July 29th, 2021 - Development Update

[Dominique_K 10,149]

3 minutes ago, Virtpilot said:

So I changed the two UserCfg.opt LOD values, which made things better. Should I change them back to default before the hotfix?

I suppose that the fix will look into that and replace your edited file. But better safe than sorry, I will put the old back in a non read-only state.

[Dominique_K 10,149]

13 minutes ago, honanhal said:

Unfortunately, the way Asobo communicated the information about the LOD reversion in this update seemed to have created much more confusion than it resolved...it's a confusing and rather technical issue, sure, but I wish they'd been a little clearer that the reversion has in fact already happened, which would resolve at least half of that confusion. I've read those sentences multiple times and it sure sounds like they're talking about the next update -- which I know from reading everything else here that they certainly didn't mean.

In any case, exciting that down the road we may get even more performance improvements. Albeit at the cost of making a lot of work for some addon developers...

James

The question is, do they know what are they talking about themselves 😈 ? I am obviously a little harsh and provocative here, sorry for it, but the MFS team including its PR wing has shown some lack of coordination since early on...

On the second point, SU5 is problematic not only for the culling and related pop-ins. And honestly, I do not want further down the road performance improvements at the price of  a reduction of visual quality. 

[honanhal 1,420]

2 minutes ago, Dominique_K said:

On the second point, SU5 is problematic not only for the culling and related pop-ins. And honestly, I do not want further down the road performance improvements at the price of  a reduction of visual quality. 

Well, that's fair enough. Partly I welcome the focus on great performance because it's proving that 60 fps+ that looks good (you may not think it looks "great" or "perfect," but I think nearly everyone agrees it looks pretty good) is actually possible in a flight simulator.

For many years anytime someone would suggest that maybe, just maybe, the fundamental problem was that FSX and then P3D were badly optimized, certain self-appointed experts would step in to explain that no, AKshually, you just don't understand that bad performance is inherent to a flight simulator, unlike every other 3D game and application known to mankind.

So much for that argument!

James

[Dominique_K 10,149]

2 minutes ago, honanhal said:

Well, that's fair enough. Partly I welcome the focus on great performance because it's proving that 60 fps+ that looks good (you may not think it looks "great" or "perfect," but I think nearly everyone agrees it looks pretty good) is actually possible in a flight simulator.

Fo

I’d love to have 60+ don’t make me wrong.  But it doesn’t make sense to me to do it at the expense of features, the infamous tradeoff, specially in what seems an already optimized sim. As I said in another thread, sometimes the best is the worst enemy of the good. 

[leprechaunlive 1,852]

35 minutes ago, Dominique_K said:

The question is, do they know what are they talking about themselves 😈 ? I am obviously a little harsh and provocative here, sorry for it, but the MFS team including its PR wing has shown some lack of coordination since early on...

On the second point, SU5 is problematic not only for the culling and related pop-ins. And honestly, I do not want further down the road performance improvements at the price of  a reduction of visual quality. 

Asobos definetely do know what they are talking about. MS on the on the other hand...hmmm, not so much 😄

[wim123 763]

i think they try to change too much at the same time.

[hanhamreds 592]

its true communication hasn't been the best, but I truly believe Asobo are doing their best in trying to modernize the Engine code - after releasing what was basically a new SIM running on legacy code.

So give the payware Devs some time (not too much please) then release as intended in the first place. 

The only downside I see with all this is that it might put off a lot of freeware devs - which would be a shame imo

Edited July 30, 2021 by hanhamreds

[virtuali 4,421]

4 hours ago, EGLD said:

I noted that Randazzo said that performance was far better on PC during SU5 beta, and that performance was significantly lower with the SU5 version that was released this week

It really depends *where* they tested the airplane.

If the difference in performance was caused by the last-minute reversal of the culling strategy for LOD-less objects, it would be more noticeable in areas ( I guess airports ) with a large number of LOD-less objects, which during the Beta were culled more aggressively.

That doesn't necessarily mean 3rd party airports. Lots of default library objects didn't had any LOD in previous releases, so they were suffering from the aggressive culling too.

