The past few days I've seen flocks of birds flying overhead while I was on the ramp, and yesterday on a flight over the AZ / Cali desert I looked down and saw black dots over a dry lake bed. When I zoomed in they were vultures or raptors circling. I don't recall seeing these before in P3D. Are they because I turned my special effects all the way up, or did they come with ORBX Vector or OpenLC NA? They're very realistic and cool ...

I learned at the ORBX forum that the flocks of white birds are in Global and likely NA, and that the circling vultures are thermal indicators.

If you want to add on more birds and other animals, give Wildlife+ by Ivar Danielsen a try. It injects flocks of birds as autogen. It includes land, sea, and air wildlife and works perfect with P3d.

There were a few people a bit critical about the affect on frame rate of Wildlife+. I think this may have mainly been on older PC's, but irrespective, I think I've got a fix which I'll put in place once the current project I'm working on is done, so v3 of Wildlife+ shouldn't be too far away.

There were a few people a bit critical about the affect on frame rate of Wildlife+.

Wildlife+ does have an effect even on modern PC's because the sim objects it injects end up being managed by the main sim job (usually core zero) which is already busy managing the sim. Even a 12 core processor is being bottlenecked by the work done by the main sim job on the first assigned core.

 

But it works brilliantly in rural/wilderness areas which is exactly what it was designed for.

 

What Wildlife+ users need to do in rural areas is make sure they limit their frame-rate so that the main sim job isn't flooded with work pumping out an unnecessary 60+ frame-rate in rural areas. If the main sim job is overworked pumping out high fps, their simulator goes into stutter. Typically the main sim job needs to be sitting at 50%-70% or so load in rural wilderness area for Wildlife+ to have no effect on smoothness. On my i6700k OC4.7, I find that a 35-50fps limit keeps the load on the main sim job down low enough in ORBX rural sceneries.

 

Another cool feature is that it can be turned on-off in the sim and the quantity and type of sim objects controlled through the interface.