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Simheaven w2xp sceneries + the new autogen

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Thanks for clearing things up, Tony. I will have a shot at generating a VFR-Objects OSM scenery one of these days. I like reading the small print and hacking-the-hell-out of the X-Plane tools we have.

 

I think once Laminar gets around creating Europe autogen (they are committed to that now that US is almost "done" and frankly it's not such a big thing after all), most of these issues will resolve just by updating X-Plane.

 

The BIG step will be to have an airport gateway type of approach to actual landmarks. People creating famous landmarks and uploading them to Laminar for them to roll them out for all users. It's not trivial since "lego bricks" can't build the Statue of Liberty, but I think some type of standardized approach can me implemented.

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Belligerent X-Plane 12 enthusiast on Apple M1 Max 64GB

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I recommend you to skip stuff from SimHeaven. The Europe Library has very bad LOD parameters, bad performance and causes micro-stutters on many systems (tested this exhaustingly).

 

I'm going to have to agree with you on this. I was only using the Europe Library without the W2XP and I was getting 25 fps in London City. Today after reading your comment I ran it without Europe Library and with same settings and I get 50+ fps. Won't be using the Europe Library anymore. Thanks for sharing.


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I gave up developing the application for this reason. People were expecting it to produce ORBX scenery out of the box, and to get good results you need to fix and experiment, and it can be time consuming. I was getting a little tired of being blamed for trees on a runway and other issues which could be fixed by reading the instructions and using the application as a development tool and not a magic scenery solution :-)

 

Well Tony, I can perfectly understand your reasons for letting it go. That would indeed be frustrating. I do sincerely hope that you know that for many of us, your efforts have improved the simulator to a level I wouldn't consider flying without.

 

For me, in the Canadian regions I prefer to fly, the difference between OSM scenery (I use the Simheaven compiled W2XP scenery) and default XP scenery is night and day. I get to see my house (and detached garage) in the OSM based scenery; in default XP, I don't even get to see my section of the city. Quite simply, if it were not for the OSM based scenery available only because YOU created the tool for it to be made, I would still be doing the bulk of my flying in FSX and/or P3D. Or, very likely considering the issues I've had with those platforms, I might simply not be flying any sim at all.

 

~~~~

 

If that sounds like a rousing endorsement for OSM based products like W2XP, or for creating your own OSM based scenery via Tony's excellent tool, it's because it is. I think sometimes the W2XP scenery gets a bad rap because Europe is such a performance hog due to the overwhelming amount of data it contains. On the North American side of the pond, if your region has good coverage in OSM, and yet is a normal, sparsely populated (compared to Europe) part of NA, then OSM scenery really can't be beat.

 

~~~~

 

Also, I think that the whole spirit of XP is truly underpinned by user created solutions. There's a place for commercial developers for sure, but the extremely rich freeware scene (perhaps epitomized by the official 'crowd-sourcing' of gateway airports) is one of the key attractions of the platform for many users. To suggest that one is better to wait for a 'real' product optimized by a 'commercial' developer, rather than to enjoy one of the many free enhancements to the platform created by people who are doing it purely out of enjoyment is simply... I don't know. I just don't know. It makes me a bit sad.

 

After all, there's no harm in trying something when it doesn't have a cost attached. if it doesn't work, delete it! Try something else! Make your own! The point is, there's no need to wait for a commercial developer to bring something to market when we have the ability to create things ourselves, and the things created by others as a labour of love and then freely shared can serve to fill extremely niche areas that no commercial developer would ever touch.

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Jim Stewart

Milviz Person.

 

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Thanks for the kind words Jim, and I hope we continue to keep the open community and freeware spirit going for X-Plane. I won't argue that we don't need better payware aircraft, but I think scenery-wise, it's going to be a hard sell in some areas with the amount of high quality freeware seen lately. Also, it's really amazing seeing the effort users are putting in to populate all the airports (I see groups doing Germany and UK at the moment). I know these are lego-brick airports, but people are willing to put in the time and share their work to improve the sim and compared to flat lifeless landscape we had when 10 came out, there is a big difference. It would be such a huge shame to see everything go payware like in FSX/P3D (which also doesn't mean it's going to be better)

 

I did make some custom autogen sceneries and also updated W2XP to place autogen instead of using exclusions, but it didn't go down well. People complained that they hated autogen and wanted to keep the 1-1 buildings. So some like it, some hate it :-).  Norway Pro is mostly autogen with obstacles but placed around address points so it's accurate and lines up with photoscenery very nicely. It performs far better than W2XP scenery and is the best way forward at the moment until the technology catches up. I am currently fixing a pile of bugs with roads and leafy airports for the update to GB Pro (where I am scrapping world-models and all the other libraries so I can create more efficient instancing friendly models).

