2 hours ago, F1Fan said:

You're right Bob.   I think that is what is happening.   A lot of game developers do this to accommodate the inferior consoles.  I've seen the ports from consoles(and actually done on a PC system for that matter) to PC games and it is awful.  However, MSFS originally a PC developed PC sim is being downgraded for consoles which is very rare.   

I don't know that much about XBOX, but one thing I understand is the XBOX is basically just another version of Windows, it uses DirectX. You barely have to change anything, it's not like porting a game from Windows to Android or to the PS 5, not as long as you are using the same game engine, which they are.

It's not possible to know what people were thinking at the time they wrote code, a lot of developers don't think things through properly, and that happens to project managers as well. It could just be that since they were working on the XBOX version, they then said well get the optimization team to apply some of those things to speed up the PC version as well. Saying it happened to make the two editions compatible doesn't really make sense, as I noted earlier it would only save them a single relatively simple block of code, which is unnecessary.

Most of the complaints with console ports were UI related or maybe missing some graphics settings, but a lot of them worked just fine.

 

Edited July 30, 20214 yr by Alpine Scenery

1 hour ago, JRBarrett said:

Are these problems evident using the existing SDK (0.13) in SU5 dev mode when working with scenery? 

Yes, but many of them are also evident in the test build of the SDK AFIK. Technically this is still SDK 0.13, but the game is so changed that you are not actually in the same DEV environment, you are in a frankenstein build until they finish giving us all the patches and SDK update, and whatever else they send. I don't know what all changes they made to the SDK files themselves, but they don't actually even report that correctly, they often give us two SDK updates, one that comes before the official developer update which they don't version, then another. Their versioning isn't reliable in that respect. I've even been using SDK 0.11 before and it says it was 0.11, but it was really 0.12 with all the features 0.12, and so forth. I don't pay attention to that, I just go by the functionality I see or how things have changed.

I don't know how many issues will still exist after the next 1-2 updates, but my guess is it will take 2-4 weeks to get rid of many of these problems.

Edited July 30, 20214 yr by Alpine Scenery

16 hours ago, devgrp said:

Man, I was watching Froogle's Piper Arrow video and when he was coming in to land it was so painful to watch. I know he has a decent system but he had it maxed out on ultra no doubt and you could jsut tell it wasnt smooth.

Certainly not a great advertisement for "Jetline Systems"

3 hours ago, superspud said:

I've just been fiddling with LOD stuff. I thought I could cheat and use the same model at each level.

I can but it adds the model again to the modellib which means a 5x increase in its size.

Some are way too big already so if the LOD thing does happen for PC I'll likely kill off any mod that's model heavy.

It would be several weeks of work. Servicing someone else's programming change is not a worthwhile use of my remaining time on earth. 

I wonder how many payware developers will wash their hands of their products too.

 This might be one change that doesn't happen. 

The best thing that could happen would be the sim can handle both lod systems at the same time. If a freeware dev wants too go to the effort - great, the user sees the benefit in better frame rates. If not, then it's up to the user to decide if they value fps over whatever the mod is. 

I would certainly keep your airports at the expense of fps. However, I would ditch 100s of other airports I have downloaded when just browsing through flightsim.to take advantage of the higher fps. 

In saying that every 3PD (third party developer) should be using the new LOD system or updating what they have as it's that under the hood expertise, time and knowledge they are charging for.

Will be interesting how many freeware devs who jumped into the 3PD world using the more basic LOD method update their mods.

The best thing that can happen is that it detects when LODs are missing and gives you a popup box to auto-generate them, as some other modern game engines do.

 

3 hours ago, Alpine Scenery said:

It's not possible to know what people were thinking at the time they wrote code, a lot of developers don't think things through properly, and that happens to project managers as well.

 

To be brutally honest, I work for a software development company and quite often the developers "on the coal-face" so to speak will warn management that a particular change will not go well and is going to create issues, but just get ignored or in some cases the manager in question will even take offence at their decisions being questioned.

I have no idea how Asobo work, but with MS in general the biggest issue is allegedly that they categorise developer by skill set and flip them willy-nilly between projects so they often have no idea of the big picture of any tasks they are assigned and just treat them as a "black box" task.  No idea how true that actually is, but it does make sense.

