Orbx TrueEarth Great Britain South Released for Prepar3D v4

[kevinfirth 1,393]

59 minutes ago, Christopher Low said:

Well, that was interesting......

I decided to remove those "3DM" files that someone mentioned on the ORBx forum. At first I thought that they must be the photorealistic scenery BGL files, but I have just repeated my test (sitting at Gate 257 at SimWings Heathrow, and looking directly towards the centre of London), and I can still see the photoscenery textures being displayed. In addition, the major landmark models in London are visible, and also a sea of autogen houses and trees. However, what appears to be missing are those weird "geometrical shape" buildings that I noticed just east of Heathrow. Strangely, there are now a handful of isolated (presumably autogen) houses in those areas, and the odd looking buildings have vanished.

Further investigation seems to suggest that those strange shaped buildings are in locations that could be related to "autogen exclusion" zones close to SimWings London Heathrow. Just about everywhere else, I see autogen houses. Lots of them. Which begs the question......why are these "exclusion zones" not filled with autogen? If autogen houses are so difficult to accurately place, then why is a large percentage of the London area covered with them? In addition, the framerate is up from 3fps to 12fps.....with exactly the same settings that I stated in my post on page 8 of this thread. In fact, that framerate would be workable for me.

Someone needs to help me here, because I am baffled

EDIT: It is also worth noting that loading times were much faster with these files removed.

screenshot please Chris

[Christopher Low 5,352]

I will try and get some screenshots posted tonight, Kevin.

[Paul Golding 92]

18 hours ago, Christopher Low said:

Maybe the TrueEarth project isn't quite as much the "future of flight simulation scenery" that I had hoped it would be

I'm inclined to agree, but not because of the performance funnily enough. 

I ignored the warnings and did a clean install of P3d, with just TEGB, ORBX Stapleford, UK2000 Southend and the Vertx DA62 fully expecting the slideshow.  Flying from, and around Southend and west toward London before following the M25 and landing at Stapleford with visibility at 20 miles and a single broken layer of stratus, I was mostly getting framerates in the high teens/low 20's - far, far better than I expected on my 6 year old PC! (I know, it needs replacing!)

Where I agree with you Chris, is that the scenery I was seeing looked pretty awful from 3,000ft.  Yes, I could easily recognise places, but the thing that I really dislike is the way roads appear and I really should've taken more notice of the screenshots here.  But if it wasn't for knowing where the buildings represented, I'd have a hard job flying anywhere by following roads!  Most have this washed out green effect that just blurs into the surroundings.

The other thing I noticed was that the trees seem to stand out like a sore thumb, very noticeably bright green when compared to the underlying scenery.

I'll continue to play around with settings, but at this point, I'm feeling pretty underwhelmed to say the least.  I was going to get TENL, but can't help thinking this might be a waste and I'd be better off installing some of the landclass stuff that I've looked at yet, like SOCAL/NORCAL and spend money on more of the airports.

EDIT: Having said the above, I've just looked again at the screenshots of the same area here and must add that this is nothing like I saw last night, so maybe it's just me.

Edited February 14, 2019 by Paul Golding

[Nyxx 6,993]

@Paul Golding Did you install Orbx HD Trees? If not that might be way your trees looked bad the default "speed trees" ones look bad. FYI North/south cal are hard on FPS etc. But if your a GA flyer you should be fine.

Edited February 14, 2019 by Nyxx

[pmb 5,137]

I did a flight from Heathrow via Southampton into Brighton tonight, first in the XP version, next in the P3D one. So most of this was not London or big cities but rural area, grassland, fields, small towns, roads, small wood etc. This was in a C172 (both) around 3000'. XP using the ORBX suggested xVision/UW settings, P3D REX and Envtex, but no real weather and only scattered clouds in both.

XP was a real joy to fly. fps between 30 and 40, no stutter, great visuals and crystal-clear with ground only at a far distance to get a bit more blurry, but there's some haze as in RL.

I stopped the P3D flight halfway because I couldn't stand the blurry ground, whatever suggestions I tried to follow. fps were locked to 20 which the machine could barely hold, but this wasn't the issue, simulation was mostly smooth, thus I could live with it. There were no major stutters, but experience was far from the fluidity of the XP flavor. But most of all, textures drove me crazy, whatever I did. The best I could achieve were more or less clear textures around the plane, but all beyond a couple of miles was pure mood, which blurry roads led into.

