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Thessaloniki X City Configurator [v3.0] (if you have OOM issues)


EmilG

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The OOM is still there. Flight from EDDF-LGTS with my PMDG 737 (Thessaloniki configurator LITE II). After the landing in LGTS the OOM appeared. Sorry i can't enjoy LGTS untill the problem is solved.

EDIT:

With the factory state of LGTS and high graphics settings, sitting in the NGX' high-res Virtual Cockpit, staring at the high-detail terminal with cloudy weather, my VAS is 3.6 GB. That's right at the "hot spot", with "irresponsibly good-looking" visuals and the configurator not even applied.

So:

  • Your operating system? 32bit/64bit?
  • Your other addons? Texture sizes?
  • Your FSX.cfg? Graphics settings?
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It is not my PC or the settings, they are ok and i can run a lot of more intense Add-ons without any problem.

You're talking about a 'problem' but don't provide details of your setup that could help to sort your issue out?

Sorry, I don't have any issues with Thessaloniki X - so now I'm going back to flying into it ...

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It is not my PC or the settings, they are ok and i can run a lot of more intense Add-ons without any problem.

In the NGX with the graphics settings I provided above, max. VAS was 3.7 GB - that is with the factory state of LGTS; no "double downgrade" applied.

I shut down ASN and restarted it during my approach, in order to see whether the VAS effect of the clouds, or rather the effect of greater visibility on VAS was more significant. Furthermore I switched between the 2D cockpit and the VC to find out about possible VAS implications due to cockpit rendering. Max. VAS under any circumstances explored was 3.7 GB (again: no VAS patch via the configurator present) - you're welcome! :D

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Emil,

unfortunately the problem remains, even with your latest City Configurator (LITE II configuration)!

But there's a difference: The OOM warning message doesn't appear, but every time when I'm approaching the city/airport I get this particular warning sound from Windows and the textures of FSX stop loading.

VAS usage is still MUCH higher than with similar add-ons...

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Emil,

unfortunately the problem remains, even with your latest City Configurator (LITE II configuration)!

But there's a difference: The OOM warning message doesn't appear, but every time when I'm approaching the city/airport I get this particular warning sound from Windows and the textures of FSX stop loading.

VAS usage is still MUCH higher than with similar add-ons...

Hi,

What's your LOD radius setting?

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LOD_RADIUS=3.500000

OK,if I remember right, this would correspond to 'medium' in FSX, fine.

It's rather odd I have to say. I never exceed 3.2GB VAS (LITE II configuration) with NGX on approach.

Perhaps you could give me base value of VAS when you load the NGX (hope you are using the latest updated version?) at LGTS (LITE II) when sitting at the apron?

If that exceeds the value of 2.7-2.8 GB, then definintely there is a lot going on in the background (other settings too high perhaps, water? AI?)

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OK,if I remember right, this would correspond to 'medium' in FSX, fine.

It's rather odd I have to say. I never exceed 3.2GB VAS (LITE II configuration) with NGX on approach.

Perhaps you could give me base value of VAS when you load the NGX (hope you are using the latest updated version?) at LGTS (LITE II) when sitting at the apron?

If that exceeds the value of 2.7-2.8 GB, then definintely there is a lot going on in the background (other settings too high perhaps, water? AI?)

Yes, it's 'medium'. I have a VAS value of about 2.65 GB when loading a flight with the NGX at LGTS. Of course I've installed the latest updates for everything!

Other important settings:

- Filtering: anisotropic

- Anti-aliasing: on

- Global texture resolution: max

- Aircraft cast shadows on ground: off

- Aircraft cast shadows on itself: off

- Mesh complexity: 50%

- Mesh resolution: 19 m

- Texture resolution: 60 cm

- Water effects: Mid 1.x

- Land detail textures: activated

- Scenery complexity: Extremely Dense

- Autogen density: normal

- Ground scenery shadows: deactivated

- Cloud draw distance: depending on the weather situation, between 96km (slider full left) and 176 km (slider full right)

- Cloud coverage density: max

- Airliner traffic: 30 % (Flight1 UT2 2013)

- General aviation traffic: off

- Airport vehicles: off

- Road vehicles: off

- Ships and ferries: 0

- Leisure boats: 0

- fsx.cfg: TEXTURE_MAX_LOAD=1024

- REX clouds resolution: cumulus 1024, cirrus 512

- FTX Global and FTX Global Vector

- Weather add-on: FS Global Real Weather

As you can see, I'm not that kind of person that is running FSX with very high settings, basically they are anywhere between low and medium.

