LWM / VTP polys in FS2004 - no need to be triangularized?

[Guest rafaelds]

I was looking at some default FS2k4 BGLs with the EXCELLENT tool LWMviewer and comparing them with some BGLs of one of my sceneries, made with the not-less-excelent Ground2k4. One thing that came to my attention is that the g2k4 polys appear all triangularized, while the default polys seem to have several shapes. Of course, they are still 'tesselated' into the appropriate LOD grid (can't remember which one now, it's been months since I last have fiddled with scenery).Is that just an artifact because of the way the polys are displayed or did this really change from FS2k2 to 2k4?

[Guest christian]

As far as I know, both LWM and VTP never had to be triangularized. I think the SDK states that VTP polys have to be convex. I can confirm though that FS2004 seems to accept concave LWM and VTP polys (basically polys of any shape).Cheers, Christian

[Guest rafaelds]

I am surprised. I can (almost) clearly remember when the secrets of these new technologies were being found out that it was being commented here that the fact of polys needing to be triangulated and splitted into LOD-quadrant contained areas was making scenery design tools more difficult to design, because the algorythms were not exactly trivial. But anyway it's good to learn this.Does anyone know why Christian Fumey's program splits the polys in triangles? Now I guess this might be the reason why my small scenery (VTP + LWM) eats so much resources in FS (FS mem usage pops to more than 500mb of RAM with it loaded, FPS drop a little but consistently with the detail increase).

[arno 1]

I would expect that triangulating the polygon (although not needed maybe) would not have a performance influence. It saves FS from having to do it and I would expect that makes it a little bit faster even.

[Guest luissa]

>Does anyone know why Christian Fumey's program splits the>polys in triangles? Now I guess this might be the reason why>my small scenery (VTP + LWM) eats so much resources in FS (FS>mem usage pops to more than 500mb of RAM with it loaded, FPS>drop a little but consistently with the detail increase).Hi,I do not know if this is relevant for your problem but do you have landclass scenery in a "scenery folder" without a "sister texture folder"?. In FS2002 not having this would crash FS. In FS2004, it makes the memory page usage to increase steadly.Regards, Luis

[Guest rafaelds]

That must be it. In FS2002 I used the trick of the folder with no 'texture' subfolder, but since in FS2004 this seemed to be not necessary I put my new landclass BGL in the addon scenery/scenery folder, which I use for my add-ons (I always make my BGLs and textures very uniquely named to avoid overwriting other files), and there is a texture folder there. Good to know this... And the huge increase of RAM usage is perhaps because I have a low amount of VRAM, so RAM is also used a lot by the AGP bus to allocate texture memory.

[Guest rafaelds]

Just tested it, and that did the trick!Memory usage went from an ever-increasing value (I ran out of patience when it crossed 500mb and shut FS down) to approximately 275mb just by moving the landclass BGL.Muito obrigado, Luis! :)