and your script co-exist very happily on that install…”

Then I’m as happy as my plugin on a dev’s machine (and somewhat relieved) to hear that. : )

Cheers, Jörn

The texture pager is designed to “just work”, it runs continuously in the background and attempts to do a best job effort. If you increase or decrease the LOD dynamically, it might have to load/unload textures, but the whole system is already designed to cope with this. I have a sim install with a bunch of third party stuff, including your script (and FlyAgi’s script attempting to do similar things. Although not running concurrently, of course). From what I can tell, the texture pager and your script co-exist very happily on that install.

The questions aren’t dumb – the original post is confusing. But you don’t _have_ to do this to be ready. It’s a nice-to-have. Basically yeah, you want a DDS file where you used to have a PNG. You can leave the PNGs side-by-side or remove them, your choice.

Thanks. When I convert png files to dtx1/5 they show up in my orthos as a DDS file. Is this right. Sorry for all of the dumb questions but I am trying to follow your blog and be ready for vulcan. We have many students scheduled and do not want delays.

Just pray