Author Topic: My feedback on KSDF and more...  (Read 4122 times)

parsec71

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My feedback on KSDF and more...
« on: October 30, 2017, 09:01:00 pm »
This is my feedback on KSDF Louisville and more. As you can see from my signature, I've got nearly all the FSDT airport sceneries in addition to GSX. I'm using FSX Steam Edition.

KSDF loads slowly. All the FSDT airports load slowly compared to Aerosoft's, but KSDF seems a tad more slow. There's quite a lot of flickering (texture alters between two appearances) on shiny surfaces such as windows. The PAPI lighting is far too dim (see atttached screenshot from rwy 35R), you can hardly see them at all. Rest assured they will be beaming like four small suns on a real runway. I tried KJFK v2 too and they seem too dim here also. Question is if lighting has been changed in the latest updates, because I'm sure the PAPIs weren't like this earlier.

A common trick in FSX is to have only two airport sceneries active in the simulator, the one you depart and the one you arrive to. Let's say that none of the FSDT sceneries are active when starting FSX. If you activate two FSDT airports in the scenery library, the sceneries won't load, not even with a restart of Couatl and a rebuild of the airport cache. In comparison, doing this with Aerosoft's airports works just fine. With FSDT, you'll have to restart FSX in order for the sceneries to load and show.

GSX really gives life to the simulation. It's a brilliant product. As for the KSDT airport sceneries, they tend to be more detailed than competing products. They have a different look and feel, more realistic-looking than others. My simulator flying in the US wouldn't be the same without them.
FSDreamTeam products: GSX, KJFK, KCLT, KMEM, KIAH, KORD, CYVR, PHNL and KSDF.
Finally on Prepar3D v4.3...

virtuali

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Re: My feedback on KSDF and more...
« Reply #1 on: October 31, 2017, 09:20:09 am »
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KSDF loads slowly

Yes, it does. But only in FSX. It's just too big/complex/large for FSX to handle it comfortably. Read Page 9 of the manual, there are some suggestion for FSX user to improve performances.

In P3D, you hardly notice any difference in loading time compared to another FSDT scenery. And they are overall way faster to load in P3D. Even more so in P3D V4.

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All the FSDT airports load slowly compared to Aerosoft's

No, they don't.

Our sceneries don't take much time to load during the progress bar, because only about 10% of them is made using .BGL, but they start to load *after* the progress bar is done, so they APPEAR to load more slowly, but they don't. The overall load time is the same, just that part of our loading process is made after the progress bar.

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There's quite a lot of flickering (texture alters between two appearances) on shiny surfaces such as windows.

We'll check this, but nobody has reported it before. Are you aware that even *default* scenery in FSX sometimes flickers against itself, especially in DX10 ?

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The PAPI lighting is far too dim (see atttached screenshot from rwy 35R), you can hardly see them at all. Rest assured they will be beaming like four small suns on a real runway. I tried KJFK v2 too and they seem too dim here also. Question is if lighting has been changed in the latest updates, because I'm sure the PAPIs weren't like this earlier.

It's impossible to "beam like four small suns" on a sim that doesn't support HDR. Like P3D. But not, nothing has changed in the way we do PAPI lights since a while. We'll check it anyway but, in the mean time, could be you tweaked something in FSX that might have affected lights ?

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A common trick in FSX is to have only two airport sceneries active in the simulator, the one you depart and the one you arrive to. Let's say that none of the FSDT sceneries are active when starting FSX. If you activate two FSDT airports in the scenery library, the sceneries won't load, not even with a restart of Couatl and a rebuild of the airport cache. In comparison, doing this with Aerosoft's airports works just fine. With FSDT, you'll have to restart FSX in order for the sceneries to load and show.

While this trick can be "common", is totally useless for our sceneries. For the same reason they *appear* to "load slow" (they don't), because they are loaded after the progress bar, they are also automatically discarded from memory as soon as you exit from the airport and, for the same reason, they are never loaded if your are just not there.

That's why the "common trick" of disabling everything except the start/destination airport is totally useless with FSDT sceneries: since we are doing custom memory management, our sceneries are not victim of the very well known issue of FSX not fully discarding resources allocated by .BGLs, even when you are far away from the airport.

And that's why the fact you must restart the sim in order to see a change in a disabled/enabled FSDT scenery is not an issue: you are not even required to disable/enabled them in the first place!


« Last Edit: October 31, 2017, 09:22:04 am by virtuali »

parsec71

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Re: My feedback on KSDF and more...
« Reply #2 on: October 31, 2017, 11:55:01 am »
First of all, no use in mentioning LM Prepar3D to me. Their policies and licensing fees are ridiculous. How many gamers are violating their terms and use it as an entertainment product?

I should have phrased the KSDT versus Aerosoft sceneries a bit different. Due to technical solutions in your software, the sceneries take longer to appear. For FSX, this is a fact and not something I'm making up. For KSDF, it is particularly slow in appearance, whereas PHNL appear almost immediately. But yeah, it is down to complexity...

Don't get me started on HDR. The biggest and latest stunt out of Hollywood when 3D failed (again...). HDR has got nothing to do with illumination intensity/strength, as in lumen. For MS games, this is OpenGL/Direct3D light property stuff. See attached screenshot from FSDT PHNL, taken today. That's how PAPI should appear. You can't fly an approach without seeing the PAPI lights clearly.