 

 

Edited July 30, 20214 yr by Glenn Fitzpatrick

5 minutes ago, Glenn Fitzpatrick said:

I have no idea how Asobo work, but with MS in general the biggest issue is allegedly that they categorise developer by skill set and flip them willy-nilly between projects so they often have no idea of the big picture of any tasks they are assigned and just treat them as a "black box" tasks.  No idea how true that is, but it does make sense.

Yah, I know of the internal workings at MS game studios, family member is manager there in Seattle. It's how I got a free copy. I don't ever talk about it though. Gaming industry is a tough industry in general, it's a lot of young people with a lot of energy and some older people trying to keep up with the flow, which is why the person I know left to go into management.

Edited July 30, 20214 yr by Alpine Scenery

6 hours ago, Virtual-Chris said:

It’s a good thing the company behind this doesn’t make mission critical business software…

😛

Or VR stuff for the military... oops.

20 hours ago, Chock said:

Yup. Some people would rather be able to see the Chrysler Building as they turn onto the runway at Heathrow and require a 4,000 quid PC in order to do so, than have a flight sim which smoothly replicates flight and then worries about the visuals after.

That sound you hear is several tens of thousands of X-Plane devotees rolling on the floor laughing.  Wasn't the whole point of MSFS originally that it provided a visual experience far beyond other hardcore flight sims?  If the visuals looked exactly like either of those two products, do you thing many people would have made the leap?

39 minutes ago, JDWalley said:

That sound you hear is several tens of thousands of X-Plane devotees rolling on the floor laughing.  Wasn't the whole point of MSFS originally that it provided a visual experience far beyond other hardcore flight sims?  If the visuals looked exactly like either of those two products, do you thing many people would have made the leap?

I've been watching this debate from the sidelines, and I just want to say that - and this is complete conjecture - but I'm willing to bet most MSFS players never made any leap at all; They're new simmers entirely, and most are on XBOX where the competition doesn't exist at all.

9 hours ago, Brandon01110 said:

people with 3090's shouldnt say "decent".  what would that make the 2000 series lol

 

The "upper mid range" RTX3070 is equal to a 2080ti in normal rendering and blows the 2080ti out of the water for DLSS and Ray Tracing.

So by modern standards the 2080ti ( 3 years old in September) is basically now equivalent to a modern "upper mid range" card (if you can get one).

So the 2080ti is still sort of "decent" if your not ray tracing and pretty good for a 3 year old GPU design, but definitely not cutting edge anymore.

Most of the rest of the 20xx range is starting to show it's age and most people by now would have upgraded if 30xx prices were not insane.

(there are people that pride themselves on making a GPU last 5 or 6 years but an upgrade every 3 or 4 years is probably more common)

Edited July 30, 20214 yr by Glenn Fitzpatrick

2 hours ago, riverreveal said:

I would certainly keep your airports at the expense of fps. However, I would ditch 100s of other airports I have downloaded when just browsing through flightsim.to take advantage of the higher fps. 

The only airports I've used that have given me a noticeable FPS hit are some of the Asobo hand crafted ones. Other ones have been pretty much the same FPS as their surroundings, even multi GB payware ones, but I haven't tried the known monsters like Flytampa's Las Vegas. 

I guess that's why people stuck to 1 LOD. It worked absolutely fine. If it hadn't they would've gone down the LOD route. And also as a newcomer there is, or was, no prominence given to LODs in the developer kit. 

It's all there of course but not pushed in any way. If it worked without it you wouldn't bother and I'm sure plenty don't even know it exists until it's too late. 

It'll be interesting to see how it plays out. I can't see them rolling it back if they put it in place, but the amount of noise will be deafening if they do implement it. 

 

 

It's a lot of work, the default exporter everyone is using was written in Python and the person that wrote it never completely finished the BATCH LOD export (at least last I checked). This means the first job is modifying the Python script to automate Blender if you really want to speed up the process. Though some tools online could do it, but then it's still a bit of a headache. What people aren't realizing is that there are devs in this making significant money with a team of people building airports with 10-20 buildings, so it's not a big deal, but then there are also people that have solely developed airports with 100+ buildings as freeware. Without automation, it means creating 400 files at least, not to mention that the SDK recommends getting rid of the normal map after a certain LOD which means more XML coding work or manually setting the texture in the GLTF files. I'm personally not looking forward to generating 400 files for a freeware product, but to each their own.

