MSFS Adaptive LOD

[Brocky120 65]

Anyone used or using this, noticed it the other week.... https://github.com/Fragtality/DynamicLOD

 

 

[JYW 2,990]

Looks interesting.  Might go and try it now.

 

EDIT:  From the actual developer on the Github page:-
 

Quote

 

DynamicLOD

Based on muumimorko Idea and Code in MSFS_AdaptiveLOD.
 

Please do not use it. It hacks your Memory. Maybe you get banned. It is bad!

 

Maybe not!

Edited December 15, 2023 by JYW

[RJC68 823]

7 minutes ago, JYW said:

Maybe not!

I read the exact same thing and thought yeah I don’t think so. Lol

Edited December 15, 2023 by RJC68

[tonywob 4,770]

Well, it's opensource, so you can read the source code and see it's not doing anything suspicious.. but it looks like it connects to the sim and changes the LOD settings for objects directly loaded in memory, similar to trainers used in certain games to cheat. A rather extreme approach, and not one I want to try, but interesting none-the-less

[roi1862 611]

Thats really interesting...it was something i always wish we had. Waiting for more feedbacks before trying 

[captain420 3,099]

This is one feature that I've always wished that was built into the core sim. I hope Asobo/MS will incorporate this one day.

[FBW737 519]

My prayers answered. I'll take a look at it and proceed with caution!

EDIT: OK, this does not inspire confidence: "Please do not use it. It hacks your Memory. Maybe you get banned. It is bad!"

Edited December 16, 2023 by FBW737

[bobcat999 8,509]

Strange!  Why would someone post that after making the files available for everyone?  And may get you banned?  How?  A strange comment to make.

 

[Stearmandriver 2,332]

Banned from what lol?  Ze interwebz?

[V1ROTA7E 718]

Who's gonna be the first to try it?

[MrFuzzy 2,124]

1 hour ago, V1ROTA7E said:

Who's gonna be the first to try it?

Hopefully some ambitious youtubers 🙂

THE PINNACLE OF PERFORMANCE

THE ULTIMATE GRAPHICS SETTING THAT WILL BRING YOUR EYES TO A CLIMAX

THE CULMINATION OF YOUR SIMULATION EXPERIENCE

[RALF9636 1,998]

I had been using the app by muumimorko for a while. It worked fine and improved my simming experience a lot. I could for example set the TLOD to 80 on the ground to provide nice performance even at large hubs and go up to 400 at cruise level to enjoy the views. The app did that automatically as it was expected to do. I did not notice any adverse effects. I always wondered why it did not get more attention.

Unfortunately it stopped working with one of the latest sim updates. It couldn't read or write the TLOD any more. Having lost this functionality made me realize how bad MSFS needs to incorporate something like that into the sim itself.

Haven't had the chance to test the new app yet.

8 hours ago, FBW737 said:

My prayers answered. I'll take a look at it and proceed with caution!

EDIT: OK, this does not inspire confidence:

 

Quote

 

DynamicLOD

Based on muumimorko Idea and Code in MSFS_AdaptiveLOD.
 

Please do not use it. It hacks your Memory. Maybe you get banned. It is bad!

 

 

 

I wonder if this comment relates to the code by muumimorko not the new app he published himself. It's quite irritating though indeed.

 

Maybe @Fragtality himself could clarify and give us some insights. This project seems very interesting! I really hoped someone would pick up the work of muumimorko.

 

Edited December 16, 2023 by RALF9636

[KL Oo 706]

Following this thread! This is a much needed tool!

[LGKR 36]

3 hours ago, RALF9636 said:

I had been using the app by muumimorko for a while. It worked fine and improved my simming experience a lot. I could for example set the TLOD to 80 on the ground to provide nice performance even at large hubs and go up to 400 at cruise level to enjoy the views. The app did that automatically as it was expected to do. I did not notice any adverse effects. I always wondered why it did not get more attention.

Unfortunately it stopped working with one of the latest sim updates. It couldn't read or write the TLOD any more. Having lost this functionality made me realize how bad MSFS needs to incorporate something like that into the sim itself.

Haven't had the chance to test the new app yet.

I wonder if this comment relates to the code by muumimorko not the new app he published himself. It's quite irritating though indeed.

 

Maybe @Fragtality himself could clarify and give us some insights. This project seems very interesting! I really hoped someone would pick up the work of muumimorko.

 

Hi

I tried to download the zip and run the program. It does not seem to register any data such as altitude, fps or anything from the sim even "sim" is green.

How did you install the program and how could you see that it actually works?

[virtuali 4,446]

The tool is surely interesting, especially because it's Open Source, so everybody can see how it works and what it does.

And yes, it does something that is potentially dangerous: it attaches to the MSFS running executables and it writes directly into the Virtual memory allocated by the MSFS process.

We used to do that, years ago, with FSX and up to P3D3, because those sims required many tweaks when they started to get too old, so we had a page full of "Tweaks" in the 32bit version of our Addon Manager .DLL for FSX/P3D1/2/3, which using this method could be applied directly in memory without restarting the sim or having to edit the FSX.CFG and restart.

And, while Tweaks that write in memory are risky, in many other cases, we used this method to read data we couldn't get from Simconnect, which is safe.

We abandoned these methods entirely when P3D4 came out, because most of those tweaks weren't really needed, and the P3D SDK was updated with more data available officially through Simconnect/PDK, so we didn't need direct access to memory, not even in read-only so, since P3D4, our apps are 100% "clean", that is only using officially documented API calls.

Same for MSFS as well: we decided safety is more important, even at the cost of losing features and, since both P3D and MSFS are still actively supported with updates, it would be very annoying for us and users as well having to update the software as soon a new build of the simulator .EXE (or any other .DLL in the sim) is updated. With P3D not using mandatory updates, we would have to support each individual build in history, and with MSFS we would need to support at least the two MS or Steam versions.

Yes, of course direct access in memory allows you to do things not possible with the official SDK, but there are many issues to consider: the software is strictly tied to the precise, exact build of the simulator and when you write something in memory, you'll never know what the side effects might be, the host program might not like having data changing behind its back, there might be thread safety issues, there are user permissions issues and, ideally, to make it safer to write into another process, the application that writes into memory, should temporarily "freeze" the main thread for a very small amount of time (yes, there's a Windows API call for that), to be sure the memory you are writing to is not written at the same time by either the simulator itself, or by another process that is trying to do the same thing.

And, of course, most antivirus will complain about this, since Attaching to a remote process is usually considered a virus-like technique so, even if the program itself is not trying to do anything malicious, the antivirus doesn't know that (antivirus surely doesn't know that location in memory is the Object or Terrain LOD), it just sees the "dangerous" API call, and will raise its alerts.

However, as I've said, being Open Source is what makes this utility useful: you can see what it does, and decide if you are comfortable with it and, in when a new build of the sim will come out, even if the original author abandoned it (because he decided having to find the new offsets again wasn't very fun), somebody else can fix it.

Edited December 16, 2023 by virtuali