SMP Reduce Unreal transitions and pauses?

[Agrajag]

Loving SMP. Makes the world so much more immersive. My issue is that it will often jar me out of that immersion with two things:

 

1. I'll be flying along (on VATSIM 99% of the time) and the entire sim will freeze for a few seconds and, presto, I have clouds.

 

2. I'll be flying along with a completely clear sky. Then clouds suddenly appear as if from nowhere. Then they disappear. It's not as if I emerged from them. If I look behind me there's nothing.

 

Is there anything I can do to reduce these sorts of harsh transitions?

[bruced39]

Agrajag,

 

I was having a lot of those problems as other were too. If you have the NOAA weather plugin installed then deactivate it, as it calls for weather updates way too many times and you will have all those pauses. Without it, you will have pauses but not as many and for a very short time. (1-2 seconds versus 5-15seconds) I also found that I lowered the cloud distance and tweaked the other settings to lesson the amount of the pause as the program has to redraw each cloud separately each update, and the more detail and distance you have for the clouds, the more your computer has to compute. AS well the slower your computer you have the harder it will be for it to do these tasks.

 

So try those thing's and see if it lessons the time of the pause and lessons the amount of pauses. It has for me. I still do get a long pause (5-7 secs) every now and then but not as much as before.

 

Good luck

 

Dave

[Agrajag]

Thanks. The pity is that I was just getting really happy with the immersion factor. At lower settings I feel like the clouds just live around me and nowhere else.

 

I also don't believe I have the NOAA plugin (I certainly didn't manually install it knowingly). I'll take a look next time I'm in there. Just xSquawkbox via VATSIM. I suspect VATSIM is doing the updating.

[JohnMAXX]

Give me a window into your hardware and rendering settings in X-Plane.....

 

The reason I ask is we can possibly work through your issues without compromising the overall scenery....

 

 

 

Oh as far as transitions, this is something we are aware of......Hang tight we have a talented group of people working on SM.....

Edited March 4, 2014 by JohnMAXX

[Agrajag]

Hardware is as follows:

 

Asus Maximus VI Hero motherboard with an i5 4670k (running at 4.2GHz). 16 GB RAM (Ripjaws). Gigabyte GTX 770 with 4GB VRAM.

 

Rendering settings are getting up there. Did you mean X-Plane's or yours? 

[JohnMAXX]

X-Plane's .......post a screenshot of the rendering window....

 

A couple areas of interest are water reflections and draw distance....

 

Many people put water reflections to high, honestly the difference between high and low isn't even noticeable...but setting it to high is very expensive on resources.....

 

Also draw distance can also be knocked down to either....medium or high......very high takes a huge toll on the sim......

 

This should help to negate any hardware/ software mismatches.....

 

 

 

In the SMP dialog keep cloud quality to 1/3

 

Overcast quality to medium

 

And cloud draw distance to 3/4

 

Just a few things to get you started,  but if you tackle a few settings you will not miss much in X-Plane and gain better performance....

 

 

Both SMP and X-Plane are scalable, even for future hardware.......  

[Agrajag]

Ah... Shift Spacebar works even for the settings pages. Live and learn.

 

 

Edited March 5, 2014 by Agrajag

[bruced39]

Hi Johnmaxx,

Haven't chatted In a bit. I never spoke of the absence then appearance from the clouds. I was trying to figure why this was happening. Glad it's not just me and glad your working on it. Agrajag, I will let john lower some of your settings as I see sone are way to high. He's helped many settle xplane down and SMP to work together. I am surprised to see you have runways follow terrain contour as most have it off for scenery to look and be correct. Again for skymaxx best performance I will leave it to John.

John I can't wait for the next update. Agrajag stay with SMP john will be able to help you. And as most x plane users know, we really need a new weather engine to make xplane the best sim and to make skymaxx the best it can be. In time the new weather engine will come.

I've been where you are and we all are waiting. As always ask questions and post problems and most will help.

Dave.

[Agrajag]

I should mention that I'm not at all unhappy with the way the system itself is performing (unless these transitions and freezes are tied to that). I'm getting 60fps in most places and no lower than 30fps with those settings. That's in heavy impact areas as well. 

 

I am open to any changes in settings. Frankly, I had no real feel for "runways follow terrain contour". I assumed that meant non-flat runways which is a huge feature over Flight Simulator.