answered A few questions regarding scenery location

[ebawebaw]

Hi, 

I have a few questions regarding scenery location

1. i have 2 EVO SSD M.2 drives of 500 gig, drive 1 is for Xplane only, with North Cal, Oregon , Washington , all SD versionsl, and LOWI , and no more room for an other true earth package .

drive 2 hase  windows  and other stuf and GB South, and Central

Drive 3 is a conventional HD with GB North

I own the HD versions also, but use SD for space requirements.

 

Is there any benefit of using all HD versions, I fly GA and mostly VFR at low altitudes ,

Is there any benefit of putting the most used scenery on the Xplane drive ? And not with symbolic link  from an other drive?

and because I have  a 8 gig conventional HD , there is lots of room free there, but does this mean slower FPS? Or only longer loading time for the scenery to load in to memory.

and finaly , is possible to move scenery from one drive to an other  if I make first a  library inORBX  Central  without  the need to uninstall the version installed, for instance in my case move GB south and Central to the conventional HD , so I can benefit from the faster SSD for US Florida?

thank you for your help

ivo

[Dusterman]

I just built a new flight sim rig with 2 M2 drives, a Samsung SSD and a 8tb conventional hard drive, 64 gb ram..  The M2 drives are a 1tb EVO and a 2tb Intel660.  The SSD is a 2tb EVO. X-Plane is on the 2tb Intel M2 drive and AF2 is on the 2tb EVO SSD. The 8tb drive is for downloads and backups. When MS Flight 2020 comes out I will add a third Intel M2 drive for it, as my motherboard supports three M2 drives. I have an older rig with SSDs and a conventional hard drive. On that machine X-Plane is on the SSD and the X-Plane library is on the conventional hard drive. I have all the True Earth products installed on both machines. My experience is:

 

I installed the SD version of Northern California on my new PC in a separate library on the Intel M2 drive. I am a GA pilot, flew low altitude from my real life home airport, KCVH, over routes I used in real life. I did not like the ground textures I saw, so uninstalled the SD version and replaced it with the HD version. It looks much better at low altitudes, if your PC can handle the increased load.

 

I am putting the most used scenery on the X-Plane drive, in a separate library. I intend to purchase a 4tb SSD for the less used scenery when my 2tb M2 drive gets filled, as the initial scenery loading is quicker on the solid state drives. I have not noticed any difference in the scenery loading between the solid state drives and the conventional drives while flying in the sim.

 

I can't answer your third question, as I have not tried moving scenery from one drive to another. I have moved scenery from X-Plane to another library on the same drive, didn't have to uninstall and reinstall the scenery. Hope this information is helpful .

 

[ebawebaw]

Hi Dusterman

thanks for your answer

regarding moving , I already know, looked at the manual, what I should have done in the first place.

you can make a library on any drive and directory you like, and use central to migrate .

also, some of my true earth scenery was in my custom scenery folder,

gonna move them  outside  to a different library, like you

gonna replace all the SD with HD , if my machine can handle it, it is a8700K oc at 4.7 and a 1080 TI with 11  gig of VRAM

rather have less autogen but clearer ground textures

thanks

[Dusterman]

My older machine has a 7700k and a 1080 with 8 gig of ram and runs at about 30fps with the sliders fairly high up, so your machine should have no problem running True Earth HD. At one point I was running out of memory in the sim, so increased ram to 64gb. After the ram increase I haven't seen that problem again. Both of my machines have 43 inch 4k monitors and touch screen monitors for running Air Manager and the 1080 works well in my configuration. The only issue I have is an X-Plane specific problem that X-Plane clouds kill the frame rate. If you fly in clear weather your frame rate will be high and you will get to see all the beautiful True Earth scenery:)

[ebawebaw]

I use a Samsung 55 inch 4K television and for me it only runs smooth when the refresh rate is the same as my FPS ,and Vsync on, I have it at 30, but indeed, the clouds are killing the FPS, if I go below 30 FPS it drops to 15, due to Vsync on, with it set to off, I get screen tearing.

but this  is off topic

what I do not like is that in order to get all my true earth scenery installed in HD, I need to download them again.

that is a massive amount of data to download at 3 mb per second.

at first I hade the HD versions  installed but needed to uninstall it  to get the  SD version working.

it would be nice to have both versions on the HD and simply switch to what version you like to use, no need for zoomlevel 17 at 35000 feet, but I can not start the download and install unless I uninstall the other version.

maybe it is possible to move for instance the SD version to an other location and then remove the library  , make a new library and install the HD version there.

It is  great that if you buy the HD version you get the SD version for free, it is not great if the only way to switch between them is to download and install the whole package again

but maybe I am  wrong and is it possible , did not find any documentation of it 

[Nick Cooper]

Hello ebawebaw,

there are two versions of the scenery files , so it is simply not possible to have an

HD version without downloading the HD files and vice versa. 

 

You can of course make your own backup of either set of files by simply moving

them out of the Custom Scenery folder, just as can be done to any X plane 11

addon scenery. This will also make them appear as not installed in Orbx Central,

as will renaming the version text file to .txt.off.

[ebawebaw]

Hi Nick, 

thanks for your help.

now I want to move the files outside the custom scenery folder but on the same drive until full, and the rest on an other drive, this makes it easier to reinstall Xplane if needed I guess? 

to understand it right, a hypothetical situation .

Xplane is on drive D

I make a library  D/ Oregon SD and install Oregon SD in it

after it is finished delete this library and move the folder to E/Oregon SD 

then make a library D/Oregon HD and install Oregon HD in it.

in order to switch  to the SD version I need to delete the HD library and make a new one that points to  E/Oregon SD

is this correct?

btw, yesterday started the Oregon HD version download and after 90 % finished hade to pauze the download and shut down the pc, 

this morning the download que was empty and had to start al over again  

is this normal?

 

[Nick Cooper]

Hello,

 

it was never intended that a customer should install and use both the HD and SD versions at the same time.

If you wish to, you will need to manage the files yourself.

 

Installing a second version:

1. make Orbx Central see the product as not installed by renaming the version txt file to txt.off.

2. install the other version

 

You cannot use both at once, to you must choose which one and delete the link for the other

before you start X Plane 11.

 

You can put the files that you are not using wherever you wish but you should put them back

again before using the other version. You cannot have both versions active at the same time, 

even if they are in separate Orbx Central Libraries.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[ebawebaw]

Hi Nick, 

it is ofcourse not the intention to use both versions at the same time,

it just that in some areas it might be that the SD version give that extra FPS needed to make for a smoother experience,

thanks for your help