Permanent Scenery ?

[Joe60]

Modern computers can easily afford to dispense with 20 or so FPS to achieve the scenery, terrain, buildings and trees to be permanently displayed without it updating all the time as you fly toward it.
Is there a mod or setting so that the scenery/terrain updates like out of sight or on the horizon for instance ?

[Groundbound1]

You can change a few parameters in the FS9.cfg, to change the radius of how far away from the plane the scenery fills in, but nothing like you're talking about. I don't think you could have it all rendered at one time, just due to the amount of memory it would take.

Mr. Needham has posted the best way to set up the FS9.cfg here:

http://www.simviation.com/cgi-bin/yabb2 ... 1211055375

[Joe60]

Cool thanks that helped somewhat and I see I can fiddle with distances in the cfg file.

Just something that beats me a bit coming from other games is the FPS.

UPPER_FRAMERATE_LIMIT=24 to 28 // note.. if the processor/card is a bit slower, this may need to be 22

Why do you guys set this so low... just something I dont understand.
With all these settings, and at 1500 feet above Seattle over looking the city and harbor, I can achieve 60 FPS, so why throttle it to 28 ?

[Groundbound1]

Capping the FPS in the sim saves compute cycles. What the sim would be using to render those extra frames, can now be used to do other things, like rendering distant scenery.

[Joe60]

Capping the FPS in the sim saves compute cycles. What the sim would be using to render those extra frames, can now be used to do other things, like rendering distant scenery. Wink

Ok, that makes good sense.
Btw, I dont get any stutter of any description and get unbelievably smooth flying anywhere in FS2004 - pity I cannot say that about FSX
But I get your point and will "throttle" it, maybe not as low as 28 but mmm... we'll experiment

[Groundbound1]

If your system can handle it, go for it. It depends on the rig I guess. I used to run with the FPS set to unlimitted, and mine ran pretty smooth too. But I find the image quality to be a little better with it capped.
It all depends who you ask too. Some say to cap it, some say don't. I suppose in the end, it really comes down to personal choice.

[JBaymore]

With all these settings, and at 1500 feet above Seattle over looking the city and harbor, I can achieve 60 FPS, so why throttle it to 28 ?

Joe,

60 FPS low and slow over Seattle.... with everything maxed?  What exactly are you using for a system?

best,

.............john

[Joe60]

John, my system is as follows:
Case with 600 Watt PSU
E6850 - 3 gig 2 Core Duo CPU
DP35DPM  - Dragontail Peak Motherboard
4 gig - Kingmax 800 mhz memory                              
Biostar V8803GT52 - nVidia Graphics card
160 gig - SATA - FAT32 hard drive
Windows Xp Pro SP3

The V8803GT52 I think is where the speed lies.
Originally when I bought the PC about a month ago, it had a standard 8800GT512 card but its AA did not work and I was generally dissapointed with it, especially in FSX.
Fortunately it packed up and they swapped it for this one as they could not get the same one again.
This is the Revision 2 of the 8800GT512 with the AA fixed and is also a overclocked version of which is still running as standard.
The 160 gig FAT32 I chose as FAT32 is much faster than NTFS and it does not take Scandisk forever to scan a 160 gig drive.
My D drive is a 500 gig NTFS.
I chose this mobo and CPU as it was strongly advised to me that "Rather get the top of the range of an older technology than the bottom of the range of a newer technology" and I'm very pleased I did just that

What also helped a lot was Nick's suggestion of nHancer, thats the most amazing program and I was not going to use it, but tried it anyway.
Using its AA is amazing and with the AA off in the hardware gives an additional 5 FPS or so also and it all helps.