NZA Milford Sound Region will be released on Sep 13

[CapnCrunch 75]

5 hours ago, Joe L said:

Yes, I was able to spawn at at least one helipad.

Thanks, that's encouraging. In their older Mount Cook scenery you can see and spawn at some pads which are connected to the airstrips. But at the various mountain huts nothing is programmed as a landing area and consequently nothing will show up in LNM. Hoping that for this one they will have changed so you can spawn at a pad up in the mountains.

[CapnCrunch 75]

1 hour ago, F737MAX said:

While aesthetically nice, how much of a difference will some Seals, Cattle, and a few rocks around an airfield make to the overall flying experience?

Valid point of course. A user selection at install would be a better option than having to rename files.

Someone made the point about having a powerful CPU/GPU already. To that I just would point out that in their readme file they mention what some of the benchmarks are that they optimized for. LOD in particular. As long as there's a hard limit in the sim for number of objects allowed, developers will have to work around that. And as users we'll have to be prepared to make a few setting adjustments now and then. It will be great if Asobo can tackle that in the 2024 release.

[pilotter 224]

very nice scenery, but just as there nzch Christenchurch scenery it's falling to the wrong side with FPS. 

[HybridNz 249]

12 hours ago, bobcat999 said:

 

I wish there was an option to reduce the stones, birds, and a bit less flora maybe, but then again, I don't know what the significant factor is on causing the performance loss myself.

Thanks, were reading this feed back and will look to shift a bunch of things off into separated BGL file. You can do this already with static aircraft at NZMF airfield. 

In the mean time, one thing weve found is people with certain system configurations which dont have as much single thread performance (MSFS2020 is ultimately single thread locked to the main thread) suffer when it comes to rendering.
The region with the included ORBX mesh which is now part of the New Zealand World update is a lot higher resolution.
- Make sure you have Orbx Mesh NZ addon removed else you are double rendering the terrain mesh
- Make sure youre being reasonible with your terrain level of detail slider. We have found people are running this over 150% vs what their system is capabile of, which puts alot of strain on your system and especially in this area because of the number of mountins in the area.
- Check out our performance guide here (https://nzasimulations.com/help/) to run through a explinaion of your settings and the performance hit. 
- you can turn on FPS debug mode in the dev menu to shop if youre over subscribed on your VRAM, another FPS killer and can cause stuttering on some systems.

Edited September 13 by HybridNz

[HybridNz 249]

On 9/12/2023 at 6:05 PM, AnkH said:

Sadly this scenery will be useless half the time of the year using live weather due to the ridiculous snow coverage bug which is still not fixed more than three years after the release of MSFS...

This is a very good and accurate fix done by one of our beta testers and the presenter of the MS ATR offcial videos. (These presets arent ours but ZKDOS's)

https://flightsim.to/file/51105/new-zealand-weather-presets 

Edited September 13 by HybridNz

[bobcat999 7,722]

39 minutes ago, HybridNz said:

Thanks, were reading this feed back and will look to shift a bunch of things off into separated BGL file. You can do this already with static aircraft at NZMF airfield. 

In the mean time, one thing weve found is people with certain system configurations which dont have as much single thread performance (MSFS2020 is ultimately single thread locked to the main thread) suffer when it comes to rendering.
The region with the included ORBX mesh which is now part of the New Zealand World update is a lot higher resolution.
- Make sure you have Orbx Mesh NZ addon removed else you are double rendering the terrain mesh
- Make sure youre being reasonible with your terrain level of detail slider. We have found people are running this over 150% vs what their system is capabile of, which puts alot of strain on your system and especially in this area because of the number of mountins in the area.
- Check out our performance guide here (https://nzasimulations.com/help/) to run through a explinaion of your settings and the performance hit. 
- you can turn on FPS debug mode in the dev menu to shop if youre over subscribed on your VRAM, another FPS killer and can cause stuttering on some systems.

Sincere thanks for your help and feedback.  I will investigate some of the points you mention.

I can see the scenery is really superb and that there has been a lot of time, effort, and talent put into it, so if it is possible to free up a little bit more fluidity at NZMF itself, that would just about put the cherry on top. 

Edited September 13 by bobcat999

[Adamski_NZ 867]

2 hours ago, HybridNz said:

Thanks, were reading this feed back and will look to shift a bunch of things off into separated BGL file. You can do this already with static aircraft at NZMF airfield. 

Firstly - a HUGE thank you for this scenery. It's an absolute joy!

A few scenery developers (now and in the past) have used some sort of a mini Control Panel to make manipulating these BGLs easier. It'd be handy for NZCH as well!

[pmb 5,130]

You may or may not believe me, but I have zero performance issues in the NZA MF Sound Scenery, neither at the airport nor in the (near) surrounding which I explored a bit.

I'm nearly exclusively flying with my trusted G1 under VR and it keeps the 30 fps I set as a limit in the OpenXR toolkit with the exception of perhaps a couple of places where it dropped to 28-29 fps. No stuttering though.

I also had a short look on 2D performance before going under the hood. I use DLSS (3.1.30.0) with FG for 2D. I've limited fps to the 60 Hz my monitor provides and this was hit at MZMF (granted, in a static situation before I switched to VR). 