Even if you could batch export correctly, you still have to load a model in and decimate it in blender 3x for every model, then create a total of 4 files. If you have even a relatively large airport but only in a city say less than 200,000 people, it literally made almost no difference in performance unless it's in a dense area or a very very large airport. That was BEFORE the upcoming coding change by Asobo, it's not just ASOBO enforcing LOD's that increases performance, it's a code change on their end to render the LODs in a different method. So it takes both the update Asobo is providing and the developer to provide all the LODs after this LOD enforcement take place. Of course for all the larger cities, especially for ones with Photogrammetry, it can make quite a difference from the Asobo updated code. Before though, it was basically the difference between getting 60 FPS or 65 FPS usually in these areas, or something like that, I don't recall exactly.

Since Asobo is changing the way LODs will be rendered, this is why it will make more difference now. Though it's yet to be seen how much difference it will have in less populated area, more than before, but likely not as much as people are expecting.

Edited July 30, 20214 yr by Alpine Scenery

1 hour ago, Alpine Scenery said:

It's a lot of work, the default exporter everyone is using was written in Python and the person that wrote it never completely finished the BATCH LOD export (at least last I checked). This means the first job is modifying the Python script to automate Blender if you really want to speed up the process. Though some tools online could do it, but then it's still a bit of a headache. What people aren't realizing is that there are devs in this making significant money with a team of people building airports with 10-20 buildings, so it's not a big deal, but then there are also people that have solely developed airports with 100+ buildings as freeware. Without automation, it means creating 400 files at least, not to mention that the SDK recommends getting rid of the normal map after a certain LOD which means more XML coding work or manually setting the texture in the GLTF files. I'm personally not looking forward to generating 400 files for a freeware product, but to each their own.

Even if you could batch export correctly, you still have to load a model in and decimate it in blender 3x for every model, then create a total of 4 files. If you have even a relatively large airport but only in a city say less than 200,000 people, it literally made almost no difference in performance unless it's in a dense area or a very very large airport. That was BEFORE the upcoming coding change by Asobo, it's not just ASOBO enforcing LOD's that increases performance, it's a code change on their end to render the LODs in a different method. So it takes both the update Asobo is providing and the developer to provide all the LODs after this LOD enforcement take place. Of course for all the larger cities, especially for ones with Photogrammetry, it can make quite a difference from the Asobo updated code. Before though, it was basically the difference between getting 60 FPS or 65 FPS usually in these areas, or something like that, I don't recall exactly.

Since Asobo is changing the way LODs will be rendered, this is why it will make more difference now. Though it's yet to be seen how much difference it will have in less populated area, more than before, but likely not as much as people are expecting.

While thats true, 3DS users faces the same problem, there are tools to automatically create LODS, but that barely works. Us blender folks, rely on Vitus's plugin, wich is amazing to be honest, he made that for free, and now thousands of people are using it, and make hundred thousand of dollars with it. Vitus is also Wing42, he produces airplane for MSFS, so he has virtually no time anymore to work on the plugin. There are a few things missing. I know FBW made an exporter, but never could get that working (the import part of it is amazing tho).

5 minutes ago, leprechaunlive said:

While thats true, 3DS users faces the same problem, there are tools to automatically create LODS, but that barely works. Us blender folks, rely on Vitus's plugin, wich is amazing to be honest, he made that for free, and now thousands of people are using it, and make hundred thousand of dollars with it. Vitus is also Wing42, he produces airplane for MSFS, so he has virtually no time anymore to work on the plugin. There are a few things missing. I know FBW made an exporter, but never could get that working (the import part of it is amazing tho).

I will mod it I guess if I get time, but I'm not a Python programmer and haven't messed with the Blender add-on. Someone that has more experience with Blender addons or Python could probably fix it easier. If I do it, I'm going to make it do the decimate / polygon reduction thing automatically and hopefully I can just make it so you can do multiple files at once instead of one at a time, like place them in a directory and it can do all at once. That way you don't have to rename the X0-X1 thing in Blender and don't even have to re-poly the models using decimate (or whatever method).

 

Edited July 30, 20214 yr by Alpine Scenery