Those of you who know a thing or two about scenery files in FS, can you please give your input on this?As you may know, I have been inverstigating the stutters that some people experience after flying for some time, especially on approach. Do a search on the forum to see what I'm talking about.Basically, FPS wil begin to drop on approach or after flying for a while. Toggling AI, or Autogen density to None, then back to whatever setting you used before, removes the stutters for a while. Turning autogen off altogether also seems to almost stop this from happening.I found a workaround some weeks ago - by deleting the default.xml file in FS9Autogen, the stutters mysteriously dissapeared even though the workload was not reduced that much (you only loose a few "extra" autogen objects). Some people reported double the FPS and the sudden drops in FPS were gone. It appeared as if FS was not releasing autogen until you're very far from the ground tile. From what I understand, the objects defined in the xml file are actually library objects, while the "normal" autogen is stored elsewhere.I stumbled across this very interesting thread:http://www.fsnordic.net/discussion/index.p...;threadid=15394(The forum system does not recognize the complete link. You need to copy the URL and past into the address bar)Could this have anything to do with the stutters I and many others experience with default FS9 scenery?Especially this line caught my attention:". It appears that FS was trying store all of my scenery file in its memory for a large area, this area went as far as Paris Orly and explains those reports, but not as far east as Amsterdam and explain the report why it didn't happen there. "This sounds almost exactly like the problem I and others have experienced with default FS9 scenery - autogen and scenery data is loaded as it appears, but is not released until you get VERY far from that ground tile (sometimes more than an hour away using a fast GA piston). The result is very low FPS after flying for a while, as autogen and scenery data accumulates, especially if you use a low zoom setting (0.5x) or pan around/use the external view a lot.Does the problem described in the FSNordic thread be the cause of low FPS with default FS9 scenery? If so, would it be possible to modify the default FS2004 .bgl's to fix the stutters? I'm certainly no expert on FS9 scenery, I just thought the problem described sounds almost exactly like the one I investigated. So what to the more experienced FS9 scenery designers think of this?

Hi Jimmy,I'm not a scenery expert, so I can't give you the infos you (or I gueass all of us) want to know. I just want to share an interesting obeservation of this problem, which I made yesterday. Maybe this is allready common knowledge.I got FS2004 on friday, and experienced this slow down yesterday the first tim. I took off from KSEA and headed north towards Paine Field. It was a fast (approx. 220 kts)low level (2500 ft) approx 25 miles flight over extremly dense autogen scenery, urban and suburban. I had locked fps at 20 and I got 20 allmost the whole time until I turned 180 degree into final to RW 16R, when fps dropped to 9 - 13. I cancelled my landing intensions and did some research instead. It turned out that I ONLY got these low fps when heading back south EXACTLY towards the high density autogen area, over which I just had been flown. When I headed to the east, west or back north the fps were immediately up to 20 again, no matter if a flew or slewed.BTW I got my 20 fps also for south-heading back by setting autogen to 0 and then back to extremly dense.Regards, Wolfgangedited to add sys specsP4 2.4 Ghz512MB DDRGeForce 3 Ti200Win XP Pro

This is the exact same thing I have experienced.You will not experience this problem unless you turn and head back over the same area you just flew over, like you did as you first headed north, then did a 180 and turned towards the dense autogen scenery you just flew past. Simply using the VC or external view and panning will also drop the framerate when you turn the view around.I'm fairly sure this is a flaw in FS9, which affects all systems. If you look at our systems and compare, we have totally different setups:I'm running an AMD, you have a P4I'm running an ATI Radeon, you're using a Nvidia GeforceThe OS is the same, but others who use Win98 have also reported the exact same problem. I also tested this on a work PC, an Athlon 950 MHz, 384 MB RAM, Matrox G400 videocard and it behaved exactly the same way (though of course, FPS was alreay at a low 9 from the start and dropped to like 4-5 after fyling for a while).Did you try renaming FS9Autogendefault.xml to e.g. default.bak and then repeat the flight?I'm not demanding a patch tomorrow (or yesterday), but I'd really to know what's going on. I've seen so many posts about this EXACT same problem. Even if it does not happen on EVERY system in the world, it does happen on enough systems to warrant further investigation.There are countless posts about performance problems that are most likely caused by user error or faulty hardware/drivers. You simply can't blame MS when the sim freezes for 3 minutes on takeoff, or when the PC reboots by itself every 5 minutes...However, when several people with completely different systems, report the exact same problem, it's time to start looking closer at it.I really want an explanation from Microsoft on this one. Was this how they entended it to be? By design? Is it some odd hardware or software conflict or a flaw in the FS9 code itself (most likely, since deletign default.xml seems to fix this for most people)? Are they aware of this problem at all? Are they working on a patch or workaround?Maybe if AVSim themselves sent an email to MS, they would actually bother replying. I've sent them an email some weeks ago but never got a reply.