I have been flying in numerous versions of the Milford Sound in several sims  before (and been there once in RL - in terrible weather) and this scenery is just exceptional. The waterfalls all come to life, several sightseeing boats around and even the St Ann's Lighthouse casts light! So much detail to discover.

Of course, I deleted the three airports mentioned and had kissed the ORBX mesh goodbye long ago. I also should mention I am under the latest SU13 beta (1.34.15.0)

My system (see sig) is certainly good but in no way exceptional. And this was in the Sting, so I can't exclude the Dreamliner may run into performance issues😁

Kind regards, Michael

[MrBitstFlyer 3,645]

1 hour ago, pmb said:

You may or may not believe me, but I have zero performance issues in the NZA MF Sound Scenery, neither at the airport nor in the (near) surrounding which I explored a bit.

Same here, as smooth as anywhere else.

[Alvega 2,016]

4 hours ago, HybridNz said:

This is a very good and accurate fix done by one of our beta testers and the presenter of the MS ATR offcial videos. (These presets arent ours but ZKDOS's)

https://flightsim.to/file/51105/new-zealand-weather-presets 

Sorry but how is this a fix to using the scenery with live weather if you are recommending to use presets instead of live weather? 

[HybridNz 249]

5 hours ago, Alvega said:

Sorry but how is this a fix to using the scenery with live weather if you are recommending to use presets instead of live weather? 

Us 3rd party devs have 0 control over the live weather unfortunately in MSFS. We have (and many others) have logged this with Asobo/Microsoft. We have had one of our kind beta testers (who is an airline pilot) create these for simmers for free to help people flying in New Zealand in the Sim. 

Something I posted on another forum around live weather (The outcome rubs us up the wrong way too) but this might explain a little bit more of what we found when we went digging into the meteoblue live data.


"Live weather is not linked to scenery, the weather system cant be controlled by developers unfortunately. We have no access to the weather API.

We have had a look at what’s going on and it seems because there are sources for MeteoBlue (the weather partner for MSFS) for this area they approximate because of the average height data. Because the majority is mountainous for this area we get default snow. The problem cause is both algorithmic and source related.

We have mentioned it but the more people that log the same bug the more visibility it will get for the area, and some sort of work around may be programmed ?"

Edited September 14 by HybridNz

[HybridNz 249]

6 hours ago, pmb said:

You may or may not believe me, but I have zero performance issues in the NZA MF Sound Scenery, neither at the airport nor in the (near) surrounding which I explored a bit.

 

To backup some comments I said earlier, it seems to be AMD CPUs dont have the single thread performance where as intel CPUs do. Looks like this will (we hope and going by some comments from Seb from Asobo) 2024 will bring calm and utilise multithread much more efficiently so all CPUs can benefit

[petz_e 74]

12 hours ago, HybridNz said:

- Make sure you have Orbx Mesh NZ addon removed else you are double rendering the terrain mesh

Are there any plans to make this scenery work with the Orbx Mesh?

[bobcat999 7,722]

9 hours ago, pmb said:

You may or may not believe me, but I have zero performance issues in the NZA MF Sound Scenery, neither at the airport nor in the (near) surrounding which I explored a bit.

I'm nearly exclusively flying with my trusted G1 under VR and it keeps the 30 fps I set as a limit in the OpenXR toolkit with the exception of perhaps a couple of places where it dropped to 28-29 fps. No stuttering though.

I also had a short look on 2D performance before going under the hood. I use DLSS (3.1.30.0) with FG for 2D. I've limited fps to the 60 Hz my monitor provides and this was hit at MZMF (granted, in a static situation before I switched to VR)... 

Well everyone's expectations are different I suppose.  I can hit 28-29 fps as well, but for me that is a performance hit!   

This is because in the beta I am getting excellent performance everywhere else. Mainly 60 FPS at my settings believe it or not. 
I could go and lock at 30, but as someone else has said, I don't see why I should just for one add-on.

Anyway, I just checked.  It looks like I removed Orbx mesh after the New Zealand world update, as we were advised to do, my LOD's are now both set to 100, and the only other NZ add-ons I have are Flightbeam Wellington, and NZA Raglan, which are both fine in isolation.

I will now look at renaming a few BGL extensions, but I am sure NZA will continue to look into this and do what they can.  If the aircraft were split, I wouldn't mind having just one static aircraft just so it doesn't look totally deserted, and I can live without the birds and seals.  I will see how it goes.

[andy1252 3,379]

to @HybridNz and all the folk at NZA, thank you for this very fine piece of scenery.

It is a beautiful place to explore at ground level or at best 100 feet or so up, but I suspect I won't spend much time there as the surrounding scenery (mountains) are so appallingly rendered. Not NZA's fault, but a great shame. Marshmallow mountain tops and side faces.

For something that many deride as a "scenery sim" I'm always surprised at how lousy most mountainous areas look - pointy bits and vertical faces don't seem to be at all well handled. There are exceptions but generally, and in NZ particularly, they are not at all enticing. Well, not for me anyway, I guess other folks may feel differently.

Oh and btw, I didn't find any problems with performance - still getting up to around 40 frames with TLOD of 300 and mostly max setttings.