Scenery takes seconds to show up

[obrunomartins]

Hi,

I have been looking for topics to answer some questions about JFK v2. I have made some flight to KJFK and I realized that when I am approaching the airport scenery takes almost 3 seconds to show up. Before it shows up I can see the gray or black (depending if its day or night) area in the long final (around 10 nm in ILS) then suddenly (3 seconds) the scenery is loaded.

It also happens when I start a flight in KJFK. The first 3 seconds it appears a very low and poor scenery area then then after 3 seconds the real KJFK v2 loads up.

Is there any configuration that can fix it?

[virtuali]

That's entirely normal, because the scenery loading is not handled by FSX, but with our software modules, which allows for a lot more flexibility in setting visual ranges, multi seasonal changes, handling native FSX code, shaders, and reducing OOMs because, if we used the standard .BGL format, we wouldn't have any control on those elements, and FSX would just load everything.

It's not the scenery takes 3 seconds "more" to load. The final loading time is exactly the same, it's just that with other sceneries you don't notice it, because it's all hidden in the black screen with the loading scenery progress bar, which will of course take longer so, overall, the time to load the scenery is exactly the same.

[jgoggi]

Sorry for reopening this thread, but when I approach KJFK v2, for example with the Canarsie approach to rwys 13, at a certain point the sim freezes for 3-4 seconds, while the textures load, and this takes away from immersion. Isn't there a way to have the textures loading little by little, so that this freezing can be avoided? I don't see this in any other complex scenery...
Thanks.

[virtuali]

at a certain point the sim freezes for 3-4 seconds, while the textures load, and this takes away from immersion. Isn't there a way to have the textures loading little by little, so that this freezing can be avoided? I don't see this in any other complex scenery...

JFK airport is in a very bad position, because it's very close to LGA, and it's close to Manhattan, and you are in one of the most memory-intense areas in the FSX scenery.

For this reason, we set the loading range for JFK a bit shorter than most of our other sceneries, at 7.0 NM, which has been measured carefully in order NOT to load JFK from LGA or Manhattan.

This means, thanks to our scenery loading system, you don't risk an Out of Memory when using a complex airplane, which you would surely be exposed to, if you used "any other complex scenery" that doesn't use our scenery loading system, and is instead in the hands of the default FSX memory management.

With any other scenery, the airport would be already loaded together with Manhattan and LGA (and the scenery developer couldn't prevent it), and if you used high settings and a memory-hungry airplane, the risk of OOM would have been very real.

So, you must trade off a minor annoyance of a pause while approaching, against the much worse risk of a CRASH while approaching. I'm sure you'll agree it's best this way...

[jgoggi]

Thanks, Umberto, but it seems that this loading feature applies also to a small airport like Geneva, I have just landed there and, on final, 2-3 annoying stutters, even if the fps are very good.

[virtuali]

Thanks, Umberto, but it seems that this loading feature applies also to a small airport like Geneva, I have just landed there and, on final, 2-3 annoying stutters, even if the fps are very good.

Geneva is a smaller airport, and being smaller, it has a smaller loading radius too. But keep in mind that, enlarging the loading radius ( which is not really needed at Geneva *because* it covers a smaller area ) won't remove the loading pause, it will just let it happen earlier.

And, as also discussed many times on the forum, the "Anti pop-up" setting in the Addon Manager can be used to trade off memory usage and fps with smoothness. The higher the setting, the more objects will be loaded at the same time (but not sooner than the overall scenery loading range), so if you increase that, you might get rid of the small pauses due to smaller objects loading/unloading constantly depending on the distance from you, with some fps and memory usage cost, so you can experiment with it.

But it won't reduce the main loading pause, in fact, it might result in a larger pause, but a smoother flight after that.