I did a flight from Orbx/29Palms Southampton and FTX EU England to Thessaloniki with the NGX today. Yesterday from Drzewiecki Designs Warsaw Modlin Airport EPMO. All other sceneries were deactivated, but always the same problem...

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Yes, it's 'medium'. I have a VAS value of about 2.65 GB when loading a flight with the NGX at LGTS. Of course I've installed the latest updates for everything!

Other important settings:

- Filtering: anisotropic

- Anti-aliasing: on

- Global texture resolution: max

- Aircraft cast shadows on ground: off

- Aircraft cast shadows on itself: off

- Mesh complexity: 50%

- Mesh resolution: 19 m

- Texture resolution: 60 cm

- Water effects: Mid 1.x

- Land detail textures: activated

- Scenery complexity: Extremely Dense

- Autogen density: normal

- Ground scenery shadows: deactivated

- Cloud draw distance: depending on the weather situation, between 96km (slider full left) and 176 km (slider full right)

- Cloud coverage density: max

- Airliner traffic: 30 % (Flight1 UT2 2013)

- General aviation traffic: off

- Airport vehicles: off

- Road vehicles: off

- Ships and ferries: 0

- Leisure boats: 0

- fsx.cfg: TEXTURE_MAX_LOAD=1024

- REX clouds resolution: cumulus 1024, cirrus 512

- FTX Global and FTX Global Vector

- Weather add-on: FS Global Real Weather

As you can see, I'm not that kind of person that is running FSX with very high settings, basically they are anywhere between low and medium.

I did a flight from Orbx/29Palms Southampton and FTX EU England to Thessaloniki with the NGX today. Yesterday from Drzewiecki Designs Warsaw Modlin Airport EPMO. All other sceneries were deactivated, but always the same problem...

Thanks for the report. Agree all looks good, almost the perfect setup. Not sure how consuming are the FTX add-ons but anyway.

That's why you get 2.65GB, which is a normal reading, and is an overall low memory load which should allow you to normally take-off and land too.

I'd only have to resort to hardware (GPU), inability to render textures (black textures) would certainly fit with that.

Not something I saw during testing though but it is possible, because the method we render the city is 'loading up' the graphics card quite a lot, which allows the fast frames.

What's your GPU specs? updated drivers? any external GPU controllers?

I know it's boring, you could perhaps test FSX with a low Global Texture resolution and try the approach. That could 'ease' the GPU load so we can figure out where the problem is coming from.

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Have a look at my system profile (orange sysP-logo) via my signature. I don't use the latest driver in this case, because revision number 13.9 causes continually CTDs/black screens in FSX (it's a known bug) so I downgraded to 13.4. which is not much older.

I don't care if it's boring or not - I'll try... if it helps! ;)

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(...)

I did a flight from Orbx/29Palms Southampton and FTX EU England to Thessaloniki with the NGX today. Yesterday from Drzewiecki Designs Warsaw Modlin Airport EPMO. All other sceneries were deactivated, but always the same problem...

EGHI fills a lot of VAS, as it's a very detailled scenery (incl. its surroundings: 29Palms provide a lot of eye-candy, too!)). Not wanting to interfere with Emilios' troubleshooting but for me it would be interesting to know how your VAS readout is in Southampton (at the stand and during departure), and whether this VAS figure settles in the cruise towards LGTS. (No need to perform the complete flight again, though.)

For Emilios' suggestions, you can save your flight towards LGTS so-and-so-many nm's out, so you can try this approach easily over and over again with different settings as suggested by Emilios.

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Plus if you flew from DD EPMO, it means you have the Warsaw City product active.

