FS9 Autogen anomoly

[chris_eve 12]

Yes, I'm still grinding away with my UKVFR installation ;)

Every so often, for no apparent reason, I find an area of photographic scenery where my applied autogen just doesn't show, as if an 'exclude' was in place. So, my question is, is there a utility that will tell me EVERY scenery file that is active below my airplane, irrespective of whether it's main centre of interest is nearby or somewhere remote.

I'm familiar with the concept of disabling sceneries 'till the fault disappears, then disabling each file in turn to isolate the problem, but with well over 10,000 bgl files to deal with it can take several hours to isolate and (hopefully) rectify what, at the end of the day, is usually just a minor niggle.

Any thoughts, or indeed solutions, will be gratefully received :)

[hjwalter 25]

Just a shot in the dark here but here goes anyway:

Could it be that your no show photo scenery area is caused by a local area of higher elevation, which is poking through your photo scenery ? OR

Could it be that your photo scenery has an overall lower elevation than whatever (possibly default) terrain scenery for the same area ? OR

Could it be that it's a scenery priority issue ?

The only program I know of that does something in your direction of interest is "LWMViewer" but that will only show active default scenery files at and around the position of your (test) aircraft, e.g. APnnnnnn.bgl, HLnnnnnn.bgl, etc.but no addon scenery files.

Good luck

Regards

Hans

 

[Engine9 3]

Presuming you are using the following autogen addons along with your UK VFR Photographic scenery:

 https://web.archive.org/web/20130530014037/http://www.shepsshed.com/autogentrees.htm

and UK VFR Library by Neil Birch, available at flightsim library (works fine in FS2004 so long as instructions followed)

https://www.flightsim.com/vbfs/fslib.php?do=search&fsec=0&fname=ukvfr.zip

Note the following from what you mention above:

1) Your autogen is not showing for certain tiles because they may not have been annotated and not necessarily because of an errant exclude; check by opening the texture folder of the region you are flying in which you have the photo texture tiles and autogen, and upon arranging by name, you will find texture tiles and autogen sequentially arranged one after the other; in some or for many cases, you will find only a texture file but no autogen annotation beside it (with identical numbering as the tile), which means for the pertinent photo tile(s), no autogen will appear in the sim on said tile(s).

2) If you have GMAX objects in the area, then you will find that there may be an apparent exclude like anomaly in your sim, as standard GMAX objects tend to exclude surrounding autogen, and if prerequisite optimizations have already been made by the scenery designer of said GMAX objects, then it just may well be that your CPU is not powerful enough to render the autogen and the scenery objects, in which case it will throttle the visual rendering to maintain frame rates; setting your frame rates to unlimited is your best bet, but may or may not be helpful.

3) Check your default.xml folder in the autogen folder; if you are using the UKVFR Library custom autogen, try restoring your default autogen file and autogen building texture files, and verify that with standard default.xml and standard autogen building textures, you find all annotated photoscenery tiles with autogen showing in the sim.

I cannot think of anything else why you would be experiencing your anomalous absence of autogen; perhaps others can pitch in...

[chris_eve 12]

3 hours ago, hjwalter said:

Just a shot in the dark here but here goes anyway:

Could it be that your no show photo scenery area is caused by a local area of higher elevation, which is poking through your photo scenery ? OR

Could it be that your photo scenery has an overall lower elevation than whatever (possibly default) terrain scenery for the same area ? OR

Could it be that it's a scenery priority issue ?

The only program I know of that does something in your direction of interest is "LWMViewer" but that will only show active default scenery files at and around the position of your (test) aircraft, e.g. APnnnnnn.bgl, HLnnnnnn.bgl, etc.but no addon scenery files.

Good luck

Regards

Hans

 

Thanks, but it's not that anything is "poking through" the photo scenery, it just that the photo scenery shows in FS9 without any autogen, but just in a relatively small area. I've found a couple of "rogue" library items that cause problems, so I deliberately avoid using those, and I spent some considerable time isolating a single specific scenery file that was causing a problem apparently remote from any item within the file, but there were so many items within the file, independently disabling each one to isolate the problematic element simply wasn't practical, I just deleted it!

