"Cross" of high detail not following aircraft

[JimmiG 244]

Hi. So as two or three betas have been released since last time, I decided to try TP again.Initially it loads up fine. As I fly, it keeps up reasonably well for a minute or two, then it happens as you can see in the picture below.. The aircraft leaves the "cross" of high detail, and beyond its boundry, the sim doesn't load in more detailed textures at all. Inside the cross, it keeps up reasonably well, I was seeing about 5m or 10m textures all the way to the edge of the high detail area (brighter colours). I'm using Virtual soil. It should be noted that the TP output window keeps ticking away, downloading tiles all the time. If I do a "Refresh Scenery", the high detail cross is moved underneath my aircraft again, but doesn't move with the aircraft. I tried pausing the sim for a long time, but it didn't reload. Maybe it's loading textures for some completely different area, for whatever reason?http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/176044.jpg

[Guest cbuchner1]

As your screenshot shows, 10-20 tiles updated per second is not enough.Lock your frame rate to about 15-20 FPS and see if that number goes up. With about 200-300 tiles per second, there is a good chance it can keep up at least most of the time.

[Guest squarejawhero]

This is exactly the same problem I'm having. I'll post a screenshot. (still trying to get it to work)

[JimmiG 244]

I have FPS locked at 15 and fiber fraction at 2.0. I have a 10Mb connection, usually getting up to 980KB/s downloads. At that rate, 300 tiles per second would only be possible if each tile was about 3-4KB in size.I guess that's why TP will never truly work on current hardware - it would require a 100Mb connecion to work well.

[JimmiG 244]

Also, during initial loading, it does anywhere between ~40 and ~1000 tiles per second, so part of the problem probably lies in the inefficency of FSX and the filter driver.To be honest, I think the route of pre-downloaded scenery is the way to go, at least until we have octa-core CPU's and 100Mb connections. TP is only really useful for the first few minutes until you leave the area it has pre-loaded.http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/176054.jpg

[Guest cbuchner1]

TPS indicates not tile download rate, but rather the number of BMP files served to the simulator.Flight Sim periodically refreshes the entire terrain around the aircraft, not just the area that actually requires an update. That is the main source of inefficiency. Most tiles far out from the aircraft (the BMP files) are less than 1kb in size and load pretty fast.If you want to try this fsx.cfg - this one has solved the extremely slow tile loading issue for me following an SP1 upgrade. All you'd have to adjust is the screen resolution to match your system.http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/176071.txt

[Guest nyflyer]

Hey Christian,Is that the same FSX.cfg packaged with the TP install? Will it work with SP1?Moses

[Guest cbuchner1]

TP does not package a complete fsx.cfg - it only modifies a few select parameters.It appears that for some users an upgrade from RTM to SP1 leaves entries in the fsx.cfg that trigger extremely sluggish loading behavior. Also known as the blurries. And it does not only affect Tileproxy, but in many cases also standard terrain.Maybe this fsx.cfg works better for you. You can back up your existing one if you want to be able to go back.

[JimmiG 244]

Thanks, I shall try this .cfg. After updating to SP1, the "blurries" became a problem even with default terrain (obviously I'm not the only one as there have been huge threads discussing the issue). If the sim can barely keep up with generic scenery stored locally, it's hardly surprising that it fails miserably when streaming continious photographic scenery from the net.

[Guest cbuchner1]

If this cfg file helped the speed of your tile loading, would you be so kind to attach your previous cfg file? Maybe I can then isolate the entries that result in such slow performance.

[JimmiG 244]

The new .cfg didn't seem to make much of a difference, unfortunately. It doesn't seem like your program is to blame as I got more blurries over default scenery too after installing SP1. I might try going back to RTM and try it with TP. Clearly, if my systen reads tiles at 1/10th the desired rate, no small tweak is going to help as there must be something more fundamentally wrong.This got me thinking however...We know lots of users got more blurries after installing SP1 (huge threads in the FSX forum). Your program provides a kind of "benchmark" of how many tiles FS is loading per second. Wouldn't it be possible for you to write a small program with only this "benchmark" part active, for use with default scenery?People could then run this program with a specified .flt file (such as flying at a specific heading and speed using the autopilot) and compare results between different setups, fsx.cfg tweaks, and pre-SP1 vs post-SP1. This might help Microsoft and the FSX users to find out what went wrong with the SP1 update on some user's systems.

[Guest cbuchner1]

default scenery works a bit differently.There it's repeating tiles of a particular kind, and it depends on the land class in the particular area how much these tiles repeat.So the benchmark would show much different results, always dependent on area.

[JimmiG 244]

Well, today, after experiencing blurries with the Horizon England and Wales photoscenery I reinstalled FSX without SP1 (only the photo scenery update). I wasn't getting extreme blurries with England+Wales, but more than I remembered getting last time I used it, which was before SP1 (I've taken a break from FS). I used to always get the 1m tiles, but with SP1 it often fell back to 2m or 5m tiles for parts of the view.Anyway, just for fun, I also reinstalled TileProxy to check it out.All I can say is WOW! Texture remain crisp and sharp, and always keep up. I'm getting anywhere from a couple of hundred to over 1000 tile accesses per second, vs 15-20 with SP1. That's a 50x increase.I have FPS locked at 15 and frame fraction at 1.5, as 2.0 caused too much stuttering. I'm also noticing far more disk access than I got with TP and SP1, there's a steady stream of data being saved to the drive as I fly.I'll post a screenshot later.I haven't yet tried the Horizon scenery, but I'd imagine the blurries would be gone from it as well.Clearly SP1 messes up some people's FSX setup. Until Microsoft realizes there's a problem, or some community member figures out how to fix it, I hope you'll continue to develop TP for non-SP1 users in parellell.

[Guest cbuchner1]

I keep developing with the SP1 installed, and depending on the machine I use it on I get about 100 to 200 TPS during flight. That is definitely near the low end of being "acceptable".Before release of every version I do some testing on a low-end PC with FSX RTM. That's a Dell with 512 MB of RAM and a 256 MB PCI (yes, PCI!) graphics card.I am struggling hard to achieve compatibility with Vista, which uses a much more aggressive caching of files on disk. And unfortunately that bypasses the read access through my file system filter and leads to all kinds of ill-effects.

[JimmiG 244]

Here's a shot of what it looks like now (compare to my post-SP1 shot above). I'm almost certain that if I install SP1 again, things will go back to 15-20 tiles/second...http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/176541.jpgEdit: I tweaked some settings further and achived about 100 more TPS average and even cripser textures:http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/176544.jpgKeep in mind that I have an older rig, single-core Athlon64 3500+, 1GB RAM and X800XT videocard... I'm not pausing when taking those shots, my textures stay sharp now at these settings:FPS locked @ 15 - this is high enough for me and prevents most sporadic stuttering and lurches where as 20 produced more unstable frameratesLOD_RADIUS=3.000000 (not sure if this value is accepted or it rounds it up to "Medium" in the options)FIBER_FRAME_TIME_FRACTION=1.63 (sweet spot for FPS vs texture performance)Higher res shots probably coming to a screenshot forum near you :)