I am more and more getting to the conclusion this product is faulty from the base design. I believe this is NOT the "darn old" ESP machine (equally old as XP, btw). You can compare to France VFR, where my machine even can handle Paris (which should be allowed to compare to London, shouldn't it?). It's not a performance monster either, but much better than TE GB, and most of all, I get clear textures, after LM repairing the high-res photo-texture bug in Prepar3d 4.4. ORBX' own product TE NL performs very well and has crisp textures on my machine - and I am not speaking about Amsterdam vs. London, but just rural architecture here.

This said, I am afraid this can't be repaired by a control panel within a week. This one will provide some options for higher performance at the cost of removing some fun which I doubt many will select and enjoy. In my mind, the whole product should go back to the drawing board and redeveloped for another 3 months. Which will not happen, of course.

Kind regards, Michael

[Paul Golding 92]

26 minutes ago, Nyxx said:

@Paul Golding Did you install Orbx HD Trees? If not that might be way your trees looked bad the default "speed trees" ones look bad. FYI North/south cal are hard on FPS etc. But if your a GA flyer you should be fine.

Good point David.  I'll install the trees and double check the settings JV has mentioned.

[Muklum 28]

With a 4 GHz processor, 16 Gb of memory, and an 8 Gb  GTX1070 graphics card, I can maintain a smooth and steady 30 fps with John Venema's settings outside London, and reasonably smooth flight over London. I also found that John's settings eliminate the pus-coloured trees, which I had previously found quite disturbing.

However, I do find that roads in many areas are too indistinct or too heavily masked by foliage to be usable as navigation aids, and I'm not happy with the levitating buildings that I've found in various places, e.g. at Dover harbour and on the Cornish coast a few miles south of Newquay (there's a whole village of floating buildings here, as well as two houses in the sea).

Dugald

PS: And I very rarely see any blurring with John's settings; textures are usually very sharp.

Edited February 14, 2019 by Muklum
Added information

[Paul Golding 92]

30 minutes ago, Muklum said:

I also found that John's settings eliminate the pus-coloured trees, which I had previously found quite disturbing.

Dugald

Thanks Dugald, that re-confirmed my need to double check my settings, aside from installing ORBX trees. 

Looking at the preview screenshots that show roads in them, I have this horrible nagging feeling of them being cherry-picked to some degree, to try and minimise showing those that look more green/blending with foliage.  Having said that, I don't like stark grey ribbon looking roads that cut through buildings either.....maybe expectations are just too high? 

[DellyPilot 109]

21 hours ago, pmb said:

The thread has been locked because of a posting (#39) of a brainless guy accusing JV not having TE GB installed. Nothing to add.

Kind regards, Michael

So delete it (which they did) and there are 202 posts so I dont think it was post 39 (mine? I didnt know who JV was lol, just some hairy dude saying I should reinstall windows).

They locked it because they have enough feedback and it doesnt look good to have your highest ranked topic with 1000s of replies on their forum titled TE GB South P3D v4 Stuttering/slowing performance issue 😂

1 hour ago, pmb said:

 In my mind, the whole product should go back to the drawing board and redeveloped for another 3 months. Which will not happen, of course.

I believe they might be waiting for 4.5/5 knowing theyd take a hit now. Blurries are part of FSX P3D architecture sadly, when you push too much stuff through the engine its really dumb at prioritising the closest (ahead) textures, it just blindly works through all your previous positions (sometimes 10s of miles behind on long flights). I flew from Dublin FTX Ireland to FTX England EGLL and I had to pause for 15minutes, fans blasting, CPU at 100% to catchup! Ridiculous.

It seems at this point we have to ask LM to look again at the algorithms at the heart of the engine. Perhaps there are good reasons this hasnt been fixed but its threatening the future of the sim with XP catching up on content.

As you point out the BGL decompressoon stage is really CPU intensive (i often see 16 5ghz cores at 100% when flying fast even at high altitdue), I would gladly buy a 5TB disk and have all UK scenery decompressed to achieve smoother faster flight.

Edited February 14, 2019 by DellyPilot

[kevinfirth 1,393]

1 hour ago, DellyPilot said:

As you point out the BGL decompressoon stage is really CPU intensive (i often see 16 5ghz cores at 100% when flying fast even at high altitdue)

Not sure this is the case, my understanding of resample.exe is that it uses lossy compression at the time of compiling, like a jpg, as opposed to allowing dynamic decompression of the image at runtime?

Edited February 14, 2019 by kevinfirth

[Christopher Low 5,352]

I think that it would be useful if ORBx could provide direct control over those 3DM files, so that the scenery density for those files only could be adjusted.

