Buildings HD - Requested Areas and More

[Scott Armstrong]

Here are some shots from user-requested areas, plus a few extras   Enjoy!

 

San Jose, Costa Rica (Global BASE):

 

 

 

 

Los Angeles, California, USA (NA Southern California):

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Manila, Philippines (Global BASE):

 

 

 

 

 

 

Around North America (OpenLC North America):

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

LDPL Pula Airport:

 

 

 

St. Petersburg, Russia (Global BASE):

 

 

 

 

 

 

Germany (OpenLC EU):

 

 

 

 

 

Honolulu, Hawaii (OpenLC North America):

 

 

 

Beijing, China (Global BASE):

 

[boetie]

Super duper Scott. This will make a huge difference to our sim cities.

Cheers Graeme

[VH-KDK]

Many thanks Scott.

The paint is almost dry so not long to go now!

[Kev D]

Ahhh....Wendy’s Hamburgers...haven’t seen them for years in UK. Nice pictures too!

 

Kev

[JoseCFII]

Thanks!

[gregmorin]

looks great!

 

Greg

[Jack Sawyer]

Extremely nice Scott, look forward to this.

[TigerTigerM]

Looks like a lot of work has gone into the buildings/dwellings & they are very good.

A must buy.

 

Could I mention something I noticed in this set & some others, & that is the ground surface texture 'blurriness'

The buildings are spot on, but in some cases the ground on which they sit is blurry.

An example is the middle of shot 1 & the ground around Wendy's.

I imagine at altitude the ground is 'sharper', but further down the track can anything be done about it. Or is it a PC settings matter?

I think the relevance is that once your HD Buildings are released, more users will spend time looking around at ground level, driving or taking 'Bob' for a stroll. 

TTM

[Captain Lars]

Did you deactivate OpenLC NA/EU for taking the San José / St. Petersburg shots?

[Scott Armstrong]

3 hours ago, Captain Lars said:

Did you deactivate OpenLC NA/EU for taking the San José / St. Petersburg shots?

 

No, I might just be displaying my ignorance on where the boundaries are for OLC NA and EU   Regardless, the textures would be the same whether they were installed or not.

[carlosqr]

Isn't this amazing?

Thank you very much Scott!!

I appreciate it

These all look great

I specially like the look of the building on # 11

It makes me stare at it

 

I have a question.

Not related to the buildings but as you said that Central America has its own separate are that goes from Mexico to Venezuela I wonder why we have orange and red trees (Fall ones) when is Fall in North America?

They look amazing in Liberia airport bu we don't have those here, Guanacaste area where Liberia airport is,  is more a savanna, dry in summer (Dec to April) and less dry from May to Nov. 

Is there a way to amend the trees in this area to look more realistic more accurate to this zone?

I wonder, as you are working on some improvements...

Thanks

Carlos

[JoseCFII]

19 hours ago, Scott Armstrong said:

Regardless, the textures would be the same.....

Hi Scott,

 

The community is requesting 2048 resolution to improve AG loading and fps.

 

Thanks.

Jose

[Nick Cooper]

Hello,

do you mean the Avsim "community", or do you speak for a wider audience than the one topic?

 

 

[DModjo]

44 minutes ago, JoseCFII said:

Hi Scott,

 

The community is requesting 2048 resolution to improve AG loading and fps.

 

Thanks.

Jose

 

You can resize them manually

[RTK1972]

16 minutes ago, DModjo said:

 

You can resize them manually

how do i do this ?

 

Never mind, found it

[Wise87]

I would also like to see a 2048 and 1024 option in the control panel. For now I have uninstalled until I resize them myself or a user option is available. Thanks for a great product. 

[JoseCFII]

7 hours ago, Nick Cooper said:

Hello,

do you mean the Avsim "community"

 

 

Yes.

[Nick Cooper]

Thanks.

