ANSWERED Tech question regarding autogen/load order for PNW/KSEA

[bazonkers]

It seems that Taxi2Gate KSEA pretty much works with the PNW region except if you install the flicker fix patch it flattens two patches of autogen on the immediate east and west side of the airport. I was wondering if it's possible to identify the ORBX autogen file that populates these areas of the Orbx PNW region and would placing it/them in the same folder as the T2G KSEA airport (at a higher priority) fix the problem? I'm still digging under the hood to learn about scenery design but autogen files are a little new to me yet. I know about load orders and it would seem that if Orbx creates autogen, the T2G addon somehow flattens it through a bad flatten area that doesn't exclude autogen, putting the Orbx autogen file higher in priority might bring it back? Seems legit but maybe wrong. 

 

Any info is appreciated, I'm enjoying the behind the scenes technical details of the scenery development world. Thanks! 

[Holger Sandmann]

Hi there,

 

autogen is always associated with a specific landclass texture set or photoreal ground .bgl file. Thus, copying just the autogen placement files wouldn't make any difference. 

 

There's no specific reason why the T2G KSEA files would have to exclude the PNW autogen meaning it's some file, probably unintentional, that does so. For example, ground polygon object files can have this effect or the use of object exclude rectangles with the "exclude all" tag. In short, it's up to the T2G developers to check for the root cause and then alter the files or tags as needed.

 

Cheers, Holger

[ALF]

It seems that Taxi2Gate KSEA pretty much works with the PNW region except if you install the flicker fix patch it flattens two patches of autogen on the immediate east and west side of the airport. I was wondering if it's possible to identify the ORBX autogen file that populates these areas of the Orbx PNW region and would placing it/them in the same folder as the T2G KSEA airport (at a higher priority) fix the problem? I'm still digging under the hood to learn about scenery design but autogen files are a little new to me yet. I know about load orders and it would seem that if Orbx creates autogen, the T2G addon somehow flattens it through a bad flatten area that doesn't exclude autogen, putting the Orbx autogen file higher in priority might bring it back? Seems legit but maybe wrong. 

 

Any info is appreciated, I'm enjoying the behind the scenes technical details of the scenery development world. Thanks! 

Hi

 

What you are seeing there is Taxi2gate solution for the flicker by removing their own autogen (not PNW). The solution is not ideal. If you have a powerful machine I can tell you how to avoid it, but I don´t know what your hardware is.

 

Just try uninstalling the flicker patch, and then reinstalling KSEA if it is necessary. You should now see their autogen again east and west of the airport, and fix the flicker in a different way. If you insert PNW autogen in the middle of KSEA scenery it will not look good and might even create conflict with the mesh, as Taxi2Gate altered the mesh around their airport with PNW thank to contributions and much appreciated from Holger.

[bazonkers]

I appreciate the answers. Figuring out how scenery is made is like a whole hobby within a hobby! I'm intrigued. As for the flicker fix, as of right now I don't have the flicker patch installed so I have all the autogen areas but I do have flicker (using DX10, maybe related). I'd love to hear the solution you figured out. I've got a pretty powerful setup, 4.4Ghz i7 with a GTX980 video card. 

[ALF]

You´ve got plenty of power to run a silky smooth FSX with ORBX sceneries and other airports. To start, go back to DX 9 and make sure you have the latest drivers installed for your NVIDIA card, and the latest NVIDIA inspector. Then come back. I am mostly interested in your Texture Filtering settings and your AntiAlias Settings, and your Vsync settings as well. tellme if the refresh rate of your monitor is 60hz and if you only use one please.

 

It is important also to understand that T2G removed large chuncks of pretty PNW autogen in key areas of Seattle to make KSEA work better. Not good IMO so you will have to reinstall PNW and NOT RUN the PNW patch or the flcker patch after you have done this.

[bazonkers]

Thanks again for the help. I need to think about this for a minute as I've noticed big improvements with DX10 on my system as opposed to DX9 and I'm not sure I want to switch back. I've got it working pretty well with the various NVI settings, etc. I might just live with the flicker if that's the only solution. I did notice the crazy stuff t2g did in regards to PNW so I did end up re-installing that thanks to a previous thread I saw. It got everything back to what I expect except for the flickering runways that start around 1300msl. 

 

It's a bummer that they flattened the autogen in two areas with the flicker fix as it totally solves the problem under DX10. 

 

Just in case I go with DX9, here are my current settings but these are setup for my current DX10 config. I'm using 3 BenQ monitors with a 144mhz refresh. I've tried a 1/4 vsync and it seems like it's worse performance than 1/2 vsync. 