 

Personally, I think anyone who tries to sell OSM scenery is going to have a hard time. There are issues with the data and it's very inconsistent. A company or person would either have to clean it all up (and give back to the community for free as per the OSM license) or use other data sources (and good and cheap data is hard to find, believe me I've searched and searched). I have seen numerous cases of people selling W2XP or OSM2XP scenery in their own packages when the license prohibits it, so there is always someone who is going to try :-).

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I whole heartedly support Jim's comments and find Simheaven's photoscenery combined with W2XP works a treat. I am lucky to have a modern rig on which to run this load, so your mileage will vary depending on this and other factors. It's nice that each simmer has a free choice about what works best.

 

One question Tony: if I have World Models Library installed, do I get any extra benefit from having Europe Library installed as well? Will Europe Library help XPL render auto gen where there is no OSM?

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No, the only thing it does it change the existing autogen artwork into more European style, but it doesn't add or take anything away from the scenery.

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Also, I think that the whole spirit of XP is truly underpinned by user created solutions. There's a place for commercial developers for sure, but the extremely rich freeware scene (perhaps epitomized by the official 'crowd-sourcing' of gateway airports) is one of the key attractions of the platform for many users. To suggest that one is better to wait for a 'real' product optimized by a 'commercial' developer, rather than to enjoy one of the many free enhancements to the platform created by people who are doing it purely out of enjoyment is simply... I don't know. I just don't know. It makes me a bit sad.

 

Jimmy I totally agree with your view on the freeware scene. It's just that when you're used to commercial products, "videogames", it's sometimes hard to adjust to the rough edges in X-Plane. I love the fact that one can configure X-Plane to his personal preference (I have been optimizing my install for years, dealing with every aspect of the sim). Sometimes though, I'd be more than happy to shell out a few bucks to get a more polished version of stuff that is available for free. These "rough edges" are also something that turns off potential new users (which X-Plane desperately needs).

 

I think the solution would be that Laminar would switch to a subscription based model (something like $99 a year), to build a cash flow that enables them to hire more developers and artists, eventually speeding up the whole process of "getting there".


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Belligerent X-Plane 12 enthusiast on Apple M1 Max 64GB

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Simheaven (w2xp) + orthosceneries in Europe = 30+ fps with the IXEG B737. 

 

It's beautiful. You should try it. 

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I can only speak for myself, but depiction of my hometown and some surrounding European cities is from 0 to 100 between naked XP and World2XP. Actually the representation using World2XP (+ HD Mesh) is by far the best among all consumer simulators I know todate, including full ORBX stuff under Prepar3d (which may or may not change when ORBX Germany will be released). 

 

The US may be another story, but even there I find World2XP an improvement.

 

Kind regards, Michael

I agree with you. The W2XP-sceneries are absolutely amazing! No comparaiosn with the default ones. And the framerates in the default US-sceneries aren't better than with the ones from W2Xp for Europe...I dont understand the complains from other users.


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I agree! World2XP EU & Mesh v3 are an excellent combination. Smooth simulation and xp 10.50 b7 loads fast. Very happy simmer. :wub:


A pilot is always learning and I LOVE to learn.

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From my experience, the only reason for poor performance with W2XP scenery is that the hardware is unable to handle it. Particularly VRAM can be maxed out pretty quickly with photoscenery, W2XP and detailed aircraft. However, as long as you balance your settings properly so you don't max out RAM and VRAM (use a tool like nvidia inspector to check usage) W2XP sceneries like those from Simheaven will not be a performance issue.

Also, keep in mind that some graphics settings will heavily influence performance. From experience, car traffic is very heavy on performance, as are water reflections and of course AA.

 

I mostly fly in Switzerland and Austria where OSM coverage is pretty good, so in places like Zürich there are a lot of objects and naturally, performance will suffer, but even with my midrange system (i7-4790k, GTX770 4GB) it rarely goes lower than 30 fps. That's with ZL17 photoscenery (Ortho4XP), Simheaven scenery, Europe library, and a lot of airport sceneries.

