Orbx TrueEarth Great Britain South Released for Prepar3D v4

[tonywob 4,768]

16 minutes ago, simbol said:

XP has way much less number fo autogen buildings, the number of autogen building for P3D is around 7,000 or more. so both simulators will behave differently with the same scenery and accordingly the settings for scenery complexity for P3D needs to be tested and adjusted if necessary. 

I'm not sure where you got this figure, but in the X-Plane version there are many more buildings because large row/terraced houses are split into individual buildings as opposed to one large building. As I said above each sim has limitations and the only way to start optimising is to take things away, lower settings or both.

[tonywob 4,768]

5 minutes ago, Christopher Low said:

So, what is your viewpoint with respect to the apparent performance problems of TE GB South in P3D, Tony? An i9 9900k @ 5Ghz/2080Ti powered system should be able to run it very well, particularly as TE Netherlands works just fine for a wide range of systems

I can tell you that in TE GB South there are more landmarks, more buildings and more trees than there are in the Netherlands, in addition there is more terrain to deal with. On its own I don't think this should make a huge difference but also bear in mind that many people are running lots of addons on top of this, complicated planes, airports, weather addons etc.. 

For me, the red herring in the room is the sim which very few people seem to want to put any blame on. Of course there are ways to optimise (as well as take things away from the scenery), but if the other two sims (AF2 and X-Plane) can handle these types of scenery, then perhaps people should be questioning LM instead of pointing the blame completely at ORBX (who are well aware of the problems being reported)

 

[Paul Golding 92]

37 minutes ago, Christopher Low said:

So, what is your viewpoint with respect to the apparent performance problems of TE GB South in P3D, Tony? An i9 9900k @ 5Ghz/2080Ti powered system should be able to run it very well, particularly as TE Netherlands works just fine for a wide range of systems. To be honest, all of the comments in this thread are making me even more interested to see just how well (or badly) it runs on my own Windows 7 64bit PC. On paper, I do not have a chance in hell.....but then I fly with clear skies and no wind, and at 1920x1080 resolution on a single monitor.

Like you Christopher, my (still old) pc looks like it'll have a serious problem.  I left my purchase downloading last night and will be holding my breath when I try it tonight 😂

On the plus side, I've never even been tempted to put any scenery slider to the right, apart from texture=7cm, so my expectations aren't high to begin with!

Edited February 11, 2019 by Paul Golding

[pmb 5,137]

24 minutes ago, tonywob said:

For me, the red herring in the room is the sim which very few people seem to want to put any blame on. Of course there are ways to optimise (as well as take things away from the scenery), but if the other two sims (AF2 and X-Plane) can handle these types of scenery, then perhaps people should be questioning LM instead of pointing the blame completely at ORBX (who are well aware of the problems being reported)

This would be a really bad message I would have difficulty to digest. However, having worked with TE GB South P3D intensely for the last two days, and comparing it to the XP version it might apply.

That's even harder, as for ordinary people it's virtually impossible to approach the LM crew sitting behing a thick firewall only now and then sending out someone to the forum to reply, as they find appropriate.

Kind regards, Michael

[GSalden 4,655]

Lod - Low

Texture Resolution - 15 or 30 cm

Scenery Complexity - Sparse

AG distance - Low or Medium

AG density - Normal or Dense

Max Texture Size - 256 or 512

No Shadows

Max Visibility - 20 or 30 mls

No AI Traffic

Fair weather or Clear Skies

FPS locked at 20-25 

This will help you with a higher framerate to start with..

 

[Christopher Low 5,332]

I certainly will not be running TrueEarth GB South at Sparse scenery complexity and autogen density levels. I did not purchase a dense VFR scenery package to remove 75% of the benefits. I will reserve judgment about performance until I have seen it in action on my own PC, and I will report back here with the results.

Edited February 11, 2019 by Christopher Low

[Cargostorm 151]

1 hour ago, tonywob said:

...but if the other two sims (AF2 and X-Plane) can handle these types of scenery, then perhaps people should be questioning LM instead of pointing the blame completely at ORBX (who are well aware of the problems being reported)

 

This is the logical conclusion if you compare the different sims. I agree.

[jabloomf1230 2,445]

13 minutes ago, Cargostorm said:

This is the logical conclusion if you compare the different sims. I agree.

Another conclusion that one could reach is that the business model of trying to port all ORBX scenery to multiple sims may be overly ambitious. Forgetting about AFS2 for a moment since it is not even close to being a complete flightsim, P3d4 and XP11 both have things that they do well and things that they don't. That's why most 3rd party developers create add-ons that match each sims' capabilities.

