P3DV2 LOD Radius and MSE Photoscenery

[Guest]

I've tried out adding some MSE photo scenery to P3DV2 and frankly it looks better in FSX to my old eyes.

 

I think part of the problem is that P3DV2 LOD_Radius can't go beyond 6.5 and when flying in FSX, I'm almost always at 9.5.  I have tried editing the Prepar3D.CFG and setting the LOD_Radius higher but LM seem to have capped the value at 6.5 regardless of what I enter manually.

 

There most definitely is a LOD_Radius in affect for photo scenery under P3DV2 ... that processing seems unchanged.

 

Anyone else come to the same conclusion?

 

Rob

[jabloomf1230 2,445]

I never see much difference even in FSX when going beyond 6.5, although I know that people have demonstrated that it does matter. The only way to really tell is to conduct those false color texture experiments like someone did in that LOD thread that you started. If you sift through the official LM forum you see posts by LM staff noting that this or that setting in the CFG file which used to do something in P3d 1.4 may no longer be referenced in the new p3d2 code. I haven't read anything about LOD, but it would surprise me that they capped it at 6.5 to reduce OOM errors. If I was trying to protect users from themselves, that setting would probably be the first that I would cap.

[Guest]

 

 

If I was trying to protect users from themselves, that setting would probably be the first that I would cap.

 

I tend to agree with you, but it would be nice if they re-open the door for us to inflict such horrific consequences of an OOM ... we're big boys, we can handle it.

 

With the MSE Ultra scenery, the LOD Radius appears to be more noticeable.  That brings me to a good topic, has LM listed what Prepar3D.CFG setting work, don't work, or are now capped off in V2?  Might head over to LM and ask.

[jabloomf1230 2,445]

I just happened to notice a few times that they have responded to posts regarding the more oddball FSX tweaks (mostly ones that either I never thought worked anyway or worse made the app unstable) and they said that they weren't sure if that variable was even read from the CFG file anymore. I think that if you narrow your question to the one posed in this thread, one of LM staff will answer you. If you just ask a blanket question, they may not answer, because they may not even know everything that still gets referenced or not. When you look back at the various ACES blogs and those done by the "non-Microsoft curious", it looks to me like a number of CFG entries are there just for legacy purposes. They may have done something useful at one point in time, but now they probably are just a dead end.

[Guest]

If you just ask a blanket question, they may not answer, because they may not even know everything that still gets referenced or not.

 

I'm pretty sure LM will have to know everything in the CFG, they may not want to share the info or have time to share the info (probably more accurate) -- but certainly anything related to graphics processing they must know about.  I honestly don't expect a response, just tossed out the question in hope.  I tend to agree with you that the more "mysterious" the Prepar3D.CFG is, the less likely people are going to mess with it and hence less of a headache for LM.

[RWFeldman 159]

Why wouldn't you expect a response? You asked a legitimate question and deserve a response. Ive heard all about this great support but I'm not seeing it. Sounds like developers and others are sharing the same thought! Wish all my customers were as nice/understanding as you Rob but thats not life.

 

http://www.prepar3d.com/forum-5/?mingleforumaction=viewtopic&t=4626.0

[meshman 109]

I've tried out adding some MSE photo scenery to P3DV2 and frankly it looks better in FSX to my old eyes.

I hope this doesn't sound freakey... Last night I decided to load a photo scenery product I made a few years back. First to see how it did in P3D and second, to see how it did on the new system I finally got around to building. The old system was an i930 (stock) with a nVidia 560GTX. New system is a 3570 (clocked at 4.0), lots of 2133 ram and a nVidia 770. I wasn't impressed at all with the results on the new machine. So I had this thought "Wonder what the guy down in Concord has tried?", now I know the results somewhat mirror mine.

 

Luckily for me, I still have a pretty fresh install of FSX, so I'll add the prior work to that and see how it renders. The product did get some nice comments from those who bought it. I'm just glad they were all using FSX... :lol:

 

Some day, I'll see if there is a difference in the compilers from FSX and P3D2.

[jabloomf1230 2,445]

Why wouldn't you expect a response? You asked a legitimate question and deserve a response.

 

 

It is one thing to ask the software's author about a specific issue, like the LOD_RADIUS setting. It is another thing to make a post and ask, "Oh yeah, give me a list of all the CFG settings that really don't do anything." Besides, we already know that most of those tweaks don't do anything useful anyway, so who really cares if a specific "mysterious" CFG setting has been disabled in P3d2 or not.

 

BTW, the false color texture test of LOD_RADIUS in FSX can be found in this post by boez:

 

http://forum.avsim.net/topic/423417-lod-radius15-but-its-not-about-distance/#entry2824348

 

One thing that was evident from the testing is that LOD_RADIUS did not appear to be limited in FSX. On the other hand, when you start to consider visibility, clouds and the resolution of most monitors, even though FSX was drawing more detailed textures at a wider radius, it was pretty hard to really tell the difference.

[Guest]

 

 

Why wouldn't you expect a response?

 

Because it's not a requirement of the SDK to know all the settings -- that would be the only "in" to leverage a response from LM.  In other words, developers writing products for LM shouldn't need to know all the settings in the Prepar3D.CFG ... it's a "nice to know", but not required to complete any development work for P3DV2.  I'm actually surprised they haven't moved all the values from the .CFG into the registry or into .XML format.  The .CFG format is actually a left over from the days of using .INI files.

 

I know if someone asked me to please give them all the information regarding my application configuration, I'd ignore the request unless they were a high paying customer that had invested A LOT in our apps.  It really wouldn't be a high priority as there are much more important tasks to accomplish.  In LM's case, they have a pretty healthy list of things to be addressed/fixed so I would expect my request to go unresponsive.