 

[bazonkers]

I should add that I did turn off DX10 and try this with DX9 (but using the above settings which might not be optimal) and still got the runway flickering. Do you have this airport installed and running flicker free in PNW? I'm assuming you do since you are trying to help

 

Actually, it sounds like you have a pretty beefy machine and fly around Seattle so if you have some settings you recommend that would get me great fps in DX9, I'm totally willing to try. There are so many variables in fsx regarding cloud cover, type of plane use etc. but I can get mid 20's to 30 on the ground in KSEA (t2G) when I take off with traffic injected via UT2. It's smooth and acceptable but I always wonder if I'm leaving some performance on the table. If I can get this kind of performance under DX9 and solve these texture issues, I'd be willing to switch back. 

[ALF]

Hi Bazonkers, I run a locked frame rate of 30 within FSX settings and avoid using the NVIDIA frame rate limiter.

 

You have to match your vertical Sync in the inspector to the locked frame rate within FSX. In my case, I have a single 60 hz monitor so I have the same Vsync as you--1/2 refresh rate which equals 30 frames per second in the FSX slider setting. The deal is that you must enable FSX to run at that frame rate, which I do with all the ORBX sceneries as well as some of their airports like PAJN, Aerosoft PANC, T2G KSEA, FlightBeam KIAD, KPHX, KDEN, FSDreamteam KIAH, T2G KMCO, and LatinVfr KMIA, KRSW and FlyTampa KTPA.

 

What I like about my settings is that I finally found the sweetspot where the settings work with EVERYTHING. A long time ago it would work well in one place and have them settings fail miserably in other sceneries. Here is what I would try if I were you, back up your FSX.cfg and NVIDIA Inspector settings and FSX sliders so you can revert back if this does not work. I have a marvel settup shweet!

 

In the FSXConfig set your Fiber Frames to 0.10, make sure you couple this to LOD radius of 4.5. If you go to 5.5 or 6.5 you will pay for it. Use Bufferpools=8,000,000. Also, verify you are not pushing max textures harder than 2048, forget about 4096 textures. Verify Texture Bandwith Multiplier set at 40, and max texture load at 6.

 

Verify in your Display and FSX settings that you have checked Texture Filtering to Anisotropic and Antialiasing. Then make sure you have no conflicts in your inspector settings. Set Antialiasing in inspector to "Enhance Application settings" then 16X 2x2supersampling combined with Multisampling. Don´t go any higher than 16x or more supersampling or it will cost you. Supersampling is a killer on performance. see here. Get rid of your Transparency supersampling, it is not needed and is costing you.

 

 

http://www.geforce.com/whats-new/guides/aa-af-guide#2

 

Lets go with the flicker issue now: I found this is most likely due on trying to push textures and mesh too hard. I run 80 in my FSX Mesh and 30 cm in texture. Backoff from max. I cannot tell any difference. Go to 5M in terrain mesh, needed for some airports like PAJN and others, going to max actually causes problems. Again, back off from max. In Scenery Complexity and Autogen back off to very dense. Further, regarding the autogen go to your FSX config and specify max builidngs per cell at 1K. Even at KLAX with FTX Global, this setting shows a ridiculously large amount of buildings in the scenery and is a performance and FPS killer. 1K in buildigs is just fine. Back off AI traffic to 30%, same for boats and cars. And lower water effects to 1xHIgh or 2xLow. Don´t go higher than that it will kill you.

 

See how you do with that and we can do more. Back up all your settings so you can go back.

[bazonkers]

Thank you so much taking the time to share your settings. The more I thought about it, the more I realized the settings were actually a red herring to the problem. The patch fixes the problem for me so it was probably not the settings (although they could help). That said, I figured it out. 

 

In order to solve the flickering (at least for me) you need to download the MANUAL installation version of the flicker patch. Unzip and then DELETE the following file:

 

KSEA-BASE.bsl

 

This is the file the suppresses the autogen on the sides of the airport. Move all the remaining files over to your KSEA-T2G install directory as per the folder structure in the unzipped patch. 

 

This solved 99% of the flicker for me. I still have a very minor amount in the shadows under the jetways that I can see from altitude but I'm pretty sure the deleted file doesn't actually fix that. I have zero idea what it fixes except killing the autogen. The remaining flicker is so minor that I'm 100% happy. Of course, it'd be great if they fixed that as well but I'm not going to hold my breath. 

 

Thanks again for all the help which in a way got me to this solution!