On the other hand, it's quite possible that ORBX has inside information regarding both sims and is just planning ahead for when the sims' capabilities will match their products' demands.

[Cargostorm 151]

 

6 minutes ago, jabloomf1230 said:

On the other hand, it's quite possible that ORBX has inside information regarding both sims and is just planning ahead for when the sims' capabilities will match their products' demands.

It could be that in P3DV5 ORBX TE (or other photo scenery) will work better. For me, I have decided to buy ORBX TE for Xplane because the performance per visual in XP at moderate settings is currently better for THIS particular scenery than in P3D.

Edited February 11, 2019 by Cargostorm

[DellyPilot 109]

There are several issues all working together. But 2 key ones for me are:

1. Its a pretty bad port, they didn't create graduated scenery complexities so its either SPARSE (looks awful) OR EXTREMELY DENSE (stutters / cant use shadows). As I stated previously Normal = Very Dense = Extremely Dense.
    
2. Yes P3D still has an antiquated autogen / scenery / texture loading algorithm.
   the engine is clearly hard to fix (it is certainly a lot better) while remaining backward compatible. Its not clever about what its loading or rendering, what being flushed or kept during draw calls.
   Why is it drawing autogen behind the plane trying but never catching up, ignoring the user Viewport? 
   Why does it stutter, why not drop autogen/scenery/texture drawcalls in favour of smoothness?
   Why not dyanmically cull scenery to achieve desired framerate?
   Why not fade in autogen.. etc 
    

I think P3D engine issues are unlikely to be fixed in 4.5 but perhaps a deeper rewrite of the scenery engine is on the card for v5.

So what we have is for several years on the best hardware money can buy you cannot run default settings with NORMAL Scenery density near London on TE SE.

Whatever about the engine that's not acceptable, it simply isn't aligned to the kind of settings and scenery density that users are capable of running, requiring users to have 2 sets of prepar3d.cfg and making flying in and out of the South East a poor experience, with no weather! In England, no weather!

I can't wait to see the reviews but I think ORBX will be forced to release a service pack fairly quickly, either that or the product will fail.

 

EDIT: They are releasing a patch next week https://orbxsystems.com/forum/topic/168114-tegb-south-p3dv44-settings-for-smooth-performance-at-4k/

Edited February 11, 2019 by DellyPilot

[tonywob 4,768]

5 minutes ago, DellyPilot said:

I think P3D engine issues are unlikely to be fixed in 4.5 but perhaps a deeper rewrite of the scenery engine is on the card for v5.

Problem with any major rewrite is that it will break backwards compatibility. People already have a lot invested in the v4 platform when it moved to 64-bit that I'm sure quite a few will be reluctant to go through the upgrade costs again. IMO, the biggest strength of P3D is the addon ecosystem, a majority of which is legacy stuff carried over from FSX. If they lose that ecosystem, it won't do the platform any good. 

[Christopher Low 5,332]

I see that John Venema sets the Scenery Complexity to Dense for flights around London. What does this setting not display in TrueEarth GB South when compared to Extremely Dense?

Edited February 11, 2019 by Christopher Low

[pmb 5,137]

24 minutes ago, DellyPilot said:

I think P3D engine issues are unlikely to be fixed in 4.5 but perhaps a deeper rewrite of the scenery engine is on the card for v5.

Aside the compatibility issue, which is a serious one as it has been on the base of Prepar3d, my impression from the few beans spilled at the FlighSimExpo in the last year, they would intend to just rewrite the display engine, presumably making it DX12 compatible. What is in urgent need for a rewrite would be the terrain rendering engine covering most of the points you name under 2). Not sure they are going to tackle this, but I don't recall them mentioning it.

Kind regards, Michael

[DylanM 1,069]

1 hour ago, tonywob said:

Problem with any major rewrite is that it will break backwards compatibility. People already have a lot invested in the v4 platform when it moved to 64-bit that I'm sure quite a few will be reluctant to go through the upgrade costs again. IMO, the biggest strength of P3D is the addon ecosystem, a majority of which is legacy stuff carried over from FSX. If they lose that ecosystem, it won't do the platform any good. 

In a poll a while back, many folks using P3D were good with a break in backward comparability if it meant a significant change in performance or capabilities. And a break in backward compatibility doesn't need to be all or nothing (as we've seen with the shift to 64 bit).

[jabloomf1230 2,445]

People are using the term compatibility without explaining it in more detail. The first type of compatibility involves preserving legacy file formats such as in the case of P3d4: BGL, MDL, AIR, etc. The second type is preserving legacy entries in the sim's SDK/libraries.