Best Practices

[Bamboo Cougar]

Hi to all scenery developers.

I have a quick question, and am hoping for some form of consensus around a 'best practice' when developing scenery.

The Scenario:

I have been developing scenery for Norteastern Ontario (2 degrees of Lat and 1 degree of Lon). I have been generous with several scenery components, most notably some of the .for from Open Scenery, as well as G8 stuff.

The Problem:

One day, as I was flying yet again around one of the newly developed airports and custom scenery, I decided to go to the bottom of my scenery area, just for a fun flight in my Shade Tree Beaver. As the scenery did a reload in the next Lat south, I ended up with alternating regular scenery and white squares.

Analysis:

I was steered towards part of the problem by Jaques Breault. He said he had a similar problem in V8 with Open Scenery .for's and suggested that the scenery load is timing out before complete.

Discovery:

I checked my hard drive power settings and realized I was set for 15 minutes until spin down. I changed the setting to "Always On".

Test:

I flew the same flight, and others to adjacent lat's and lon's and never had the problem appear again.

My Question:

Do you feel that a best practice is to design for the user that has rapid hard drive access (eg. it's spinning when needed or spins up very quickly), or should I design for the user who will have 30 seconds to spin up the drive and load the scenery? (I think 30 seconds is the max until timeout, but I stand to be corrected).

Any ideas would be welcome.

Thanks everyone... have a great flight weekend!

[Beej]

Hi there BC,

I am far from a scenery developer and so am of no practical help to you.  Others here hopefully will have the expertise you need.  However, if not, could I suggest that one useful approach might be be to contact Ben Supnik?  He seems to be one of the "go to" guys on these things and I enjoy reading his blog (the bits of it I can understand) and he seems helpful.

best

Beej

[-TheoGregory]

Make it as detailed as YOU want it. Its your scenery. No scenery should really take more than 30 seconds to load up though. If a scenery load takes more than 30 seconds something is corrupted or something has gone wrong somewhere (glitch)...

If the scenery load causes x-plane to crash more than once, you might try checking your log.txt in your root folder. It MAY reveal the source of the problem.

I think there might be wasted resources somewhere that you could cut down.

How big is the folder of your scenery?