Well I'm not so sure on the airports - I have 5 of theirs.... I wonder what the loading distance is? Because my default flight in KDLH is quite far from the nearest Orbx payware - they don't seem to load into the VAS that far away.

 

I'm surprised too, but I've tried and tested it and noted the numbers in the different scenarios. I have a great deal more than 5 including all of their freeware, and it makes a massive VAS difference to me to disable the ones I'm not using. Almost a 20% gain, not to be sniffed at....

But where is your default flight? All I know is that you mentioned KSFO. That's right on the doorstep of their regions (well right in NCA) and airports. My default is in Duluth, MN - far away from any region or airport.

But where is your default flight? All I know is that you mentioned KSFO. That's right on the doorstep of their regions (well right in NCA) and airports. My default is in Duluth, MN - far away from any region or airport.

 

KSFO isn't my default flight, and I wasn't comparing VAS usage of my default flight.

 

I set up a saved flight, at the gate at FB KSFO, in the NGX, with high UT2 traffic.

 

I tested the VAS usage with all of my ORBX airports disabled, and then enabled. There was a 15-20% difference each time between the ORBX airports being disabled and enabled. Tested a couple of times in case it was a fluke. Maybe it's just some peculiarity of my setup, but before, I couldn't even get to the active runway at SFO without an OOM, now my VAS usage is several hundred MB lower which makes a huge difference.

 

EDIT - And Duluth is making me think of Fargo! Love that show :lol:

 

2nd EDIT - I see what you mean about it being on the doorstep of other ORBX airports, however KRDD is the nearest ORBX airport to KSFO that I own, which is ~200 miles away. I don't own another ORBX airport for some considerable way north after that. So it's not like I'm testing somewhere which is within 50 miles of 10 ORBX airports.

FSX loads a footprint of ANY photoscenery in VAS whether you are flying anywhere near it or not.  ORBX's products are not primarily photoscenery, but they do contain tons of areas of photoreal mountains, reefs, estuaries etc... that blend in with the landclass textures and make everything look awesome.  if you only have one or two regions, not a big deal,  but if you have all of them, and you also have global, which makes sure they are ALL running at the same time, makes a big difference.  Also the Airports are all photoreal, so they add to the issue

 

FWIW my strategy is just to keep FTX central on Global Hybrid at all times,  which is a bit of a compromise setting, and just disable any region I'm not using with SCE, I have them all organized in groups for fast enabling/disabling.  make sure to backup your scenery.cfg if you ever have to load any other FTX state (to upgrade a region for example)

 

I am looking to offload my GA flying to p3d soon, and just do my tubeliner flying in FSX,  that should help a bit too.

 

 

This same strategy works if you don't have ORBX but have a lot of various PR loaded,  you'll have the same issues.

I'm just debating that every scenery loads into the VAS no matter where you are.  There must be a distance where this happens.

 

In Duluth I'm more than 1000 miles away from any Orbx regions... and the closest airport then is KJAC.  With all my scenery enabled I'm still only see 1.1 - 1.2GB on initial load.  

Do you have these 2 files in your nca scenery folder?

 

ADEX_FTX_NCA_KHAF_Half_Moon_Bay_CVX.bgl

 

ADEX_FTX_NCA_KHAF_Half_Moon_Bay_CVX_CVX.bgl

 

Or

 

ADEX_FTX_NCA_0O5_Rodgers.bgl

 

and

 

ADEX_FTX_NCA_0O5_University.bgl

 

Delete the Rodgers.bgl and the cvc_cvx.bgl

 

See if those changes fix your high vas

Do you have these 2 files in your nca scenery folder?

 

ADEX_FTX_NCA_KHAF_Half_Moon_Bay_CVX.bgl

 

ADEX_FTX_NCA_KHAF_Half_Moon_Bay_CVX_CVX.bgl

 

Or

 

ADEX_FTX_NCA_0O5_Rodgers.bgl

 

and

 

ADEX_FTX_NCA_0O5_University.bgl

 

Delete the Rodgers.bgl and the cvc_cvx.bgl

 

See if those changes fix your high vas

 

Thanks, I'm a bit sceptical about deleting files when I don't know why....what does this do? Are these just large photo areas that consume a lot of resource?

You could just turn them to OFF. I agree, deleting is a bit drastic. And if no improvement, turn to ON.

Thank You very much everyone for this ongoing informative thread here.

Although there maybe no real way out of our "FSX-VAS-issue", it is at least really good to know that there may be some workarounds for instance or things to be set accordingly to gain some more "VAS-room" so to speak.

 

You could just turn them to OFF. I agree, deleting is a bit drastic. And if no improvement, turn to ON.

+1

That's the way i'd also go as it is a good one to stay save of potential errors.

Don't delete , just rename the extension to .bak

 

That way FSX won't read the file... And you can just take out the .bak to use again if something goes wrong.

the cvx_cvx is an error I read it in the Orbx forums. Same with the 0o5 duplicates. You are supposed to delete them.

