I am conteplating my first scenery design project, but am rather concerned about the age-old issue....frame rates.It has struck me that many scenery packages, even payware one's made with GMAX, impact rather negatively on frame rates on my system, which is a not too shabby P4 2GiG with 1 GiG RAM and a GeForce 3 graphics card.Perhaps an experienced scenery designer can enlighten me on what are the real issues to consider when making sceneries vis-a-vis frame rates.I'd hate to invest a lot of time on making stunning scenery, just to find that upon completion it becomes unmanagable when it relates to frame rates.In particular, I'd like to hear views on which scenery design programs are impacting negatively on frame rates. Would mixing several software options (like making the ground textures with FSSC or Airport and the rest with GMAX) affect frame rates.

In general GMax give a bit better framerates, but when you design your scenery without thinking about the performance you will always be able to destroy the frame rate, with any tool you use :).Also you should remember that every time you add more detail this must cost some performance. You can expect a scenery to have a lot of detail and still to run faster then the default scenery.I think the most important parameters to control the framerate are of course how complex (amount of polygons etc) you make the objects, but also the v1 and v2 parameters you give it (these are visibility ranges). By setting these correct you can recover a lot of performance. Also build in options to display part of the scenery only at dense complexity setting or so can help to give good performance on slower machines.The best thing is just to build one new piece of your scenery every time, then compile it (you need to do this anyway to check if the object you made looks like you want). Then you can right away check the impact on the performance. If the performance suffers to much, just try to optimize the object further.