FS9 patch and the autogen bug?

[JimmiG]

It seems the patch does not fix the autogen bug. It did not for me, and I saw a couple of posts on the "other" site reporting the same thing.

What are your findings? If you start from a densely populated scenery area, and slew "backwards" away from that, does the framerate remain high, or does it drop to about 10 FPS? If it does drop, what happens if you rename your default.xml file to default.xml.bad and set TERRAIN_USE_VECTOR_OBJECTS=0 in your FS9.cfg file and repeat the test?

Starting from KPDX and slewing backwards south, I started at about 30 FPS and as I moved backwards it dropped to 10 FPS. After disabling the vector objects and default.xml, I got a steady 35-40 FPS.

Going to try it on a clean install on my laptop but I doubt it will be any different - looks like MS failed to deliver.

On the other hand, the 19m mesh support now works properly - noticed a sublte but very noticable improvement over the VFR Terrain and Switzerland Pro sceneries.

[airassult]

If I can tell you I flew from San Fransico to Los Angeles with scenery and density at settins at max, along with max wtaer seting. Then I will throw in fps locked at twenty clouds visibility 30miles, clouds draw distance 40-50miles, 3D 100% and not to forget ai set at 100%.
Now with all this I was looking over the wing as the were many cloud layers and preformance was SMOOOOth as silk as the aircraft was banking right.
So I guess now we have a slight dilima here. Is my set up wrong, or right? I didnt notice any decrease in fps over populated areas looking front nor back.

[sandokan]

Are you sure your system is running the COMPLETE patch?
To be sure check the properties of your FS9.exe and check that your version TAB is: 9.1.0.40901
Sandokan

[JimmiG]

Yup, 9.1.0.40901. However it patched countless other files as well which I why I wanted to try it on a clean install. However, after installing FS9 on my laptop and trying to apply the patch, I got a message saying "Callback OD" and then another message telling me I had chosen to abort the update "You have chosen to end the update process".

Indeed it looks like this patch needs a patch.

[JimmiG]

OK managed to get the patch installed on the laptop *but* the autogen bug definitely remains. I saw the exact same thing on the laptop, with a "clean" installation of FS9. When using a high Zoom setting the default.xml objects are clearly visible up to 20+ miles away and framerate is about 1/3 of what it should be.

[Bruce]

not sure about the atogen bug, to be honest i never noticed it anyway. i did used to get lots of randon crashes for no particular reason which i still get. also to be honst i can't say i've noticed any difference post patch, bu then i have not flown much ouside the UK where i had 3rd bridges anyway. I did disable my generic.bgl though because i wanted to get rid of the bridges that where popping up where they should not be.

[Zevious Zoquis]

Is it possible this is a problem associated specifically with slew mode (or made much worse by it)? Anytime I've used slew mode I've noticed the scenery can get pretty funky. What about when you're flying a normal flight from point A to point B? How are the framerates then? Also, I assume this is at EXTREMELY DENSE autogen?

[Skymaster]

Hi Bruce!

How do you disable the generic.bgl file? Renaming it?

Thanks in advance,

Skymaster
[font color=blue]Cheers from Portugal (LPPR)[/font]

[bjpilot]

TERRAIN_USE_VECTOR_OBJECTS=0 ---> what does this do? If it increases fps, I'll try it but what does it really do?

[JimmiG]

" Is it possible this is a problem associated specifically with slew mode (or made much worse by it)?"

It is made worse by slewing, simply because when you slew you "travel" much faster over the scenery than you would normally. Even a supersonic jet travels quite slowly compared to a few "clicks" on the Numpad 8 key in slew mode. This is also why the scenery gets "funky" (blurry textures, no mesh detail etc.) - it just can't keep up.

However, the autogen bug will also appear when you're flying normally. Suppose you fly from KPAE to KSEA and land at RWY 34 - by making a 180 before landing you will trigger the bug even if you're flying a C152. If you were to land on 16 however, you would not notice the bug at all.

The reason I used slew to see if the bug was gone is simply because it's much quicker than actually making a complete flight.

There is a faint possiblity that Microsoft's "fix" only works when you're flying normally. This is easy to check though - simply set the plane on autopilot and look backwards. I will try that later today.

More likely however:
a) MS "forgot" to actually include this particular fix in the patch
b) MS doesn't understand their own scenery engine.

Of those, I think b is most likely. From the FS9 patch readme:
"Flying out of an area then back to the same area may cause lower frame rates. The problem was due to a memory leak and how Flight Simulator handled autogen objects. "

This description of the problem is inaccurate at best. You don't need to fly "back to the same area" to trigger bug - you simply need to fly some distance (about 20 miles), then turn 180 degrees and look back. Also, it's not a "memory leak" at all by definition. If it was a memory leak, FS9 would eventually crash with an out of memory message, which it does not. In fact, the "sticky" autogen objects *are* purged, but only at a distance of 15-25 miles instead of the "correct" 3-5 miles. They may well have optimized the memory usage of autogen objects but that doesn't do much good when the objects still "stick".

I'm just glad they managed to implement the other fixes without messing them up - especially the 19m mesh support makes VFR Terrain+Photo scenery and Switzerland Pro look much better - and - they don't use Autogen :-lol