Mostly I fly FS9, but on my occasional outings in FSX (I tend to use FS9 for commercial passenger & freight flights, FSX for slwer VFR flights in Cessnas and so on) one big annoyance is the way that the scenery continually 'pops' as the terrain is redrawn. Perhaps there is nothing much to be done about this? The worst aspect is the way autogen appears suddenly and not out in mid-distance as in FS9 but pretty much right up to my plane: suddenly an area of tress has twice as many trees in it, or a sparsely populated village suddenly has dense housing.

 

I know that this is the way FS works - up to a point. What would be nice is to get FSX to draw these features a bit (or a lot) sooner, so that the scenery is changing every few seconds around my a/c. Is there a tweak?

 

Thanks,

 

Martin

You could try changing the LOD_RADIUS in the FSX.cfg (making the number higher will load things sooner, so further in the distance) but unfortunately there is not tweak or solution of the autogen popping up. MS/Aces simply 'forgot' to use alpha-fade...

I did actually try changing it from 4.500000 up to 6.500000 (sorry, should have said this) but didn't see any change. May give it another go, but I think that this affects the sharpness of textures as you get further out from the user a/c rather than autogen drawing.

 

I know, unless I am remembering this wrongly, from my own dabbling with scenery creation that the drawing distance of objects is written into the bgl file, but I think there are other tweaks that will improve things..

Changing the LOD value will only affect the sharpness of ground texture and mesh. It wouldn't affect the autogen distance

Nothing you can do about it unfortunately. It would need a re-write of the terrain engine *cough*P3D 2.0*cough*.

Well, I am trying out one or two of the ORBX demo sceneries. The autogen pops up right under my aircraft almost, nothing sits still for a second. This doesn't happen at all in their demo videos. Are their videos 'fixed' then?

Well it shouldn't be as bad as you describe, so maybe try lowering your autogen density or add and try experimenting (with inserting different numbers) with these lines under [TERRAIN] in the FSX.cfg:

TERRAIN_MAX_AUTOGEN_TREES_PER_CELL=1200
TERRAIN_MAX_AUTOGEN_BUILDINGS_PER_CELL=800.

 

It's still really annoying and a true immersion breaker, but you learn to ignore it i guess.

Yes, I'll reduce the autogen..

It's more apparent with OrbX because the autogen is more dense. More objects = more visible popping. As long as the terrain engine is keeping up (no blurry textures) it's as good as it's going to get. You don't notice it as much from the cockpit as you do from external views.

 

The videos are edited to look as good as possible. Any scenes with visible popping are probably removed. Also they employ other tricks like post processing, recording at a lower speed and then speeding up the video + adding motion blur to hide any frame rate issues. They're promotional material/ads, meant to make the products look as good as possible.

Yes, quite! Well, no point expecting perfection I guess. The ORBX series looks worth putting up with this for, to say the least, but it is disconcerting.