Texture Lookup Goose Chase

[cklink 0]

LOL... :)Barry every time I dig into FSX I think I have found one... and pursue on my "bear in a china shop" method of trying to sort it out.I don't think there is a single "Silver Bullet", I think you need to load a couple hundered pounds of raw silver in a cluster bomb and drop it on a high speed pass from about 500agl .....In short the sim is so cpu/video intensive, so I think every little thing helps - a little bit.I've said it before and I'll say it again - it looks rushed from my point of view. It's not just this, but quite a few things. I like it, I'm enjoying it, and I support it - but it needs work. (I just wish I got more time to actually fly it ..)Regards'Garett

[Guest baksteen33]

Hi Gary, the rest of SimObjects folder is maybe another 2-3 days of work. As far as I would dare to judge, all the textures are there. Some of the 'fallback.cfgs' lead nowhere, so FSX won't find them. It indeed looks like a bit of a rush job sometimes. Fortunately, this aspect is something we can easily correct and all it takes is a couple of 100MB of disk space. Again, case somebody want's to host the combined texture pack (assuming expermental stuff isn't suited for Avsim file library), or wants to help finishing it, more than welcome. Cheers and kind regards Jaap

[Guest bdg]

I am bewildered about this. How can an application not know where it's files are? This just doesnt make sense at all. This is not acceptable for ACES to overlook something this basic. If this is true then they really should be chiming in here with a big apology I would think. ThanksBob

[Guest JuiceRabbit]

Good work Sherlock! :)

[Guest BOPrey]

Make sure you know what you are copying. I mean before you copy any file (move it away from its home directory), you better check if there is a file in other directories with the same name. Also, what are you going to do with the addon files? Currently, I am working on a few 'patch' addons to deal with the performance issues. This is one of them. None of these patches will require the modification of texture size and autogen.

[Guest cwright]

Luis, Adam Szofran came up with a very useful cfg tweak to stop the preloading. Under the MAIN section in fsx.cfg add this line:DisablePreload=1Best regards, Chris

[cklink 0]

Agreed,What do you mean the addon files?What's your patch(s) do ? Now you got me curious ...BTW - I find that it's not all the simobjects, only some of them. (for calling textures that it scours to find) That what bugs me about the fallback texture cfg. Some times it works others it doesn't? Its the same cfg so I don't know what gives. A/C variant texture.1 might want the bump that in is the default A/C variant, but it goes everywhere else looking for - even though the fallback is ..texture? Its got to be reading something else (in priority)over the texture.cfg. Half the time it goes back to reading the dam scenery indexies before it even looks at the cfg .. I dunno ..To date I have only done a few or so dds textures (BLDB2/LM, MD83_T, Taxiconcrete that I have flipped and saved as extended bmps as called for. Most of the changes are in adding the "rest of the textures" from A/C variant 1, to the rest of the A/C variants. And - adding the globalenv_ac_chrome. Same goes with the ground vehicles and boats. Theres a few tricky ones in the ground vehicles however, eg Red Firetruck uses Green's bump & specular (as called for). Heck I wish it didn't call for specular & bump files in the first place - I can do with out them on my baggage cart or push tractor I'm sure ...The trouble with this is that I feel we are fixing stuff after the fact. If the md_83 mdl called for the dds instead of the bmp in the first place .... Same goes with the BLDB texture calls. Other stuff is just sticking files from FSX/S/B/T into the sim objects textures folder. Not hard to fighure out that wash_ferry.dds goes with the wash ferry ... But I leave it still in the default directory in case something else is calling for it that I don't know about.It just gets frustating with all this crap sometimes, as I feel like a NTSB accident reconstruction guy - with no drawings or idea of the original plane to go by. And the guy that knows doesn't return your calls...(or maybe doesn't want admit the planes in a million pieces)Sometimes I wish I could just leave well enough alone ... Oh and to top it off - I flew in CYEG and had about 100 pages of errors as it was trying to load a effect called ||P.fx - I don't even know where to start with that one ..Garett

[cklink 0]

WOW - That sure helped the load time! The Interface was up before I could blink! Thanks !!

