# of World Objects -- any way to control trees & buildings separately?

[PDX Flyer 111]

In the "Graphics" section of setup, it seems like this should be a separate slider for density of trees, buildings and static aircraft.  Currently, there is one slider that controls all three.

I would indefinably appreciate help if it is possible to control these separately?

[Paraffin 2,197]

Here's a utility that allows more fine-grained control over the settings (Windows only):

http://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/files/file/36925-rendering-options-for-xp11/

[Denco 48]

How does this work though? The LUA scripts get loaded only when you load into your flight. Changing building, road or forest density would require a restart wouldn't it?

[PDX Flyer 111]

42 minutes ago, Paraffin said:

Here's a utility that allows more fine-grained control over the settings (Windows only):

http://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/files/file/36925-rendering-options-for-xp11/

This looks perfect.  Now one question: with the advent of XP-11, why hasn't this capability been included?

[Paraffin 2,197]

12 minutes ago, PDX Flyer said:

This looks perfect.  Now one question: with the advent of XP-11, why hasn't this capability been included?

It was a deliberate decision to reduce the load on tech support, from users fiddling with settings and not understanding how they interacted with each other to impact the frame rate.

I still think they could have done that with an "Advanced" tab on the Settings menu, but it does make sense in terms of reduced tech support for a small company like Laminar. Ben Supnik explains the rational here in the dev blog:

http://developer.x-plane.com/2017/01/where-have-all-my-settings-gone/

[PDX Flyer 111]

2 hours ago, Paraffin said:

It was a deliberate decision to reduce the load on tech support, from users fiddling with settings and not understanding how they interacted with each other to impact the frame rate.

I still think they could have done that with an "Advanced" tab on the Settings menu, but it does make sense in terms of reduced tech support for a small company like Laminar. Ben Supnik explains the rational here in the dev blog:

http://developer.x-plane.com/2017/01/where-have-all-my-settings-gone/

Fair enough.  Although part of me thinks to be competitive with the upcoming P3Dv4, maybe the developers should consider more robustness in the future.

[Paraffin 2,197]

26 minutes ago, PDX Flyer said:

Fair enough.  Although part of me thinks to be competitive with the upcoming P3Dv4, maybe the developers should consider more robustness in the future.

Well, Laminar doesn't operate like a normal company in many respects, especially with regard to "competition."  They go their own way without much regard to what anyone else is doing, which has its pros and cons. At least they did expose these datarefs for tweaking, instead of hiding them in a binary file.

[N1G 88]

21 hours ago, Paraffin said:

Here's a utility that allows more fine-grained control over the settings (Windows only):

http://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/files/file/36925-rendering-options-for-xp11/

Hi, when using XP's default rendering options, and rendering is maxed, does this reflect max on all options in this utility? Since I run max on everything, will this utility offer any benefit?

Thanks

Boib

[CarlosF 1,241]

I suppose eventually once XP11 is tweaked to its max performance and stability, LR will probably enable a few of the hidden control settings

 

[Paraffin 2,197]

34 minutes ago, N1G said:

Hi, when using XP's default rendering options, and rendering is maxed, does this reflect max on all options in this utility? Since I run max on everything, will this utility offer any benefit?

I don't think so. According to Ben's dev blog post (linked above), it seems the new simplified X-Plane UI is designed to let the user increase eye candy with the sliders, balancing a combined interaction of many different settings that are hidden from the user. If you run all the sliders to the right in the default X-Plane UI, you're getting the best set of combined graphics settings that still allow a high frame rate. 

Maxing out all the hidden sliders exposed in that plugin will probably kill your frame rate, because there are interactions between the settings that are understood by the devs but not by the user. I think that's the idea, anyway. You could always try it and see. 

[Paraffin 2,197]

23 minutes ago, CarlosF said:

I suppose eventually once XP11 is tweaked to its max performance and stability, LR will probably enable a few of the hidden control settings

I doubt it. Read Ben's dev blog post (linked above) for the reason they did it this way. It's about reducing the number of tech support tickets related to low frame rates.

[CarlosF 1,241]

25 minutes ago, Paraffin said:

I doubt it. Read Ben's dev blog post (linked above) for the reason they did it this way. It's about reducing the number of tech support tickets related to low frame rates.

Yes, have read it when he posted it and it does make sense form the Beta run POV. I still believe when XP reaches maturity, LR will probably enable some (not all) hidden rendering settings. It makes sense to have the user have a bit more control since there are too many hardware combinations out there, having limited control over rendering only limits the ability to squeeze more FPS out of your specific hardware.

[propsfan 52]

50 minutes ago, CarlosF said:

Yes, have read it when he posted it and it does make sense form the Beta run POV. I still believe when XP reaches maturity, LR will probably enable some (not all) hidden rendering settings. It makes sense to have the user have a bit more control since there are too many hardware combinations out there, having limited control over rendering only limits the ability to squeeze more FPS out of your specific hardware.

I imagine there are differences between what makes sense to you and what makes sense to Ben.

[Mountain Man 142]

1 hour ago, CarlosF said:

I suppose eventually once XP11 is tweaked to its max performance and stability, LR will probably enable a few of the hidden control settings

If XP is every tweaked for maximum performance then they won't need to.

[Paraffin 2,197]

1 hour ago, CarlosF said:

Yes, have read it when he posted it and it does make sense form the Beta run POV. I still believe when XP reaches maturity, LR will probably enable some (not all) hidden rendering settings. It makes sense to have the user have a bit more control since there are too many hardware combinations out there, having limited control over rendering only limits the ability to squeeze more FPS out of your specific hardware.

Well, there is still the reality that as far as I know, Laminar doesn't have a dedicated tech support department. Or they have one, and the tickets eventually land on a coder's desk. As end-users, we really want them coding, not doing tech support. I think that's the reason why we're not going to see this changed during the XP11 cycle. They got tired of people complaining about frame rates when they didn't understand the interactions of the various settings in earlier versions of the sim.

From my personal viewpoint, while I would have preferred an Advanced tab, it does help clarify things. Instead of endlessly fussing with a multitude of interacting settings, I can adjust a few sliders until I get an acceptable frame rate (40 fps average, never below 30 fps). At that point, the sim is basically telling me "You need better hardware to run these sliders higher."   

And it's true! I should really be running something stronger than a GTX970 if I wanted to push these simplified settings higher. I don't believe that any amount of fussing with more fine-grained settings would improve the look of the sim, without reducing the frame rate below where I want it. In a nutshell, that's the reason for this more simplified design.

I know there are people who would like to kill individual elements like the trees or the cars like we could in XP10, to eke out a few extra frames per second. The tweakaholic approach will also be standard for anyone coming to X-Plane from the FSX/P3D world.

If you think about it though, it's essentially an admission that they're running substandard hardware for the sim's requirements. And if you want to do that anyway, there is a plugin for adjusting the deeper settings. It wouldn't surprise me though, if a standard response from Laminar for people complaining about frame rate is to remove that plugin before trying to debug the problem.