 

I am not the developer but I am still a little disappointed that some members of the "community",

having been presented with probably the best autogen buildings upgrade for FSX and P3D that

there has ever been, almost immediately are asking for it to be degraded.

 

It seems that for some, the obsession with frame rates, VAS and now apparently "VRAM" has completely

over ridden the wish to see the best in a flight simulator.

 

There are plenty other ways of managing these things.

 

 

[Lawrence Hickerson]

Much to do about nothing!  With you, Nick!

[Scott Armstrong]

8 hours ago, JoseCFII said:

Hi Scott,

 

The community is requesting 2048 resolution to improve AG loading and fps.

 

Thanks.

Jose

 

6 hours ago, Wise87 said:

I would also like to see a 2048 and 1024 option in the control panel. For now I have uninstalled until I resize them myself or a user option is available. Thanks for a great product. 

 

Hi all, I understand the reasoning behind the request and this is something we will certainly consider for a future patch.  Thanks for the input

[Wise87]

9 minutes ago, Scott Armstrong said:

 

 

Hi all, I understand the reasoning behind the request and this is something we will certainly consider for a future patch.  Thanks for the input

Thank you for understanding the logic behind our request and not looking at it as a degrade. I have since reinstalled Buildings HD and done some sight seeing and it is truly a great piece of work. I especially enjoy flying at night again since I have installed it. Again, having the option allows the user to select what works best for their simulator but still enjoying the features of Buildings HD. Thanks Scott

[Scott Armstrong]

Just now, Wise87 said:

Thank you for understanding the logic behind our request and not looking at it as a degrade. I have since reinstalled Buildings HD and done some sight seeing and it is truly a great piece of work. I especially enjoy flying at night again since I have installed it. Again, having the option allows the user to select what works best for their simulator but still enjoying the features of Buildings HD. Thanks Scott

 

No problem, I'm very glad to hear that you are enjoying it overall!

[corinoco]

It's working well on my rig; ancient i7-3770K @4.1Ghz, 16GB ram, Nvidia 1080 (6GB vram) running P3D v4.5

I suppose if you're still running the 32-bit FSX you might have some ram issues, but I find mine is pretty much perfect for me now! Good frame rates (average 24-30fps around busy airports) and great scenery.

 

I know many 'serious' members of "The Community" would be shocked (shocked I say!) at 24fps but really, it's fine.

 

The Buildings HD set has given a very noticeable visual and performance improvement for me.

[TigerTigerM]

16 hours ago, Nick Cooper said:

Thanks.

 

I am not the developer but I am still a little disappointed that some members of the "community",

having been presented with probably the best autogen buildings upgrade for FSX and P3D that

there has ever been, almost immediately are asking for it to be degraded.

 

It seems that for some, the obsession with frame rates, VAS and now apparently "VRAM" has completely

over ridden the wish to see the best in a flight simulator.

 

There are plenty other ways of managing these things.

 

 

I think it would be helpful Nick if you, [or someone else  conversant with HD Buildings],  could perhaps suggest to people  where they can find articles or other means of understanding some of the "plenty other ways of managing these things"

I suspect there is a wide diversity of knowledge among users  about how to tweak settings to get the HD buildings working on their systems.

ie, from 'no clue' to 'systems whizz.'  The former fumbling around , the latter having no trouble if they find tweaks are necessary.

TTM

 

[DModjo]

I tried resizing the textures to 2048x2048 and they look almost as good as the standard 4K - still a huge improvement to the previous ones as they much better textures. The size drops from approx. 10MB to 3MB per file.

 

The only reason I would do this is if you run FSX with many other addons, complex aircraft, sceneries and need to save VAS. Otherwise there's no point. 

[Wise87]

I looked at the texture sizes and they were already at 2048x2048. Maybe I'm mistaken.

[DModjo]

Nah they're 4096x4096.