It is a very huge and detailed addon basen on photoscenery, so it will raise VAS, which may lead to OOM's.

So flying to heavily detailed sceneries like Thessaloniki, I' rather have it deactivated and choose another departure location.

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  • Aerosoft

We have tested the RTM default product extensively and no tester ever experienced memory problems. And neither have most users so far. A good example is promotional 'testing' i.e. reviewers&video producers who use heavy add-on aircraft to demonstrate the scenery in full density. None ever reported problems.

-numerous VAS consuming add-ons in parallel

-'tweaked' .cfg files- with the exception of the HIGHMEMFIX=1, most other tweaks often cause problems

-very high FSX display settings (e.g. most important is LOD radius; try setting to medium for heavy aircraft approach, same goes for autogen-reduce to Normal or Dense)

To support what Emilios wrote: we have simply seen no OOM errors on any of our tests, not one of our 12 test machines (all machines used by personal) ever showed OOM errors.

This weekend I assisted two befriended customers who had consistent OOM errors by logging on to their machines (this is not standard service) and on both machines I found heavily modified cfg files. So we did FPS benchmarks (both in FPS and in FPS variation) before resetting the cfg, adding the 2k and high mem tweaks. In both cases no OOM's where seen and in both (!) cases FPS were higher. In one case more stable, in the other case a bit more variable but that was because the average was over 40.

I'll say it out loud. If you need a 'tweak' of a product that removes 250.000 polygons you really need to start thinking. Certainly if the majority of customers and all the professionals, all the testers, all the people who made videos, screenshots do not need that tweak *. What Emilios released is not a patch, it close to a castration, lol. It does not fix a problem, it simply deletes stuff so the OOM bothered people can use the product. We advise against using it and advise you to sort out your FS!

I also noticed that a lot of people still use FPS limiter in FSX. We do not advise that unless you get at least 50 fps average (above that FPS becomes very unstable and that's annoying). If you get an unlimited 20 fps in a location and then set the limiter to 20 you will in most cases hardly ever get 20. It's buggy, it's bad. And on many systems I have seen it cause memory leaks. External FPS limiters are fractionally better, but we still see no need for them at all. They all use memory and cycles (costing FPS) to prevent the sim from getting the highest possible FPS. They only make sense if you already have problems.

* and of course people will say, but look at the forum to see MANY MANY MANY people has OOM issues. Please believe me, that's simply not true. We have had solid reports of a dozen people and we did sell a few more then that. If this was an issue with the product the forums would be overflowing with hundreds of complaints. The issue is NOT with the product (sure it needs a lot of memory, it's a freaking super detailed scenery, what did you expect?) but with the way some people have there sim running.

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To support what Emilios wrote: we have simply seen no OOM errors on any of our tests, not one of our 12 test machines (all machines used by personal) ever showed OOM errors.

This weekend I assisted two befriended customers who had consistent OOM errors by logging on to their machines (this is not standard service) and on both machines I found heavily modified cfg files. So we did FPS benchmarks (both in FPS and in FPS variation) before resetting the cfg, adding the 2k and high mem tweaks. In both cases no OOM's where seen and in both (!) cases FPS were higher. In one case more stable, in the other case a bit more variable but that was because the average was over 40.

I'll say it out loud. If you need a 'tweak' of a product that removes 250.000 polygons you really need to start thinking. Certainly if the majority of customers and all the professionals, all the testers, all the people who made videos, screenshots do not need that tweak *. What Emilios released is not a patch, it close to a castration, lol. It does not fix a problem, it simply deletes stuff so the OOM bothered people can use the product. We advise against using it and advise you to sort out your FS!

I also noticed that a lot of people still use FPS limiter in FSX. We do not advise that unless you get at least 50 fps average (above that FPS becomes very unstable and that's annoying). If you get an unlimited 20 fps in a location and then set the limiter to 20 you will in most cases hardly ever get 20. It's buggy, it's bad. And on many systems I have seen it cause memory leaks. External FPS limiters are fractionally better, but we still see no need for them at all. They all use memory and cycles (costing FPS) to prevent the sim from getting the highest possible FPS. They only make sense if you already have problems.

