Trying to kill my new PC...

[New Light]

Hi Daube!

I don't see where to (un)check 3D Trees. I Googled, Binged, and looked on You Tube for any "P3Dv4.1" "3D" "Trees" settings and come up empty. I tried inserting a line in the P3D v4.1 cfg file with a mixture of "autogen", "texture", "3D", "tree(s)", X_X_X, combinations with =0/1 & = true/false, but I still have 3D trees. I also tried (un)checking 3D Vegetation in the settings and there was no noticeable change.

I did reset the scenery settings to their original settings.

Then I tinkered with the EXP=##. I set it to 10 from 15, and it yielded no difference Then I set it to 9 and noticed four 3/4 - 1 second freezes while turning to final. So "10" might be where the sim ignores that tweak. I left it set to 9. Anyway, that's where I'm at, at the moment.

David

[Daube]

The option to disable the 3D trees is located in the settings -> Graphics -> World section of the game options. It is a checkbox at the bottom of the screen
Concerning the TEXTURE_SIZE_EXP tweak in the [TERRAIN] section of the Prepar3D.cfg, the value 10 is definitely taken into consideration, since it will crash my porr GTX970 (because that video card doesn't have enough onboard RAM). It is the value used generally by people with GTX1070 or GTX1080 video cards, which have more RAM on them.
My GTX970 can only handle the TEXTURE_SIZE_EXP=9. And the result is already very cool, as the ground textures are crisper in the distance, and the autogen is displayed much further away.

One more thing: don't forger to delete your shaders in the folder C:\users\your name\appdata\Local\Lockheed Martin\Prepar3D v3\Shaders\

[New Light]

Ahhh... you have v3. I went straight from FSX to v4.1 This is what v4.1 setting pages looks like...







I'll experiment with the EXP= and see what the limit is. My rig didn't like 9, but seemed fine at 10 and 15. Maybe 7 and 12 will be more telling.

Thanks again!

Dave

[New Light]

I couldn't stand it. I bought Orbx FTX Global and Open LC. Apparently, it comes with some weather textures too. I have not purchased FTX Vector or HD Trees - yet...

I was "flying" the Carenado Cessna 172 N Skyhawk out of Hammond: Northshore Regional (KHDC)


Everything was going pretty good crossing Hwy 190


Then the gulf coast weather started to change quickly following I-55 & Hwy 51 south, just north of I-12 (E/W)


On base, runway 18, Hammond


Two small birds racing to tie down around where Fly by Knight FBO would be at KHDC.


That's my story, and I'm sticking to it...

Dave

[Daube]

I have P3Dv2, P3Dv3, P3Dv4, FSX, FSX-SE, FlightSimWorld and XPlane11
And currently, P3Dv3, P3Dv4, FSX-SE, FSW and XPlane11 are installed on my computer.

The setting I indicated is visible on your second screenshot "Settings - World" at the bottom of the picture. Deactivate it. Dynamic 3D autogen vegetation is both expensive and ugly, you really don't want that option to be ON.

[New Light]

Wooo! I'm only loading P3D on my 250G SSD. I'm going to load FS9, FSX and XP11 on a my HDD and see if the better hardware makes a difference. If it does, I'll add a 1T SSD.

I did delete the Shaders folder twice, and it reappeared twice. I also unchecked 3D Veg again.



This what I came up with...

These two look pleasing - much more than default





This isn't too bad either, but I don't think columns and rows look good unless it's an actual tree farm, although, I probably would not notice at a distance.



We DO have A LOT of oak trees in this area too, but they don't look like this...



In the end, I still have 3D trees right??? Thanks for your help and patience. You've still got me going in great direction. And, I'd rather be picking out tree textures than be fighting with poor equipment, software, OOMs, etc...

Dave

[Daube]

The trees in columns are most likely a tree farm, as you said.
From these shots, I can confirm you now have "normal" autogen, with what seems to be OrbX textures. These trees are still "3D" of course, but they are made of just a few polygons, not a full 3D shape with indivudual 3D branches etc...
Now, the area you chose is not so dense. You might want to give a try to the North Cascades are for example, that mountain area which is around Seattle.

Talking about OrbX, since you bought OrbX Global, you should now be able to download and use all of the OrbX freeware airports. These are most definitely recommended, especially for your low&slow VFR flights with small piston engine aircraft !

Finally, about mountain flights: I would recommend you to activate the "receive" shadow option for the vegetation. It will allow your trees to be shadowed when they are, for example, on the dark side of a mountain/valley. (Else, they would be lit by the sun...).

[New Light]

Alright! I finally made my PC falter. I clicked the shade settings to send & receive, moved all shade sliders to Ultra, and loaded a flight from WA69. Just looking around the cockpit brought me back to my FSX nightmares I turned the shade settings down to max and reloaded the flight and everything performed very nicely again.

I also went ahead and bought OrbX FTX Vector and Trees HD. I have all the NA freeware downloaded also. Here's pictures from two 40 minute "flights". There does seem to be a noticeable difference in detail between the Seattle area and the less popular gulf coast.

Here's the Carenado Cessna 152 on downwind, runway 31, Hawthorne (45R) - north of Beaumont, TX. east of Houston. OrbX Global, Vector, OLC NA & Trees HD with default sky... Looks better than default...




Carenado Cessna 172 N Skyhawk @ 3,500' over downtown Seattle. There were very few micro-stutters throughout a 40 minute "flight" around the area with everything pretty much loaded. I did notice some black squares on buildings from 15+ miles out. That's still awesome compared to what I'm used to!




Coming back towards WA69 @ around 700' AGL. The pine trees do seem to look much better in the PNW than the pine trees along the gulf coast and southeastern U.S. I'm still happy with the investment though...