Edited February 14, 2019 by Christopher Low

[pmb 5,137]

4 hours ago, Muklum said:

With a 4 GHz processor, 16 Gb of memory, and an 8 Gb  GTX1070 graphics card, I can maintain a smooth and steady 30 fps with John Venema's settings outside London, and reasonably smooth flight over London. I also found that John's settings eliminate the pus-coloured trees, which I had previously found quite disturbing.

PS: And I very rarely see any blurring with John's settings; textures are usually very sharp.

I've seen some reports at the ORBX forum getting sharp textures indeed. To my best knowledge, I (and no one else I know) was unable to pinpoint the criteria making the difference so far.

As a sidenote, I already deactivated using SimStarter all scenery except TE GB, ORBX GB LC, the ORBX GB airports, a handfull of UK2000 airports I own, and Simwings EGLL during my test flight cited above. I understand these should be able to work together, shouldn't they?

And I already lowered autogen + scenery draw distance to medium, switched off all shadows, and locked fps to 20. I obstain from mentioning all the settings I tried to get clear textures - to no avail, so far.

Kind regards, Michael

[Muklum 28]

Michael,

I started off with exactly the settings recommended by JV, then later I made the following changes:

1.  AA set to 4xMSAA instead of 4xSSAA (I think this was the first change I made; my aim was to get better frame rates and better smoothness over London, and it worked).

2.  Frame rate locked at 30 instead of unlimited (again for better smoothness over London).

3. HDR Brightness set to 1.00 instead of 0.80 (because I preferred the appearance).

4. Cloud coverage density set to Max instead of High (because Active Sky kept nagging me).

I don't think any of these changes would give improved sharpness of textures.

I use a 4K TV set as my monitor, with the in-sim resolution set at 3840x2160x32. I use NOD32 antivirus, but it goes into gaming mode when I'm simming, and all the P3D and related files and folders are excluded from real-time file protection. My testing so far has been with the A2A C172, the JF Arrow III, and the Real Air Duke. I've had the Duke travelling at about 200 KIAS and about 1000 feet AGL, and the ground textures were still sharp. Sorry, I can't think of anything else that would have affected the results, but please let me know if you want me to check something. I hope you get the problem fixed, because I'm very pleased with the results I'm seeing now (apart from the floating buildings).

Dugald

[pmb 5,137]

9 minutes ago, Muklum said:

Michael,

I started off with exactly the settings recommended by JV, then later I made the following changes:

1.  AA set to 4xMSAA instead of 4xSSAA (I think this was the first change I made; my aim was to get better frame rates and better smoothness over London, and it worked).

2.  Frame rate locked at 30 instead of unlimited (again for better smoothness over London).

3. HDR Brightness set to 1.00 instead of 0.80 (because I preferred the appearance).

4. Cloud coverage density set to Max instead of High (because Active Sky kept nagging me).

I don't think any of these changes would give improved sharpness of textures.

I use a 4K TV set as my monitor, with the in-sim resolution set at 3840x2160x32. I use NOD32 antivirus, but it goes into gaming mode when I'm simming, and all the P3D and related files and folders are excluded from real-time file protection. My testing so far has been with the A2A C172, the JF Arrow III, and the Real Air Duke. I've had the Duke travelling at about 200 KIAS and about 1000 feet AGL, and the ground textures were still sharp. Sorry, I can't think of anything else that would have affected the results, but please let me know if you want me to check something. I hope you get the problem fixed, because I'm very pleased with the results I'm seeing now (apart from the floating buildings).

Dugald

Thanks for replying.

I tried 1 and 2 (with several fps values) to no avail w.r.t. blurry textures. 3. I switched HDR on/off with no noticeable difference, I don't think modifying the HDR values does matter. I also tried Dynamic Lighting off (Dynamic Reflections are off anway), which I feel improved things just a tad (with some imagination, perhaps).

Cloud coverage is medium, draw distance 80 miles. I didn't even try to use TE GB together with AS so far.

My monitor is 3440x1440. I use Win 10 Defender (after pulling out my hairs with two commercial relatives). I don't think Defender has a game mode as such, but Win10 game mode is on and both directories (P3D as well as XP) are excepted from virus check (supposed Defender acknowledges this...). I also tried starting P3D with Process Priority high, which usually helps with blurries, but doesn't in this case.

Of course, I tried JV's settings to the iota once. Still blurry textures. It may be something outside of the sim, who knows. 

Kind regards, Michael

[Mace 1,908]

18 minutes ago, pmb said:

, but Win10 game mode is on

Michael I don't think you want Win 10 game mode ON -- I think you want it to be "off" when running P3D.

Leaving it on is a known detriment to performance, if I am recalling that correctly.