 

 

I'm just debating that every scenery loads into the VAS no matter where you are.  There must be a distance where this happens

 

there is a footprint of every photoscenery loaded no matter where you are.  there IS a distance where that scenery loads into memory completely.  I own all ORBX regions and 10-15 airports and there is a difference of roughly 700-800 meg VAS between ORBX scenery loaded and not,  with corresponding levels of usage if I only have one or a few active.  there are other photosceneries I have on my setup, that I see varying levels of usage with them as well, and I test this in a distant airport in the Sahara.

 

NGX and t7 use about 700-800 in my tests,  similar levels of VAS when I increase the LOD to 6.5  (Unless my entire flight is in an orbx region or PR area, I actually set my LOD to 5.5 and haven't had too many problems)  Also Autogen on max uses quite a bit.

 

I haven't fully tested if mesh resolution has any effect, but as higher levels of mesh resolution take longer to load in the sim, I expect it might.

There's two ways to do 3d scenery objects -- the models can be compiled into specific scenery (called geo-locked) or they can be compiled into libraries and placed in any location.  FSX at least scans every object library.  I don't know how much data it actually maintains in VAS.  This is different than actually rendering the object.

 

scott s.

.

Something to try: I was testing a new Orbx airstrip with a nice freeware Texan, as I taxied along toward the grass strip I was getting repeated memory dings and fps of 10 or below. This is crazy. I went to the FTX Day button and activated it", went and did the flight again, fps back to 25-30 and no memory warnings.... I think its the memory draining street lighting poles still active during the day, I don't know why it switched. It may not help, but its something I learnt this week that may.

In order to determine once and for all exactly what is loading during your flight, you should run Process Monitor with only FSX being monitored. This is how I found out that even though I had Orbx regions turned off, Orbx Autogen was still being loaded into FSX (these are the Orbx files in FSX/Scenery/World/Scenery). They didn't cause me any problems but it upset me that I had returned FTX Central to the default and these files were still being loaded. Here's how I set up the Process Monitor (this will probably be added to the AVSIM CTD Guide in a new version to be released some day soon:

Setting up the Process Monitor for FSX – Another investigative tool used to pin down a situation where FSX/P3D freezes, crashes, or stutters/pauses during a flight is to run a utility called Process Monitor - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896645. During your flight, this utility monitors activity such as calling textures, AI aircraft schedules, ATC, weather updates, and scenery loading. When FSX/P3D stutters or FPS drop dramatically you simply write down the time it occurred. This is important as thousands of entries are made every minute, every second. Continue doing this throughout the flight. Of course, if it freezes, you will know what was going on before the sim froze. This utility will not show you a definitive cause of your issue but it will show you what add-ons were being loaded about when you received the stutter, the long pause(s), and the freeze and you can further investigate by disabling that scenery, that aircraft, or whatever might have caused the event. One member used this utility to determine that My Traffic X, version 5.4c was the cause of a BEX/StackHash/NTDLL.dll crash he was getting. It was easy to disable My Traffic X in the Scenery Library and find that FSX no longer crashed.

AVSIM recommends you do not run a flight any longer than 60 minutes as the Process Monitor log becomes quite large. For a 60 minutes flight, expect the file to be at least as large as 8GB’s or tens of millions of captured events. Make sure you delete the log or move it to another drive after you have finished your testing to free up HDD space. Another recommended tip is to make sure you use system time to mark the time of each event and do not use an external clock unless they are sync’d. Going through one minute of a glitch is a massive amount of data needed to be reviewed (it goes fast as thousands of entries just show a scenery being loaded).

To run this utility properly, you need to capture only FSX/P3D events. It would be nearly impossible to find a possible glitch if Windows events or other system activities were being logged too. AVSIM recommends opening of the Process Monitor when you are on the active runway and preparing to takeoff to save space on your HDD:

Open Process Monitor. Click on the Filter tab and then Filter….
Display entries matching these conditions:
Where it says Architecture, click on that and select “Process Name”
Go next to the blank box and click on that and select FSX or P3D.exe and make sure “Include” is shown (FSX or P3D must be running when you do this!!). Once completed, click on Add and then click OK at the bottom of the form and Go Fly.

You can use the utility while in Full Screen mode or Windowed Mode. In Windowed Mode you can monitor what is happening instantly but it is best to run Process Monitor in Full Screen (unless you are seeing freezes in Windowed Mode).

When the flight is finished, immediately go to the Process Monitor application and hit Ctrl+E on your keyboard to capture the events (event logging will continue until you do this). Shutdown FSX/P3D and begin your investigating!

 

As stated above, this process will take up a lot of HDD or SSD space.  My recommendation is to extract the Process Monitor on a HDD that has a lot of space left on it as the log will be built in the Process Monitor directory.  Once you stop the sim, it is easy to scroll through the logs to see exactly what was loaded during the process.  You may see a lot of surprises like I did.  Again, make sure you set it up so that just FSX is loaded then only FSX and any FSX addon will be loaded during the session.  Don't forget to delete the log file when you are finished as it will be taking up a lot of disk space.

 

Hope this helps.

 

Best regards,