Memory leaks with VTP2 textures

[Holger 0]

Hi all,I suppose that most of us are aware of "memory leaks" (that can lead to out of memory crashes) with generic land class files that have an associated texture subfolder. However, what was news to me is that the same problem can happen with VTP2 textures.Design software like Ground2K4 and SBuilder allows us to pick textures for our VTP2 polygons or lines from any FS folder without complaint. In my case, I wanted to use specific textures from some of the default sets in SceneryWorldtexture without having to install duplicates in my local texture subfolder.Wrong move! The compiled bgl file *does not* retain the path that you provide in G2K4. Thus, the first place FS will look for when it reads the VTP2 texture calls is in your scenery's texture subfolder. It won't find them there and moves on to SceneryWorldtexture but that is exactly the situation that leads to memory leaks. Whether these memory leaks are slow or fast depends on the number of your polygons or vectors but you can usually spot them easily with the help of Filemon - http://www.snapfiles.com/get/filemon.html - and the FS9.exe memory use in the Windows Task Manager.The solution is to either provide copies of the external textures in your local texture subfolder or place any VTP2 bgl files that reference external textures into a scenery folder without a parallel texture folder.And, since we're on that topic, missing effects files will also lead to memory leaks as well as microstutters, the latter because fx files are often called many times per second.It'll be interesting to see whether FSX shows different behavior in regards to these memory leaks.Cheers, Holger