>Did you try renaming FS9Autogendefault.xml to e.g.>default.bak and then repeat the flight?Not yet! Will try it tonight, when I'll do some further testing.BTW, I had the same or similar problem in FS2002, mostly when flying over a specific type dense autogen pine forests (e. g. in Scandinavia especially near ESSA)) when I still had my old system (PIII 800Mhz, 512MB SDRAM). But the impact then was not as heavy, so I never tested it out. BTW it disappeared when I upgraded to my current sys.RegardsWolfgang, Innsbruck/Austria (LOWI) P4 2.4 Ghz512MB DDRGeForce 3 200TiWin XP Pro

I had an almost identical experience a few days ago. A lot of times I fly short hops and dont notice this here. This one was different. I took off out of Honolulu and flew to a few of the other islands to the west. After about 30-40 minutes of flying I headed back and as i got within sight (about 20 miles) of the big buildings on the north shore my frame rates began to tank considerably. I was mid twenties and it went down to the low teens and had some serious stutter. it happened every time I looked back or turned to see the metro area. I had not seen it this bad before and I do have my default autogen renamed. I am in agreement that there is something wrong with this and if this is how MS intended things to be we got even bigger problems, especially if you want to do add-on scenery that is graphically intensive. Can you imagine something like a Simflyers Airport not getting released from memory!!!!Hornit

My guess is that the autogen is being drawn a second time when you head back to where you originated. IOW, the old autogen hasn't been released yet, _and_ it is being drawn again on top of it - doubling up.It's just a guess.I renamed my default.xml and redid parts of my terrian.cfg so that I would get power lines and bridges, etc on the sparse setting. I've been happy ever since.

I did the rename thing to my Default.xml and this was a BIG help- but the underlying problem is still there, just as some of th earlier posts in this thread describe. Looking at- or heading back- on the same heading to that dense area causes a noticable FPS slowdown.Best,Joel

I too have this problem. Until it's fixed, have you tried this workaround? Set up a hotkey to refresh your scenery. It is quicker, easier, and less annoying than turning autogen off and then on or the other methods mentioned.I believe that this was originally posted by JohnCi and I use the key chord that he suggested, Shift+Ctrl+S. You can enable that hotkey by inserting:REFRESH_SCENERY=83,11into the KEYBOARD_MAIN section of your FS9.cfg file. It works for me, try it. R-

I have assigned a hot key, but it does not work for me. When I hit it the sim pauses for half a second, a window opens, it says loading..., the bar get filled out, but after the pause the fps are as low as before. What helps is to to turn autogen off and on again. Would it be possibel to assigen a hotkey to this action? Probably with FSUIPC, but I'm not sure if I should buy the shareware version.But - I found out, that setting autogen back from very dense to just dense, permanently cures the problem. I prefer this to disabling the xml autogen, because as far as I found out, adjusting autogen with the slider gives you a nice mixture of the different autogen objects and is not just eliminating one specific type of autogen like disableing the xml autogen does.I'm not sure, if i like this finding, because this might indicate, that the problem depends on how powerfull your sys is and MS does not see a reason to release a patch for this issue. They might say, use the stting, which fits your system (which is the concept of the whole sim).WolfgangWolfgang

I think one serious issue is that for some odd reason FS02 or 04 DOES NOT utilize the full complement of available physical RAM. It's unfortunate, but if you have 1GB of RAM for example you will fine the most FS uses in realtime is maybe 350mb (for FS9.exe), then the OS uses another 100 or so, and the remaining 550mb sits there doing nothing. The swap file is used at about the same rate as the free physical RAM is, so your swap file may be around 350 or so as well. Again, the available free ram does not appear to be used. Now solve this one!Noel

Try to disable SWAP FILE in the control panel! I can assure you windows WILL use your physical memory! ;) , besides you'll get a faster boot and less hdd activity in memory intenssive tasks...Jos

Well, MS say on their own site that by the time a version of FS is released they have moved a fair way into the next version so will not release patches unless it's critical. Their definition of critical will be constant crashes not just framerate slowdowns, they will expect people to throw hardware at it to aleviate the problem. The fact that it is less stable for many of us and has this kind of bug won't do anything because where else can we go for this kind of sim? There are contenders but for many of us I think we just have to suck it back and do our best to get decent framerates when landing.I am betting there will be no patch because the flight sim community doesn't have organisation to offer any clout. Look at all the reviews of FS2004 saying how wonderful it is (and it is in many respects, pity it can get hard to enjoy it sometimes), that whats important to MS, image, not things that detract from the experience of hard core flyers...Just my opinion of course based on plenty of experience of the software industry, I'll be happy to be proven wrong! :-)Steven

Whilst this problem is being reported as an autogen problem, I happen to believe it is a problem with any object called from the FS9 object library. I spent a fair amount of time performing tests using my own scenery files created using default objects in the FS9 library. As an example of one of tests I did, I created a series of objects with a view distance of 8 kilometers. When I flew towards the objects, they (correctly) appeared when I was 8 kilometers from them and not before. However, after passing them they did not disappear after I was 8 kilometers past them. They just stayed stuck in view - to the limit I had set for visibility. As far as I am concerned, any object should have a specific view distance and if you are further than that distance then the object should not display.

History Repeats Itself....if we would only learn from it.FS98 - GoodFS2000 - TroubleFS2002 - GoodFS2004 - TroubleI haven't been into flightsimming prior to FS98, but I hear the trend holds prior to that.Guess which sims I've used! See y'all in FS2006.....maybe.Glenn Willmot

I happen to believe that its a texturing issue. I had been running the sim without issue for a few months, now suddenly, I have stutters. Not as bad as some, but a solid .5 - 1 sec pause. It occurs with me even if I delete default.xml over default terrain, however it does seem to occur only at low altitude. Clouds exacerbate the problem. What really compounds it is flying at dawn or dusk. Whenever there is a transition, be it in sky color because the sun is rising/setting, or visibilty because of flying in and out of weather, I get horrible stutters.sg