Read a comment in another thread regarding frame rates:>>Autogen accumulation bug - trim down terrain.cfgCan someone ellaborate on this a bit? I have a very large terrain.cfg and was wondering if it was victim to this bug. I've never heard of it before - but I'm certainly interested.BobKMEM

I didn't see the thread you are citing, but here's what I thought the autogen accumulation problem was:The issue was discovered shortly after the release of FS2004 - the "new" autogen, including the restaurants, power substations, and a variety of other objects, don't release from memory and rendering properly.Autogen loads as you fly, and fills in a viewable range around you. As you fly, it fills in the area in your view range, and removes the autogen from areas out of range in an attempt to keep your computer performing well.It was uncovered that the new autogen objects were not being removed from the view in a timely manner. The normal range for autogen objects is only a 1 or 2 miles. The new autogen objects has its "turn off" range set significantly higher, on the order of about 7-10 miles. So, as you fly forward, the new autogen populates your view at around 2 miles or so... BUT, if you were to turn around and reverse direction, a significant amount of that autogen which should have turned itself off will still be presant - this leads to a very high demand for processor and GPU cycles as it tries to draw all the objects. Obviously that leads to significant performance penalties.Unfortunately, there was no known fix other than disabling the new autogen objects... you can do this by renaming or removing the "AUTOGEN.XML" file in the "Flight Simulator 9Autogen" directory of your FS2004 install. This will remove all the new autogen objects. Although cute, many people have no problems not seeing the Chicken-on-a-Pole restaurant anymore. :) I tested the method out way back when, and indeed it does help with the autogen problem on my machine. Only you can say whether or not it helps your computer! THere will be an improvement off the bat as you are restricting the type of autogen, but the big improvement comes when you do some cross-country flying and turn and look behind you. This isn't an issue for those who always point the airplane in one direction, but if you have to make a 180 deg turn to land, you'll run into the autogen hiccups. Give it a whirl - if it doesn't fix much for you or improve your experience, you can always rename the file back to it's original and you'll be back to where you started.

Autogen appears when you fly near to it, like normal scenery.However it doesn't disapear until you are about four times further away than when normal scenery disapears - thats the bug.So if you fly over a town loads of extra autogen items are accumulating, all requiring extra work to be drawn.Some people have tried to limit the effect by cutting out things like burger bars and shopping malls that clutter up the town, but leaving things like silos in the countryside, where there is not so much scenery in general.They are trying to get a balance between speed and scenery.Search for "autogen bug"and you should come up with some of the suggested mods.Don't forget to back up first...EDIT: Doh! Someone was already answering as I was typing.

"you can do this by renaming or removing the "AUTOGEN.XML" file in the "Flight Simulator 9Autogen" directory of your FS2004 install."Just thought I should make a little correction here (sorry Greg)...The name of the file is acutally 'default.xml'."Some people have tried to limit the effect by cutting out things like burger bars and shopping malls that clutter up the town, but leaving things like silos in the countryside, where there is not so much scenery in general."I use a file that does just this. If you want it it's in the Avsim library and the filename is: fs9xml.zipI really didn't want to lose those barns and Silos! So I use that file and it partially helps to cure the 'newer XML Autogen' bug.Hope that helps,Jim

Excellent explanations - both of them Thanks guys.I always enter the field in the pattern, so I'm sure I'm taking hits from this.Thanks again.

I also want to thank you all for this particular thread. As I didn't purchase FS2004 immediately upon release, by the time I DID get it this autogen problem had been rehashed 100 times already. :DI'll sure try that file, Jim... I'd like to use at least SOME of the new autogen scenery.-Lindy :-rotor:-wave

Another thing worth mentioning is that some objects are actually defined in terrain.cfg and will remain even after you disable default.xml. Those are the kind of objects that follow roads, as well as utility lines. For example: Utility lines, phone poles, billboards etc.There are two ways to work around this. My preferd method:Open your fs9terrain.cfg file. Scroll down to "// utility lines", from there on, the autogen objects are defined. Simply erase those that you don't need. For example, to remove utility lines you'd erase all ten lines starting with "// utility lines".The ones I *keep* are:"Small road with telephone poles only""utility lines"+all types of bridges.I deleted the rest.Or, you can disable *all* vector objects:Simply change the 1 after TERRAIN_USE_VECTOR_OBJECTS= to 0 in your fs9.cfg file.The combination of renaming the default.xml file and disabling most vector objects resulted in a framerate increase from about 20 FPS to 50 FPS over Downtown Seattle on my system and the framerate no longer drops to single-digits if I make turns during a flight.It *is* kind of frustrating that we find ourselves disabling a key new feature of FS2004 and MS still doesn't want to admit there is a problem...

Ya know, when you install USARoads (if you have purchased it), this removes all the telephone poles, billboards, for you and in turn gives you every road in the USA. The fact they are now gone and I didn't have to remove them manually is an added boost! So I must be doing better now when I flip a "U-ee"Just a thought as I read the above.

Interesting - maybe something will come along that gives us much more realistic landclass data, but deletes all of the default.xml objects :-lol