[JoseCFII]

15 hours ago, Scott Armstrong said:

 

 

Hi all, I understand the reasoning behind the request and this is something we will certainly consider for a future patch.  Thanks for the input

Thanks! It's not going to water down your add-on. It will actually make it better!

[Nick Cooper]

15 hours ago, TigerTigerM said:

I think it would be helpful Nick if you, [or someone else  conversant with HD Buildings],  could perhaps suggest to people  where they can find articles or other means of understanding some of the "plenty other ways of managing these things"

I suspect there is a wide diversity of knowledge among users  about how to tweak settings to get the HD buildings working on their systems.

ie, from 'no clue' to 'systems whizz.'  The former fumbling around , the latter having no trouble if they find tweaks are necessary.

TTM

 

 

Hello,

 

"managing these things" refers to "frame rates, VAS and now apparently "VRAM" "

 

Buildings HD does not require to be managed.

 

Anyone who shares the obsessions is very likely to have widely researched the ways of maximising the

number displayed at the top left, it has been so since flight simulators were invented.

 

Similarly with VAS in FSX and P3D v1-3, there are those who just cannot accept that the problem of VAS

is invariably due to a combination of VAS hungry addons, instead they blame the last addon that was added.

 

In a 64 bit simulator, it seems that the limit has moved on to the amount of VRAM.

This in itself is not a problem at all in P3D v4, until the user insists on modifying the Prepar3D.cfg file well outside

the recommended parameters without regard to the caveats clearly stated by those who shared the information in the first place.

 

Purely as an example here is a quote from the Avsim forum that illustrates the point

 

Quote

 

I have used ordenador to resize all the Orbx textures to 2048, that way I can still have my other high res textures (runways etc) without maxing out my Vram

I use texture exp=10 and before was using around 8 gig VRAM, since buildings hd at 4096 this went up to 10.3gb, nearly maxing out my 1080ti

 

 

I do accept that there are plenty of users who will always wish to push the limits of their hardware and software, they are the ones

who research how to do this and who run a never ending experiment, rather than a flight simulator.

Nothing wrong with that and Scott has recognised this and has said that a choice of lower resolution textures may be a future update.

 

However, to write off a product as good as this one because it results in the experiment being pushed beyond its limits is not justified.

 

In short, the vast majority of customers do not "fumble around" and will see the vast improvement in the quality of these texures

without the need to change anything.

 

 

[mburkhard]

On 6/30/2019 at 10:30 PM, Nick Cooper said:

... but I am still a little disappointed that some members of the "community",

having been presented with probably the best autogen buildings upgrade for FSX and P3D that

there has ever been, almost immediately are asking for it to be degraded.

 

Nick,

I disagree with you when you say that people want the product to be degraded. I know the ORBX community consists of many scenery-oriented fliers, doing VFR and flying less complex aircraft like those from Carenado and the like. To those people having all Autogen buildings at 4k size is of no consequences, and yes it looks stunning indeed!

 

However, there are also those flying complex airliner add-ons into major hubs. And that creates issues if too much data is being used, not because of VAS, but just because of the inefficient and old P3D engine. So those people would like to save on resources wherever the maximum is not needed. And Autogen is such a case. Flying fast and only coming close to the ground on short final, for a minute or two, believe me one can NOT notice the difference between 4096x4096 pixels and 2048x2048 pixels texture size. Sure, if I were to pause the sim at that moment, I'd see a difference. But not while moving along at high speed with my sight being directed to the aiming point. 

So therefore when flying airliners I'd welcome an option for 2048 pixels very much. It will still look a MILLION times better than default Autogen! But with a vastly reduced amount of data. It will still be an amazing product! And it will be better optimised for flying complex airliners. 

 

So even though I own a PC with an i7 9700K, overclocked to 5 GHz, 32GB of RAM, a 2080Ti video card and Intel Optane memory, I'd still be delighted to get an option for 2048x2048 textures. Think of all those people flying airliners into mega hubs. There's only that much the old P3D engine can take  Thanks!

 

Markus