I'll press on :)

[chris_eve 12]

3 minutes ago, Engine9 said:

Presuming you are using the following autogen addons along with your UK VFR Photographic scenery:

https://web.archive.org/web/20130530014037/http://www.shepsshed.com/autogentrees.htm

and UK VFR Library by Neil Birch, available at flightsim library (works fine in FS2004 so long as instructions followed)

https://www.flightsim.com/vbfs/fslib.php?do=search&fsec=0&fname=ukvfr.zip

Note the following from what you mention above:

1) Your autogen is not showing for certain tiles because they may not have been annotated and not necessarily because of an errant exclude; check by opening the texture folder of the region you are flying in which you have the photo texture tiles and autogen, and upon arranging by name, you will find texture tiles and autogen sequentially arranged one after the other; in some or for many cases, you will find only a texture file but no autogen annotation beside it (with identical numbering as the tile), which means for the pertinent photo tile(s), no autogen will appear in the sim on said tile(s).

2) If you have GMAX objects in the area, then you will find that there may be an apparent exclude like anomaly in your sim, as standard GMAX objects tend to exclude surrounding autogen, and if prerequisite optimizations have already been made by the scenery designer of said GMAX objects, then it just may well be that your CPU is not powerful enough to render the autogen and the scenery objects, in which case it will throttle the visual rendering to maintain frame rates; setting your frame rates to unlimited is your best bet, but may or may not be helpful.

3) Check your default.xml folder in the autogen folder; if you are using the UKVFR Library custom autogen, try restoring your default autogen file and autogen building texture files, and verify that with standard default.xml and standard autogen building textures, you find all annotated photoscenery tiles with autogen showing in the sim.

I cannot think of anything else why you would be experiencing your anomalous absence of autogen; perhaps others can pitch in...

Thanks for the reply.

Yes, I've got all the available autogen from Shep's Shed etc., I was creating autogen as part of that project all those years ago and uploading it to the UKVFR developer site (long since gone). It was all downloaded when it was "new" and that is not the problem … though it may exhibit the symptoms in places and I haven't found it yet.

My issue is that as I continue to generate new autogen, every so often I find an area, not as big as a whole scenery "tile", where the autogen I've just created, using AGenT, simply doesn't show in FS9, though it's visible both in AGenT and with the Microsoft annotation tool, much like the issues around the UK2000 airfields, but I'm nowhere near any of those fields and the problem still exists with all of the UK2000 scenery disabled.

I do indeed suspect a rogue model somewhere, there are some with quite significant "footprints", or even a redundant exclude in a scenery file, it's isolating them that I'm trying to achieve … without disabling everyone of 10,000+ bgl files individually to nail down the problems ;)

[chris_eve 12]

Here's a link to a screen-cap of an example :

https://1drv.ms/u/s!AkzZuPOaEswYggyfm99fSUQdJv7k?e=w6NOdd

On the left is AGenT showing a belt of trees (green squares) up and to the left of the big buildings (red squares), on the right is FS9 showing some of the buildings but the autogen trees disappear completely. I'm familiar with FS9 not displaying large autogen buildings, that I will get around to rectifying with "generic" buildings, but even with the autogen buildings deleted, the trees still don't show ?!?!

For reference, the computer is an I7 @ 3.6Ghz with 1Gb of video memory, so should be adequate for the task ;)

[Engine9 3]

What about maximum autogen limit per tile in FS2004: 300 autogen buildings and 600 autogen trees is the max I think per tile; check to see if you are under the limit and/or are you crossing the limit with the additional annotations in (presumably) an already annotated scenery tile....?

[chris_eve 12]

6 hours ago, Engine9 said:

What about maximum autogen limit per tile in FS2004: 300 autogen buildings and 600 autogen trees is the max I think per tile; check to see if you are under the limit and/or are you crossing the limit with the additional annotations in (presumably) an already annotated scenery tile....?

Thanks :)

Well familiar with the total limits concept … this particular tile has 235 vegetation areas and 12 buildings. It's a tile just SW of the old Hatfield airfield that I autogenned from scratch as part of the "ambience" for one of my "grass strips", but I've run into similar symptoms in two or three other areas and either ignored them or covered the area in library objects. I specifically remember an area near the "Museum of Berkshire Aviation" and also somewhere in the south-east near the two big old RAF/USAF fields … forget the names for the moment … but the symptoms have occurred elsewhere as well ;)

[chris_eve 12]

UPDATE:

I've now gone to the effort of setting up a basic copy of FS9 on a separate machine, installing just the UK VFR Photographic Scenery and copying over the autogen file in question. All the trees show, as anticipated.

So, failing some clever utility, as requested in my initial posting, it looks like I'll be spending time disabling and re-enabling sceneries to find the source(s) of the problem(s). I think that's a job that'll wait 'till I'm really short of "things to do" next winter ;)

Thanks for all your thoughts :)