[Daube]

Now it's starting to look like P3D, and not like FSX anymore

There are a few more adjustments needed though.
Concerning the "send" and "receive" options for the shadows, I strongly advise you to just disable the "send" option for trees, but keep the "receive" one.
The receive option is light enough on the FPS, but the send one can be extremely heavy. This is only valid for the autogen trees though. For other categories of objects, you can keep them all checked (both send and receive). You should also disable the cast option for the last category, that "non-shadow flagged content". I believe that one might create visual issues sometimes... but not sure.

In your screenshots, we can clearly see the ground textures became blurry. Especially in the last shot. This shouldn't happen with such a slow aircraft.
I would advise you to keep the terrain mesh resolution setting around 5 or 10 meters (instead of 1m as it is now), and the ground texture resolution setting around 1m (instead of 7cm as it is now). This will greatly help your CPU.

You might also want to disable the water reflections for the following categories:
- clouds
- vegetation
- buildings
This will make the water surface less expensive and less instable too.
You might also want to disable the 3D water, by pushing the water quality setting one crank left, from ULTRA to HIGH. You'll get 2D waters like in FSX, but the sim smoothness will increase.
Finally, you should disable the option "bathymetry", which makes the water transparent and models the underwater grounds in just in a very few places on the planet. This option is useless at the moment, and quite expensive as well.

From the Windows side, just two things:
- Ensure you launch P3Dv4 by right clicking the icon and select "Run as administrator".
- Ensure your antivirus is set to ignore anything about P3D (add the Prepar3D.exe to the list of excluded processes, and the P3D install folder to the list of excluded folders)
- Ensure your computer power management settings are set to "Maximum Performance" in the power saving mode selection. Yes, that one sounds stupid I know, but it definitely had good results, including on my own computer on Win10 64

Last but not least, you might want to replace the default clouds with the ones from the freeware package HDEv2.1 (that version which was specifically made for FSX, because the 2.0 is in fact for FS9 and some textures are not compatible). I'd recommend you to choose the cumulus resolution 512x512 DXT5. It sounds like low resolution, but in reality it will look beautiful already, and it will also allow you to push your cloud draw distance a bit further without any FPS hit.

[New Light]

Sorry for the delay. I ran into my first crashing issues with P3D yesterday. I had lowered the resolution and changed to the HDE sky textures and loaded a flight at Wax Orchards WA69. The sim would load to the cockpit, then freeze and shut down repeatedly. So I'm working elsewhere for the moment. I had some mixed results with the new settings in the same flight.

This is a very nice looking pic "flying" out of KHDC with the lower settings. That is I-12 E/W and the Hwy 445 N/S interchange, which looks correct and excellent although Hwy 445 usually won't show up at medium settings on the other sims.



Then, 18 miles east things started looking a lot less good. This is just north of Vincent (private field) and is the best representation I've seen of it in a sim. The lake water over port wing and Lake Pontchartrain look great. The trees and fields on the right side of the pic are fine too. I don't know what started happening at the lower left of the pic. The antenna and some buildings look sharp



This is L31 again, which is 5 miles east of Vincent. It is more representative of what the area looks like as far as color, and is, generally, better looking than what I posted before. I haven't mentioned that this area is supposed to be a lot heavier populated even though there is still a lot of pine forest in the area, but that wasn't represented in default P3D at it's highest settings.



And this is the same shot from a higher angle. The water looks nice. I'm not sure what happened to everything else



This is south of L31 over Mandeville and the northshore of Lake Pontchartrain, which is very green, but populated area. One item that's definitely missing is the Pontchartrain Bridge which should show up even with low settings...

[New Light]

On a less depressing note. This was taken before all the crashing started yesterday.

On downwind, 35L, Hooks Memorial. This was using the medium settings, I believe. It's an OrbX airport with OrbX products and REX Sky Force 3D. I caught some rain at the end of that flight. Happy times!

[New Light]

Ok... I rechecked the "Use High Resolution Textures" since yesterday's fiasco, and something went right... I loaded a flight out of L31 and everything loaded and performed correctly. I kept the medium to high settings previously used.

This is what the area looks like in real life. The area around L31 is all pine tree forest. There was a lot traffic on Hwy 36 which runs perpendicular on the north side of the runway had no impact on performance during taxiing.




This is south of L31 and east of Mandeville about to cross Hwy 190. Notice the Pontchartrain Bridge is not there...




After crossing where the Pontchartrain Bridge was supposed to be, I panned around, and look what I found. Even North Causeway Blvd looks correct




I decided to cross the lake and check out another Orbx airport, New Orleans; Lakefront Airport KNEW



Dave

[Daube]

There is something wrong.
The forest sparse density is just one of the problems... but the blurriness of the ground textures on the second-to-last screenshot is way more dramatic.
Your computer is not keeping up to speed... When flying a Cessna, this isn't supposed to happen, especially on P3D. Your ground textures should be crisp all the time.
Can you post screenshots showing your current settings again ?

[New Light]

These are the settings from the flight that started good and ended bad.




Then I checked this box for the second set of pix.

[New Light]

I was able to get FS 2004 set up again too!

I have Real Environment Pro, Ground Environment Pro II, REX 2004, Ultimate Terrain USA, FS Global 2008, Shockwave Lights, FS Water, HDE v1 Clouds, Dr. Zewiecki Design Grass 3, Tree Gen v1.0, and FSUIPC 3 (Registered) loaded so far. Although, it looks much better from the cockpit. This is the standard I'm jumping from


This is the default Cessna 172 SP Skyhawk entering downwind, runway 4R, Ryan; Baton Rouge Metro (KBTR).