Disable Autogen Buildings and Vegetation (Again !!)

[glider66 8]

I've tried searching this topic on here and found several previous moans about the Autogen of buildings and vegetation in MsFS being out of proportion and out of context, but nothing mre recent, so here goes.....

I've just got into the SDK scenery designer (and really like it - thanks Asobo), and I accidentally discovered the effect of disabling buildings and vegetation autogen over a comparatively large area, (with an exclude polygon).  I'd been trying to make a small village on the perimeter of a very rural ex-WW2 airfield look more realistic, but the standard library objects had very few "locale specific" matches for the oldish UK village buildings.  Even the church looked like something out of the Munsters Movie, though admittedly it was an improvement over the original three storey block of flats that was Asobo's previous 3D building plonked over it.

So I thought I'd clear the decks completely by drawing the exclude polygon around the perimeter of the whole village, and hey presto, the effect was a remarkable improvement.  It revealed the high res online satellite imagery underneath with the same clarity as the extensive Orth04xp scenery that I'd painstakingly downloaded for my XP11, (and required it's own dedicated 4tb disc).  I admit the lack of 3d buildings wouldn't be so succesful in urban areas with high res buildings, but in rural areas it was far closer to real VFR from even as low as 1000ft.  Not only was my house 100% accurate, but even the garden shed and parked car were visible.  Whereas with mSFS autogen on (any setting, even ultra), was completely different, and the pig farm up the road had become a luxury hotel !

Here's a split screen shot of the local village, half with Autogen, and half without, and another composite screenshot showing a nearby Solar Energy Field, depicted by Autogen as rows of tiny terraced houses and miniaturised hotels.

So is there any way that we can ask Asobo to add a settings tickbox to completey enable/disable autogen of buildings and/or vegetation ?
.....and it would be even more useful it could maybe be more specific in keeping default hand crafted scenery enabled, so just avoiding the genuine "autogen".   I'm fairly sure that it would have a secondary really useful effect in greatly reducing the bandwidth, CPU, and GPU loading, not having to draw and rotate these hundreds of buildings and trees, and would significantly improve FPS, especially in VR.

It would seem to be a relatively easy tweak to implement, since it can be accomplished with polygons in the SDK.  I did think of trying to draw a polygon around the UK, but it exceeded the allowed size, then just Southern England, then just Norfolk, but the largest permitted was just about one square mile.

Edited July 28, 2022 by glider66

[JacquesBrel 639]

For solar farms this mod does a decent enough job for me: https://flightsim.to/file/26186/powerlines-and-solar-farms

As for other autogen, even with its flaws, I wouldn't want to disable it anywhere. The autogen can certainly be weird in a few places here and there - but flat aerial photos everywhere would look weird everywhere to to me.

[glider66 8]

I guess it all depends on where you fly Jacques.  Some areas of the world may have more accurate autogen locale specific architecture.  Here in rural UK very few buildings are appropriate.

Even with Autogen disabled, land contours are faithfully reproduced, so MsFS is using quite a fine mesh to lay the sat photos on.  So in rural areas at > 1000ft alt the scenery effect doesn't look flat except where there would be tall buildings or landmarks.

I've been using Ortho4xp at 18 and 19 max res for several years now with XP, and it is better than MsFS as long as you're not flying really low.  It's quite hard to practice real VFR flights with autogen because although the topography of rivers, railways and roads is correctly mapped, the over-sized buildings and vegetation can mask and dramatically alter the downward appearance in most areas.

When I first started mith MsFS I was amazed by the scenery, but at the same time surprised to find quite wide rivers in very familiar flight areas that were in reality quite small streams, almost invisible from even 500ft.

 

[philmurfin 73]

Hi, I completely agree with you that it would be good to be rid of the autogen, did you get anywhere with it please?

Phil