Nicodemus

I'm not sure, but this might be intentional on the developers part

I say that as with the shift to 64bit, it seems that Chaseplane as stopped reporting VAS usage. Moving from an specific VAS count, to  a rather funny "Smiley Face" when running V4, as if to indicate "don't worry be happy".

I agree that it would be ideal to know the current count regardless of 64bit

P3DV3 Chaseplane

P3DV4 Chaseplane

No worrires, it no doubt does come at some performance hit, as this is a highly optimized asset I would imagine that those with mid to lower high end pc builds would not notice any discernible impact (i would guess single digit frames). If you are doing IFR or Tubeliner flights, and really need 2-3fps(an estimate) for less "beefy" pcs, I would imagine this is a good thing to toggle off, that being said, I think like most autogen, that this is not a high FPS impact outside of "far right slider" setups.

I'll try some tests on my rig and see...I think autogen density will be more critical than "speedtree on/off", as this are generally highly optimized assets

Hello all,

I've been a lurker for years, and have gained much insight from reading posts (thank you all).

With P3Dv4, and the explicit setting for Dynamic Auto Gen vegetation, I have seen a number of posts concerning speedtree...and it seems that many  are unaware of the middleware or what it does

speedtree is a middleware software used in cinema, games, etc. that enables easy creation of vegetation assets (trees, shrubs, grass, etc.), and easy authoring into those application (for developers, VFX houses, anyone creating content that can benefit from the middleware)

http://www.speedtree.com/

I feel that many have seen the name and believe it has something to do with sim performance, or that it is something Lockheed has developed for P3D. Although the obviously use the middleware for the ease of content creation (and the benefits for boned based animation of assets built in speed tree)

Speed tree assets have the runtime benefit of being instanced (a not fully accurate explanation: single allocation of memory allowing for multiple instances in the engine without duplicating memory footprint, although each instance does come at a cpu cost,etc). This allows for a lot of use cases for in engine without the overhead of each "tree" or instance being a unique asset that has to be handled by the engine

Disabling the dynamic autogen (the setting that enables speedtree assets at runtime in P3D) just stops the engine from using speedtree assets at runtime (no doubt coming at a performance gain  for those not interested in more vegetation, or animated vegetation assets)

I'm sure this has been covered before, but with probable new converts to P3D, I wanted to help provide a context for those coming onboard as I think the name "speedtree" confuses people into believing it is some performance related asset vs a middleware implementation , that although can help performance, is not limited to that

Thanks,

Nick

For those interested, similar game development middleware, such as Scaleform, is used by P3D to allow for Adobe Flash integration (no doubt for UI construction)

http://www.prepar3d.com/SDKv3/LearningCenter/scaleform/scaleform_overview.html

https://www.autodesk.com/products/scaleform/overview