active Please stop using groundtraffic

[daemotron]

Dear ORBX team,

 

I would be greatly pleased if you could stop bugging all your scenery packages for X-Plane with the GroundTraffic plugin. It was great at its time, but shouldn't be used by scenery designers anymore. The rationale behind: Each plugin X-Plane loads is basically a DLL loaded at run time. In any operating system, the number of DLLs a process can load throughout its life cycle is limited, so each plugin X-Plane loads counts against this limit.

And while per-aircraft plugins are actually only loaded when the respective aircraft is loaded, per-scenery plugins are loaded always, no exception. And each instance of the groundtraffic plugin is loaded as a dedicated DLL, eating up memory and ticking down the counter for DLLs X-Plane can reference. So with a bunch of global plugins (like terrainradar, ASXP connector, LNMconnector, ...), the usual SASL plugin (per aircraft) and some 50 or more groundtraffic plugins, X-Plane easily hits the limit and stops loading plugins (though without crashing).

 

For the average end user, this situation is hard to debug, as X-Plane doesn't log it couldn't load a plugin due to this limit. The result usually is that the per-aircraft plugin (loaded last in the order of plugins) does not fully load under certain circumstances, resulting in an only partly working aircraft. This can happen in particular if another aircraft was loaded first, and the user then switches planes (unloading an aircraft does not revert the DLL limit - the next plugin loaded will just increment the counter further, until it hits the limit).

 

Therefore it would be really great if you could move from a per scenery package plugin (i. e. groundtraffic) to a global plugin, driving all sceneries making use of it. That would reduce the plugin count for all ORBX sceneries to 1 (except Quatam River, I know PropStrike is using some custom plugins on their scenery). I am fully aware that the most popular plugin for this purpose (SAM) is not free for commercial scenery designers, but I'd also let you know I'd be willing to accept a little markup on a scenery package if it goes for this much more convenient solution than the tedious groundtraffic plugin (right now I manually go through all my sceneries and remove it wherever I find it, to keep X-Plane happy and running).

 

Kind regards

Jesco

[Jon Clarke]

I have passed your comments to the devs.

[Nick Cooper]

Would it not be possible to just delete the Ground traffic file?

[Jon Clarke]

9 minutes ago, Nick Cooper said:

Would it not be possible to just delete the Ground traffic file?

I believe the OP is doing that at present according to the final sentence of his post.

[Nick Cooper]

In which case, asking for them to be removed for all customers does not seem to be necessary,

or perhaps even desirable?

 

[Sentry11]

IMHO, there should be a choice for the user when they first download the addon, just like static or no static aircraft on some addons.

[mauricecohen]

59 minutes ago, Nick Cooper said:

Would it not be possible to just delete the Ground traffic file?

No, the txt file can stay, it is the plugin that needs to be disabled or removed in each scenery. Xorganizer has a tool to do just that; you can even select the ones you want to keep - I choose to keep ground traffic on bridge sceneries  but nowhere else.

 

As an aside, Sidney Just of Laminar has agreed when he has a chance (not before Vulkan is out) to attempt to modify GroundTraffic to make it a global plugin, loading only once  and reading the txt file on each scenery package.

[daemotron]

@Nick Cooper I do not remove the GT plugin for not wanting it, but for the fact that as someone who's got the whole ORBX scenery currently available for XP installed, it just weights to heavily on the DLL refcount of my X-Plane setup. Removing the GroundTraffic plugin from a scenery unfortunately also degrades functionality of a scenery package (namely it removes the animated ground traffic), so it's not something I'm doing voluntarily, but because I have to in order to keep my X-Plane happy and running well. Anticipating that in the future I will have even more ORBX scenery installed (eagerly waiting for some Oregon and NorCal airfields ), this problem will grow with every scenery package released, and I'm not to keen on having to live forever with a static scenery due to a disadvantageous technology decision. On a side note: ORBX is of course not the only scenery developer making use of GT, so basically this concerns a lot of free- and payware scenery out there (and in my Custom Scenery folder).

 

Concerning the effort needed to deactivate the GT plugin - honestly speaking to me it's negligible. I'm good enough a programmer to automate these basic things for my own use, no need to buy a payware to do it my end. But of course doing it either way still leads to the same deplorable result - static scenery with a lack of feeling alive (at least in comparison to the non-degraded state).

 

My proposal was therefore not to remove the GroundTraffic plugin without replacement; instead my vote would go for a solution in the sense as @mauricecohen described it above. I was indeed not aware that GroundTraffic might one day be converted into a global plugin similar to SAM - but also I'm not too enthusiastic as there is no formal announcement or any product road map for GT available right now that actually fixes this evolution down to something more tangible than a "when I have the chance to" statement.

[mauricecohen]

2 hours ago, daemotron said:

product road map for GT

Jonathan Harris, AKA Marginal, the developer of GT, OverlayEditor and other incredibly useful but completely outdated add-ons for XP, has not been active for many years; GT Is essentially abandoned but open source.  @daemotron,  if you are a good enough programmer, which I am not, why not take a look at GT on github  ( https://github.com/Marginal?tab=repositories ) and see if it is possible to create a fork that changes it to a global plugin (and that does not require permission).