Some default objects, like the taxi_light_02, which is used in all default airports ( the taxiway side blue light fixture ), or the default Windsock, didn't had any LOD before SU5. They has been added in SU5, but the taxi blue light have very strict values, so it looks very bad until you get *really* close to it. We reported it as a bug but, it's possible that a "fix" might have some impact on fps, since it's an object used in the hundreds on big airports. 

[virtuali 4,421]

3 hours ago, hanhamreds said:

anyway we ARE at pre SU5 with LODS - so nothing has changed in terms of that

That's not entirely correct.

The only LOD-related thing that has "reverted" back to pre-SU5 is the automatic removal of objects without LODs ( or, more precisely, only 1 LOD ), but for objects that DO have different LOD levels, what you'll see in the sim will be mostly controlled by the values of these LODs, and many default library objects has been changed, with LOD values added or updated. 

[superspud 450]

8 minutes ago, virtuali said:

They has been added in SU5, but the taxi blue light have very strict values, so it looks very bad until you get *really* close to it. We reported it as a bug but, it's possible that a "fix" might have some impact on fps, since it's an object used in the hundreds on big airports. 

I noticed that. It is absolutely terrible now. The light is entirely yellow until you're within 1-2 metres. I don't think keeping the top blue is that demanding. 

They've done a really bad job on many of their own objects. Vehicles seem to have had the top LOD level entirely removed. They're all now a strange cloudy colour with little detail at all. 

Edited July 30, 2021 by superspud

[Bobsk8 12,730]

1 hour ago, wim123 said:

i think they try to change too much at the same time.

Exactly. We tell users when they have a problem to empty their community folder, and then add a couple of things back at a time, until they find the problem maker. What does Asobo do, they dump 40 GBS of changes into the sim and guess what, multiple problems pop up that we have to struggle with. 

[pmb 5,137]

38 minutes ago, virtuali said:

That's not entirely correct.

The only LOD-related thing that has "reverted" back to pre-SU5 is the automatic removal of objects without LODs ( or, more precisely, only 1 LOD ), but for objects that DO have different LOD levels, what you'll see in the sim will be mostly controlled by the values of these LODs, and many default library objects has been changed, with LOD values added or updated. 

Thank you, this is the first note in this matter I do understand as a layman.

Kind regards, Michael

[Dominique_K 10,149]

1 hour ago, virtuali said:

That's not entirely correct.

The only LOD-related thing that has "reverted" back to pre-SU5 is the automatic removal of objects without LODs ( or, more precisely, only 1 LOD ), but for objects that DO have different LOD levels, what you'll see in the sim will be mostly controlled by the values of these LODs, and many default library objects has been changed, with LOD values added or updated. 

This is what I intuitively understood from your and others earlier posts. Your added precisions are welcome. 

I do see the pop-in and morphing of default objects too. 

So it doesn't make sense to kindle the flame under the 3rd party developers feet. The SU5 is what has degraded  the visual quality not addons.

And let me clear about that. By focusing on 3PD as the MFS arch-defenders would like us to do ,  we aim at the wrong  target to improve things. The right target is the MFS team.

Edited July 30, 2021 by Dominique_K

[Alpine Scenery 1,609]

2 hours ago, virtuali said:

The only LOD-related thing that has "reverted" back to pre-SU5 is the automatic removal of objects without LODs ( or, more precisely, only 1 LOD ), but for objects that DO have different LOD levels, what you'll see in the sim will be mostly controlled by the values of these LODs, and many default library objects has been changed, with LOD values added or updated. 

Thank you for confirming our various observations. I got into a pretty heated argument in another thread and people kept spamming that there are NO LOD changes, and i kept saying, ok well the renderer has been changed on default objects. I did not have time to check any custom airports really (well it's harder to notice or compare since i updated all my PC's), but I've noticed some changes in some of the detail in the default buildings.

They were mixing up the fact that one change was held back which was going to cause issues to some airports, but that does NOT mean that NO changes were made.

Edited July 30, 2021 by Alpine Scenery

[marcg11 125]

I wonder how much of the performance improvements we are go to lose - Hopefully very little but I was starting to enjoying the smoothness of my flight since SU5......