This a new one

[Guest mz-cd]

I was loading TP via VE and this message came up.TileAPI Tile at level 16 12354,40197 has fallen out of decode cache.Is this a problem Christian?RegardsRichard

[Guest cbuchner1]

Haha, looks scary doesn't it.So to speed up things I have 100 decoded JPEG files in memory. Old ones get replaced permanently when different JPEG get decoded.So occasionally I see that I do not have to load a JPEG file from disk or network because it's already present in decoded form in memory. But a tile may consist of 24 JPEGs (the high res tiles do!). So as I load the remaining JPEGs either from network or disk, unfortunately one of the existing JPEGs that should also be part of the tile may occasionally "fall out of the cache" (get replaced).That would be unfortunate if I didn't have special code which takes care of this unlikely situation. This code prints the message and makes sure the missing JPEG gets loaded once again.So everything is under control. Nothing to worry about. Move along. ;)Christian

[Guest mz-cd]

OK thanks Christian.Everything is working fine. There are only now a couple of things which bug me and that isInitial load times.TP goes into load mode when I refresh scenery andTP goes into load mode when I go into the scenery library and click ok.This makes for long load times for a flight.VE and YH work fine but GE not so good, but that is not a problem.When can we expect TP6?? Looking forward to it.RegardsRichard

[Guest cbuchner1]

Having not much time to do any development on a Beta 6 version.The day job is too demanding.

[maxymaxy 0]

Hi Christian,I am getting the following error:proxyuser: Given tile c:....photoreal world1005texture121233112003223WI.BMP is invalid or does not exist.The tile loading starts off loading 1000+ tiles/sec then hits this error and falls to single digits and is still loading after 30mins. It used to load in around 1-2 mins.How can I fix it, please, and return to my quick load times again?

[Guest cbuchner1]

a possible cause: A full hard drive. The files end up with length 0 or can't get created and the tile loader later complains.

[maxymaxy 0]

Hmmm...Thanks Christian.That's interesting. I have been using TP since it first appeared and folder 1005 is around where I live. It has been growing rapidly. I am running Vista Ult. with TP5 and still have 89G free of a 250G drive. The folder 1005 has 640,000 files in it and the size on disk is 6.6G. Could it be reaching some OS limit? With a C2D@3GHz it takes several seconds to report the folder properties.Would it help to turn off 8.3 name creation and last access date updating? I am not sure how to do that.

[maxymaxy 0]

Well...I fixed the problem. I deleted the current world folder and used the backup I made last weekend and it fixed it. So I think it was a bad file in that folder. But just to make sure I did a CHKDSK which took nearly 4 hours...it didn't find any problems. I will keep an eye on the number of files in the folder because who knows it might be something to do with the number of bmps in there?

[Guest cbuchner1]

Say, ... since you're running Vista.I have a persistent problem on a Vista Business notebook where tiles right below the aircraft suddenly turn into goo (low res).Do you also experience this problem?It is related to the operating system caching the file size. My driver changes the size "on the fly" (making the file appear bigger and high res), but the OS caches the old size and refuses any read request after the cached original size. This problem drives me nuts.The problem never appeared on Windows XP for me.Christian

[Guest cbuchner1]

If the problem is always that file, you could have deleted it manually. I am not sure if NTFS has a limits on # of files in a directory.Anyway 65536 tiles make up a small square in the world map (as posted in another thread), 16 of the small squares form one of the large squares. There are 4 seasons + 1 for hard winter + 1 for light maps16 * 65536 * (4 + 1 + 1) = 6291456So at most 6 million files would ever be in one of the subfolders like e.g. "1005". Not exactly peanuts. We need to get that number down to improve overall performance. I was thinking of placing many low res tiles in a bigger file (always requiring Tileproxy to run to use the files though).Christian

[maxymaxy 0]

Hi Christian,This may be anecdotal but flying along say at 60 knots @2000ft produces blurred files under the craft when the tile res is set to 2m or lower (LOD at max). However, given the same circumstances and raising the height to 3500+ (that seems to be the magic figure) the tiles suddenly crisp up (I can see individual cars on the road). Now this might not be related but could it be something to do with the angle from the craft to the ground? In other words, I get fewer if any blurred tiles when flying at 3500+ right up to 90+ knots at 1600x1200, mesh 10m, activesky Wx, 10% traffic.With regard to the number of files, even a reasonably specified rig like mine has trouble referencing 600,000+ files in one folder. Anything that concatenates or conglomerates the files, say into BGLs, would be helpful for everyone.Let me say again, I am so grateful for your efforts. It really has brought me back to the love of sim flying.

[Guest cbuchner1]

Microsoft has chosen to not document the BGLs and to change/extend their format with every FS release. So this is likely not the way to go. For photoreal terrain BGLs they even use a proprietary + patented image compression algorithm - and nowhere any source code for this compressor is to be found. Needless to say that I would have to provide the images in this particular format to make them load. Other than by reverse engineering there is no way to make this possible. And then I probably couldn't publish my source code legally...So unfortunately I must continue to rely on that outdated "FS9 code path" to provide photoreal terrain on the fly. Let's hope they will keep this code path alive in FS11 and FS12... I will do my best to further improve performance as far as possible.