Holger,These are my autogen settings in the FSX.cfgTERRAIN_MAX_AUTOGEN_BUILDINGS_PER_CELL=600TERRAIN_MAX_AUTOGEN_TREES_PER_CELL=800If I understand you correctly with above settings there should be no difference in the amount of autogen displayed no matter if the slider is at "extremely dense" or "very dense". But on my system it makes a difference! I get definitely less autogen within PNW with the slider at very dense. I have made screenshots which clearly show this. I'll post them tomorrow after I have converted and resized them.Cheers, Wolfgang

I don't need screenshots to know you are right: of course those lower slider settings will show you less autogen. When I use default autogen settings (like I always do) above an area where there are just a few trees, lowering the autogen slider does remove trees, so there are even less. It does not only change autogen at area's where autogen is maximized. That behaviour won't change with a settings like 600. The tweak may limit autogen at the top, but changing the slider will change what you see anyway afaik. The amount of autogen (obviously) changes when you move the sliders when you use the default autogen settings (4500 for trees and 3000 for buildings), so why shouldn't it change with lower cfg settings?

I think the point might have gotten lost in the rhetoric ...The effect of the autogen sliders in combination with the autogen "tweak" will depend onHow much much autogen there actually is annotated, and how it was annotated.In scenery where little was annotated .. there will be little effect from a tweak .. because the "hard limit" Holger describes has not been reached. This is often the case with default scenery. The sliders will still have an effect in this setting ... because they adjust the overall annotations back by a percentage ... not the hard ceiling (if you like).As with most things FS .. you need to try it for yourself, and adapt your settings to the aspects that are important to you.As scientific approach as you can manage helps .... looking forward to your results Wolf.

The sliders will still have an effect in this setting ... because they adjust the overall annotations back by a percentage ... not the hard ceiling (if you like).

Yes, that was what I was trying to say... :(

So here are 2 screenshots. I have reproduced the scenario today with the same results. I have even shut down and restarted the sim 3 times. I took 3 screen shots at extremely dense, which all looked exactly the same, the autogen objects were always placed at the same spots (at least in the more sparse areas, where it is easier to estimate). The same is valid for the 3 screen shots at very dense.The first screenshot is at very dense, the second at extremely dense. I have marked the areas in yellow, where the differences ar the easiest to spot. Another interesting aspect is, that many trees are placed at exactly the same spot, no matter if the slider is at extremely dense or very dense, but when at extremely dense the trees appear much smaller. I have marked 2 of those trees in red.The most proper way to find out more was to make some top-down shots and to count every autogen object.very denseextremely denseAnd yes, I know, too much bloom! :-)Wolfgang

Hello Wolfgang,thanks for posting those screenshots. They nicely demonstrate what I've stated earlier: that max_autogen_trees works differently from max_autogen_buildings:

TERRAIN_MAX_AUTOGEN_TREES_PER_CELL is a different beast. Whether it works as an overall cap or not depends on the way the annotations were placed with the FSX SDK autogen tool. That's because the number of tree placement rectangles overrides the parameter value. I don't want to get too technical here but suffice it to say that in most areas lower values don't really make much difference. Even at 500 the value won't show much difference in urban and agricultural areas.

In PNW we place small footprints on individual tree crowns in most of our forest classes to make sure that autogen trees appear exactly on top of the tree crowns of the textures. A typical forest tile has about 1500-3000 of these boxes and thus your max_autogen_trees setting of 800 has no effect and the only differences in your screenshots are due to the ~20 percent removal of autogen trees when lowering the autogen density slider from extremely dense to dense.Below are a few screenshots from my test area. It's in Antarctica (= free of interference from other scenery elements) and uses a plain ground texture to make the autogen stand out. The first screenshot shows 7x7 grids of 100 trees within the tile, 4900 trees in total. I also set max_autogen_trees to 1000. As you can see, at Extremely Dense all 4900 trees show up meaning max_autogen_trees has no effect.For the second image I had moved the autogen slider two notches to the left (=Dense) with everything else the same. The expected behavior is that about 40% of the trees are removed. An interesting side note is that the removal happens in clusters rather than random trees here and there.In the third screenshot I have replaced the 4900 small foorprints with one large box that covers the entire tile. Max_autogen_trees is at its default setting of 4500. You see lots of trees but they are placed randomly meaning they wouldn't necessarily line up with a ground texture of an open forest, which is why we prefer to use the small, precise footprints.For the fourth image I added max_autogen_trees = 1000 and you can see that it really does remove about three quarters of the trees compared to the default setting of 4500. Thus, in the case of large footprints the parameter does have an effect.The final two screenshots highlight that max_autogen_buildings works differently. In this case an urban tile with ~1100 building footprints clearly responds when setting max_autogen_buildings to 500. This parameter always works as a "hard cap" while with max_autogen_trees it depends on how the developer made the autogen annotations. In summary: If you're happy with your fps and/or this numbers game is too much of a hassle then ignore the max_autogen parameters and use the general autogen density slider as needed. On the other hand if your system struggles with fps across urban areas, in PNW or elsewhere, you can experiment with a max_autogen_buildings value of about 400-1000 depending on your preferred autogen density slider setting. Using max_autogen_trees will make little difference within PNW but may make a difference in other areas of the world depending on how the forest tiles were annotated. It won't "hurt" within PNW either so you can set it to some value you consider suitable. Use a saved test flight as I mentioned above to make sure it actually makes a difference. Doing so will also help you check for unwanted side effects; I haven't noticed any but see Nick's concerns above. Specific to FTX PNW I'd suggest doing some flights in heavily forested backcountry areas (e.g., Vancouver Island or southwestern Oregon) to determine the level of the autogen slider your system can handle. Then you'd move to urban areas and adjust max_autogen_buildings to a value that works for you. Keep in mind - as my sixth screenshot shows - that even with seemingly low values of max_autogen_buildings (e.g., 500) you still have lots of buildings in urban areas.Cheers, Holger

Me again,I wanted to post one more fun screenshot. This is what happens when you overlap four large rectangles: each rectangle is treated separately so instead of 1x4500 trees (at the default max_autogen_tree setting and the autogen slider at extremely dense) you end up with 4x4500 trees = 18,000 trees per sq km :( Needless to say my system wasn't happy with that but it shows that FSX is very much "future proof" when it comes to autogen tree densities :( Cheers, Holger

We did all these tests a few years back. There is more to them too as well. We also went through the default system from top to bottom to find out why so many were struggling with it back then and to find out why my systems which were all top of the line at the time would also struggle with default in many places. The result of that in-depth analysis was the suggestions I made in the tuning thread which was posted a long time ago, far before many of the addons and hardware changes that have taken place since. I am working on a revised edition to include newer hardware and to address things I am seeing people do because they are assuming too much. The primary reason I am rewriting the document is: THE FIRST TWEAK that should be applied to the FSX.cfg file is none. And build on that as needed. What I saw over time is many understood what I posted when I said there is a range for most tweaks from the DEFAULT to value X, and, they followed the directions and got the results they were after, but some people were actually not reading and instead skipping through the thread and simply applying every edit for the FSX.cfg file I listed, booting the sim and then assume because they spent 2, 3 or 4K on a rig, they too could push the sliders to the max and install some big airport, city, or area a developer who is more interested in eye candy than product performance that slams systems to the cross with draw calls, and then

Holger and Nick,Thank you very much for your in-depth replies. I think it is fantastic when developers take that much time to explain their work and FSX to the ordinary user.Wolfgang