Roads and buildings detail

[Sigmoid]

I'm a bit confused by the world detail settings, mostly by the separate roads and objects dropdown.

As far as I know, X-Plane got its road-and-object data from Openstreetmaps. What is the logic behind the number of roads setting, what kind of logic does it use to display or not to display a certain road? Or does it "make up" new roads on high settings that aren't in the scenery?

Also, what about objects? So far I'm unable to set it up within the fps sweet spot of my computer in a way that Seattle isn't dominated by fully improved empty lots (ie. a street map without buildings), or on the other hand, be full of buildings that do not have roads leading up to them!

A ton of roads / a ton of objects: citiscape ruled by fully improved empty lots.

Default roads / a ton of objects: lots of suburban homes without a road.

[bsupnik]

The way the density sliders affecft the autogen is currently in a state of transition.

 

In v9 we removed "stuff" when you turned the settings down.  This technique just doesn't look that good in v10.  Roads are removed by scope, e.g. highways stay the longest, small roads go first.  3-d buildings are removed on a per-entity basis, e.g. one autogen element is removed at a time.

 

This is _not_ what we intend to have for much longer.

 

The new way, which we are working to is:

- Autogen elements spawn more or less 3-d over their base lot based on the objects setting.  So when you turn down OBJs you'll get a "less 3-d-ish 3-d" with the base ground textures still in place.

- Roads will have detail removed but all roads remain.

 

This second idea is going to be tough to tune...because it means a lot of roads even at the lowest setting...we're really going to have to tighten our belts to make it work.  But we think it can look good, while removing big chunks of the road grid looks a bit silly.

 

Once we do this, if you _still_ can't run well on the lowest detail settings (low objs, low roads), the next thing to do is to turn down the world detail distance, which means 3-d less far out.

 

One reason why we think we can go to this "simpler 3-d" instead of "less 3-d" is that the actual performance of the autogen is really quite good.  I have a Sandy Bridge i5 and I can run with _all_ of the autogen, forests, roads, and world distance maxed out at 30 fps, and have been able to since X-Plane 10.0 shipped.  And we do have a few ideas to make things faster.

 

The easiet way to kill autogen performance is to turn shadows and reflections too far up - they're amplifiers on the cost of 3-d.

 

cheers

Ben

[Sigmoid]

My 2.2Ghz quadcore Macbook Pro does around 13 fps with everything turned up to chock full. However, I need to bring it down significantly to get a stable 25-30 fps (everything between "default" / "a ton", grit and bump maps off).

 

So in the future, turning detail down won't make roads and buildings disappear, only make them simpler? I guess it would make a lot of sense for VFR. Seattle looks pretty rural on my computer right now.

[Sigmoid]

Hey guys, how is this improvement coming along? Any chance of it getting into 2.25?