 

There are some great freeware tools available for XP that can improve performance. I very highly recommend 3j-fps control, which will try to keep a user-defined framerate (30 fps, for example). If the fps decrease below that value, the drawing distance for objects is adjusted "on-the-fly", so it's a smooth transition. When the framerate increases again it will re-adjust the drawing distance to the normal value. It can also control cloud densitiy in a similar way.

http://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/files/file/31097-3jfps-control-keep-good-fps-by-automatic-adaption-of-view-distance-cloud-quality/

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The biggest cause of the problems in the Europe scenery is not necessarily the number of objects, but the variety of objects. The autogen system works in X-Plane because it uses instancing. This allows many of the same objects to be drawn in one call as opposed to repeated calls, greatly speeding up the rendering. e.g. If there are 1000 houses and they only use 5 different models, then instancing will really work well here. 

 

There are two problems with the European scenery (but this effects all 0.7.4 and pre sceneries):

 

- Far too much variety and randomisation of objects to try and match the building footprints. Instead of 5 different building types, there are hundreds of little coloured buildings. Not only is this bad, in my opinion it looks ugly as well. We tried to get cities working as well using this approach, but the sheer amount of objects required meant it was near to impossible to do.

 

- OSM3D. This was a feature I added for cities that use wall, roof and layout information in OSM to build and texture a unique object on the fly. e.g. The Berlin TV Tower or Empire State Building. This worked great until people started mapping houses everywhere with the roof colours and shapes. So now you have thousands of unique objects which blows up memory usage, kills instancing and causes huge loading times (mixed with smart exclusions)

 

We generally don't see this issues outside of the big European cities because they don't have this OSM3D information to the extent Germany, Austria and Switzerland do. If you generate your own scenery and turn off OSM3D and reduce the variety of objects (and footprint tolerance), there is an instant performance improvement. My Denmark, Massachussets and Norway sceneries have thousands and thousands of buildings, but only about 20 different models are used, so it performs and loads quite quickly. GB Pro still uses mostly world-models so it loads slowly but I am working on fixing this by removing all libraries and restricting the buildings to all fit on one single texture sheet.

 

Hopefully next time Simheaven will use the last beta I did and turn off all the extra candy and OSM3D (I think landmarks are better served with real objects). I think this will greatly improve the performance for everyone and probably make it look better as well :-)

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There are some great freeware tools available for XP that can improve performance. I very highly recommend 3j-fps control, which will try to keep a user-defined framerate (30 fps, for example). If the fps decrease below that value, the drawing distance for objects is adjusted "on-the-fly", so it's a smooth transition. When the framerate increases again it will re-adjust the drawing distance to the normal value. It can also control cloud densitiy in a similar way.
http://forums.x-plan...-cloud-quality/

 

Thanks for the tip!


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Belligerent X-Plane 12 enthusiast on Apple M1 Max 64GB

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Most of you here saying that W2XP doesn't decrease performance is just silly.

 

If I situate my self in an E-110 over New York with the stock autogen the minimum FPS I'll get is 30+. Now if I use W2XP with same settings I'll dip down to 17fps and stutters plus the scenery and buildings look more ugly in my opinion. Like the poster above said too much can sometimes be more ugly.  Considering that I'd had to lower the object and road density a lot to achieve the same fps using W2XP I simply see no point in using it. I also don't consider my pc to be a pushover but using W2XP brings it to its knees without making it look better. My 2 cents on this subject.

 

Regards.


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If I situate my self in an E-110 over New York with the stock autogen the minimum FPS I'll get is 30+. Now if I use W2XP with same settings I'll dip down to 17fps and stutters plus the scenery and buildings look more ugly in my opinion.

 

What are your settings? Your hardware is faster than mine, yet I just tried flying low (3000ft) right over Manhattan in the Rotate MD-80 (a seriously performance hungry aircraft), using HD Mesh V3, W2XP, all the Drzewiecki NY airports as well as some other airport addon scenery. With all this I get a solid 17+ fps, rather low but very much flyable and without noticeable stutters. And as soon as I turn away from Manhattan it jumps to 25+ fps.

My settings are:

daNaJxCh.jpg

 

As for being ugly, well I have to agree there. :wink: However, to me the benefit of having accurately sized buildings in the right places is, especially for VFR flying (which is what I do most of the time) a huge advantage.

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