[Guest BOPrey]

"What do you mean the addon files?"The future third party addons. They have their own texture files and I am sure that a lot of them are going to have the same names as the default ones."What's your patch(s) do ? Now you got me curious ..."I am not saying anything until I have something to show. I should have the first 'patch' (which addresses this issue) within a week for trial. It allows FSX to open the files sucessfully on the first try if the they have unique names under the fsx root directory. There are other 'patches' I am either working on or investigating. See that I put the word patches in quotes. It's because they are not real patches as we all know them. They are executables that work along side FSX that improves its performance. Hopefully at the end, I can merge them and make a product.

[Dougal 165]

You know..... you guys are the absolute 'dogs wottsits'! I for one owe you big time!Watching & listening for future developmentsDougal

[meerkat 86]

Why some 100s of MB? Wouldn't be a batch file with copy commands for all files you added to several folders be sufficient? You didn't create or alter any bitmap files, did you?Just a suggestion in case you kept track of what you've done.Btw, not all of the NOT FOUND files are really problems imho - often there are generic searches (for instance for status files of sim objects you did never fly - so these can't exist).

[Guest Ichinin]

Good analysis for a non programmer.However, doing 10 file/directory querys do not cause much stutter or consume much processing power, unless it is continously looped.It is a good thing that they have done this, it makes texturing aircraft much easier by allowing the creators to use whatever texture format they want.What cause stutter is the creation of new objects, loading the mesh textures, even if those textures are already present in memory. The more complex environment (more detailed ground/buildings) the more processing power it takes.So, hopefully we will have quad processors each running at 5000 ghz with shared memory architexture like supercomputers by 2010 for gaming. But after a while, the next generation of games will make such a system run slow...Only way to experience a non stutter/lag experience is to disable pretty much everything - or go flying in the real world.

[Guest tmilton]

I think you guys are on to something! Thanks for the investigative work! I'm going to download Filemon myself and see what I can make out of this strange texture call behavior of FSX. I can't see what purpose FSX would have by looking for textures in the wrong places, or looking for incorrectly named files. Strange indeed. Hopefully if this this chaotic behavior is corrected, performance might increase, as early indications seem to show.

[Guest baksteen33]

Hi Markus, I was also quite surprised to see how quickly the individual folders grew just by copying 'a couple' of textures from the the other texture folders. :-) The boats folder grew roughly fivefold. Since many objects use textures worth mutltiple MBs, they accumulate quickly. As for FileMon calls, I'm aware to not pay too much attention. Thanks nevertheless. The method I pursued eventually had very little to do with FileMon's analysis. Filemon 'only' helped reveal in which direction to look first. Not many 'fallback.cfgs' point the wrong direction, just a few. Looking at the pace Aces (had to?) put up towards RTM, maybe no surprise? Parallely, I still wonder what the real benefit might be? If common texture folders would signify, that common textures only get loaded once, they would make sense. It's exactly this I would appreciate an answer about. AIM, I handed an Aces rep a CD with the concept roughly 4 weeks ago. To me, no reply signified this is non-important or perhaps even counter productive? This thread re-opened the dormant project with this specific question still open... :-) Cheers and kind regards Jaap

[cklink 0]

Hey Jaap>If common texture folders would signify,>that common textures only get loaded once, they would make>sense. It's exactly this I would appreciate an answer about.See that's what I don't understand. Who care if it takes 500 tries to find the file - it should only (maybe) slow the intial load time right. After that who cares - But it if has to read the file again in flight, over and over again (times numerous files)- then it might make a difference right?I'm very cautious about reporting a gain as not to start a wildfire with a spark in the forum- so I checked numerous times with about 5 different saved flights with complete pc restarts to make sure.At the specific CYVR test flight, I'm at 270 of 512 vram, 30locked/42unlimited (outside spot fixed view), and about 1100 of 2048 memory. None of the stats changed after(except the fps), but I was getting studders 90% of the time circling in spot at the gate on the saved flight, now I do not and I gained a few fps? The only thing I still get is the odd time I watch the textures being applied (flashing on) to certain items as I pan around. The minimum the FPS drops to is 24, but no studder?RegardsGarett