The common trick I mentioned is particularly useful because active sceneries will load even when flying 40,000 feet above them. I flew from KIAH to KSDF with (K)MEM as VOR/waypoint, and the Airbus X I was flying stalled and fell 10,000 feet due to the loading of the KMEM scenery. I was at sim rate 4X (cruise level) when this occured. So I find it handy to have only two sceneries active, but with your sceneries, that's a hassle due to the fact that they won't load until FSX is re-started. But again, that's down to technical decisions you've made with your software...
FSDreamTeam products: GSX, KJFK, KCLT, KMEM, KIAH, KORD, CYVR, PHNL and KSDF.
Finally on Prepar3D v4.3...

virtuali

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Re: My feedback on KSDF and more...
« Reply #3 on: October 31, 2017, 02:12:00 pm »
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First of all, no use in mentioning LM Prepar3D to me. Their policies and licensing fees are ridiculous. How many gamers are violating their terms and use it as an entertainment product?

Yes, maybe gamers that use the simulator for entertainment purposes, are in fact violating the license but, flight sim users never considered themselves as "gamers" so, any other usage other than entertainment ( learning aviation, for example ), is covered.

FSX is dead, and we are not developing anything new for it. And in the unlikely case LM would stop making it available to everybody with a Credit Card, we'll develop for other platforms (X-Plane, FSW, etc.), but won't go back to FSX.

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For FSX, this is a fact and not something I'm making up. For KSDF, it is particularly slow in appearance, whereas PHNL appear almost immediately. But yeah, it is down to complexity...

That's exactly what I've said. If we made the SAME scenery with a .BGL, you would have had a much longer progress bar, but the scenery would "appear" as soon as the progress bar ended. But the overall loading time would have been the same compared to a similarly detailed scenery. Again, in FSX.

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Don't get me started on HDR. The biggest and latest stunt out of Hollywood when 3D failed (again...). HDR has got nothing to do with illumination intensity/strength, as in lumen. For MS games, this is OpenGL/Direct3D light property stuff. See attached screenshot from FSDT PHNL, taken today. That's how PAPI should appear. You can't fly an approach without seeing the PAPI lights clearly.

We know perfectly well how a PAPI should look like, and that's how it looks like on a sim that supports HDR (that is P3D, of course) so, I guess it IS useful...

your screenshot show the really outdated default AFCAD lights we used years ago for PHNL, but using default runway lights is not possible due to how the scenery has been made, which is entirely contoured in 3d, while PHNL is still old technology flat FS8-style scenery.

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The common trick I mentioned is particularly useful because active sceneries will load even when flying 40,000 feet above them. I flew from KIAH to KSDF with (K)MEM as VOR/waypoint, and the Airbus X I was flying stalled and fell 10,000 feet due to the loading of the KMEM scenery.

Now you are referring to the pause. I was referring to the supposed memory saving, which is not an issue, as I've said. If it's just the pause you are worrying, we can surely prevent the loading of the scenery at high altitude.

However, your remark still seem strange, because we also have altitude checks on all objects, so they are not loaded at 40K feet and, it's really not possible that loading of KMEM resulted in an airplane stall. We surely don't do anything to the flight model itself. Maybe, it was the autopilot system of that particular plane which was confused by a pause.

parsec71

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Re: My feedback on KSDF and more...
« Reply #4 on: October 31, 2017, 02:52:15 pm »
Bottom line is, PAPI on KSDF and others are too dim on FSX. It should be fixable, though, 3D contouring or not.

The KMEM scenery did load and the pause did cause the plane to stall. That's why only two active sceneries is the way to go on FSX.

As for KSDT not developing for FSX anymore, that's a decision you're entitled to make, of course, but at the same time FSX customers will look elsewhere. Thankfully, many developers are still making FSX products.
FSDreamTeam products: GSX, KJFK, KCLT, KMEM, KIAH, KORD, CYVR, PHNL and KSDF.
Finally on Prepar3D v4.3...

Hnla

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Re: My feedback on KSDF and more...
« Reply #5 on: October 31, 2017, 05:00:16 pm »
Oh, another old FSX user who is sad and jealous because he is being left behind with all the marvels of P3D

Don't worry, you will switch over as soon as all your FSX developers realized that FSX is deader than a doorknob!

parsec71

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Re: My feedback on KSDF and more...
« Reply #6 on: October 31, 2017, 05:45:28 pm »
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Oh, another old FSX user who is sad and jealous because he is being left behind with all the marvels of P3D

Don't worry, you will switch over as soon as all your FSX developers realized that FSX is deader than a doorknob!

I've used FSX Steam Edition since August this year. So I'm not an old user of the sim. However, when it comes to playing computer games, I have quite a record, way back to 1982. Sinclair ZX Spectrum, Commodore, Atari and then PC in 1988.

P3D is FSX with a re-designed 64-bit engine, made by a military manufacturer. No go with the current licensing and pricing. Flight Sim World has the same bad 3D engine as FSX. And since FSX has tons of add-ons, the choice was easy.
FSDreamTeam products: GSX, KJFK, KCLT, KMEM, KIAH, KORD, CYVR, PHNL and KSDF.
Finally on Prepar3D v4.3...