Ok after using all the tweaks from Aces and others here (except autogen because it is a FPS killer) I can run locked at 30 FPS. Unlike my KSEA pics that most thought were awful I turned things WAY UP. I am one extremely happy FSX user!http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/159602.jpghttp://forums.avsim.net/user_files/159603.jpg Best,Randy J. Smith<<>>

My enthusiasm for autogen has, like GeofA's, been much eroded by the sheer quality of the high-res textures. But having seen what FSX is capable of when the completely default settings are turned way up and the autogen fills the screen I can see (literally) what the ACES team were trying achieve. OK, so if I do that I can get down to 3spf (that's 3 seconds per frame, not 3 frames per second). :) One day I'll have the hardware. One day!Only trouble is, when you do this there is something that I see in the screen that troubles me. Something that makes the shots with no autogen more convincing at anything more than a few hundred feet. I couldn't put my finger on it until a fellow pilot called round yesterday and I showed him FSX (he's not an FS user). He saw a scene similar to the above, then I showed him the same screen with all the autogen showing and he picked up on it immediately: "Too many sharp edges" he said.And I think he's right - look at the image above, the absence of sharply-defined edges enhances the depth perception, giving the impresssion not only of distance, but also looking through the atmosphere. Now look at it with autogen. It seems too clearly defined, too sharp. Its not the size or quality of the texturing, its the way that the edges are drawn. I know nothing about the creation of autogen and scenery but would it be possible as an experiemnt to re-render some of the `old style` trees (treessu, etc) with `blurry` edges or rounded corners, or is it a limitation of the format used for the trees and buildings? Just adding an angular facet to the corner might be enough, to make a building `eight sided` not four and create a naturally-blurred corner. Or would that impose an unacceptable FPS penalty because of the increased complexity? Allcott

Hi Allcott:I believe there may be a way to create the "appearance" of softened edges on the textures on the trees using techniques of transparency and gray color pixels without changing their 3-D structure.When one looks at a magnified view (in a program capable of opening FS bitmaps) of "better" 3rd party tree textures made by Lago's FSSE and FSE developers, Gerrish Gray, Arno Gerretsen (and others I apologize for not remembering here), one will likely see a special margin near the edge of the vegetation part of the textures which in my experience was likely the cause of their blending into the rendered scene with less flickering and harsh definition as an object standing out against the landscape. Of course the lighting angle and contrast of the original tree texture photograph would influence its resulting appearance as well.I haven't yet studied in detail whether this same technique was used by Ruud Faber in the 'free' tree replacments he once provided on his website for FScene owners to download (I am not an FScene user). But when I did try them out in FS9 after reading about their availability in an AVSIM news release, I was pleased to note that this largely stopped the "flickering tree" issue I had at the time (without resorting to use of video card driver-controlled reduction of maximum mip-mapping to 1 setting below maximum to degrade my image quality in FS9); and they blended into the scenery better!Incidentally, I was also rather pleased to find that his 'downloadable' replacement summer river-stream texture looked better than that of both FS9 and Ultimate Terrain. Whether these files (if still available) will prove relevant or useable in FSX, of course I don't know yet.My point here is that that I believe there will be a way for tree textures to be artistically adapted to produce better blending and realism without changing their out of the box default polygon structure; adding even more planes/axes to the 3-D trees would only increase the hit on framerate rendering problems (hmmm... hitting 3-D trees with 'axes' in a virtual world could topple them! :-lol ).I would venture to say though, that it is only a matter of time until we see new free FSX replacment texture and/or autogen sets (in various sizes and complexities too!) appearing on AVSIM and other FS websites. In theory, it should also be possible to even replace the trees with "+" style or even "--" (rotate-to-plane) style 3-D object configurations with the appropriate tools, although it may not be desirable to regress farther back than the "+" types except on VERY old systems attempting to run FSX.Hope this helps... :-) GaryGB

Thanks Gary, it does help. I don't recall whether you contributed to the thread we had a few days ago on the autogen in FSX, but there were some interesting ideas put around in there that my tie in to what you have said.Food for thought, certainly. Thanks! ;) Allcott

Located...links???..please.

>"Too many sharp edges" he said.This is a fair comment. There is an inherent mismatch between quality/resolution of scenery and autogen objects. Autogen objects are simply too sharp for the ground textures they are supposed to be placed in. If the scenery resolution went down to something like 0.25m then the current objects would make more sense and they would not be standing out so much.Michael J.

> Ok after using all the tweaks from Aces and others here>(except autogen because it is a FPS killer)Randy my friend,I found this sentence a bit self-contradictory. Per my understanding of the English language it sounds as if the only tweak you did NOT use was the autogen, yet you claim it is a FPS killer. I don't see any autogen in your pics - I guess you had turned it off.Michael J.