* and of course people will say, but look at the forum to see MANY MANY MANY people has OOM issues. Please believe me, that's simply not true. We have had solid reports of a dozen people and we did sell a few more then that. If this was an issue with the product the forums would be overflowing with hundreds of complaints. The issue is NOT with the product (sure it needs a lot of memory, it's a freaking super detailed scenery, what did you expect?) but with the way some people have there sim running.

Mathijs, with all due respect: I really need to start thinking about what? To be honest, in my case (Emilios confirmed my settings are good) it should be possible to make a flight from A to B without any OOM issues! Today I loaded a flight with the NGX at Taxi2Gate's MMMX Mexico City Xtreme (which is similar on it's area and scale to Thessaloniki) and VAS usage was aout 500 MB lower than loading a flight with the NGX at Thessaloniki.

I say it again: I NEVER experienced an OOM before !!! And I did a lot of flights in the past and own a lot of sceneries...

But now I will repeat my yesterdays flight from EGHI to LGTS with a low global texture resolution and report back later with my result...

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Need to second Mathijs here for two reasons:

  • "History of FSX": FSX was released in 2006 when computers weren't nearly as capable as they are today. In 2006 and following years, the major concern of us flightsimmers had been performance ("frame rates"). Hardware specs had been the bottleneck, and VAS had not been an issue, simply 'cause there had not been any computers (or addons) that could fill up those 4 GB. In very recent years hardware has caught up with FSX' demands: We get more and more decent framerates and that's why we push our sliders more and more to the right. Performance isn't much of a bottleneck anymore, but now the 4 GB VAS restriction, that comes with every 32bit application, has to be considered. And addons get more and more 'HD', 'high-res', 'photo-real' and whatever ...
  • "VAS residua": Scenery at the beginning of your flight needs VAS. The "heavier" your scenery is, the more VAS will be needed. Now the tricky thing is that, after leaving your "departure scenery", this VAS will not be "released" completely: Even many nm's after departure, even after an hour into your flight, "residua" from you departure scenery will be noticeable in your VAS readout.

As an example:

I set up a flight in the NGX from EGHI to LGTS. After loading the NGX to be parked at my stand, VAS slowly increased from 3.0 GB to 3.3 GB (that was during my preflight).

After preflighting the plane I taxied to my departure runway with VAS fluctuating and peaking to 3.6 GB.

After takeoff I climbed to my CRZ FL (FL350) and my VAS settled at 2.8 GB.

And now, the interesting part of my post ( :P):

I saved the flight in cruise. After shutting down and restarting FSX and reloading the flight, guess what my VAS readout was? 2.8 GB again? You're wrong!!! Because I dumped the "VAS residua" from my departure scenery (by shutting down FSX and firing it up again), this time my VAS was merely 2.2 GB.

What's that? A difference of 0.6 GB (16% of the VAS maximum and pretty much 100% of what you would like to have as your safety margin from those OOMs for any flight), when comparing cruise to cruise. That's the "penalty" in VAS because the departure scenery is still existent (partially at least), when performing a flight out of a highly detailed scenery like EGHI.

No, I'm not bashing EGHI. It's exactly the scenery I wanted and I've recommended it a couple of times. We simply face a new kind of bottleneck that we have to deal with: High graphics settings for your flights in a GA plane, lower settings when flying a plane that has its own higher "VAS footprint". We have to learn to manage our sliders again around the VAS bottleneck, just as we used to manage them for frame rates in the years 2006ff.

"VAS school" is over; back to my flight into LGTS ... :D

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What you guys say is true how hardware has caught up on FSX making VAS the new "bottleneck" rather than the FPS. However I don't find saving your flight and restart FSX a good solution since I do all my flying online and I don't think it would be particulary popular all of a sudden vanish only to show up in midair a couple of minutes later :o Also having to restart FSX midair to be able to complete a flight from A-B takes away quite an amount of the fun flying IMO.

How the developers are now able to come up with these amazing sceneries is of course a very cool thing but I don't see the point developing products that people nearly won't be able to use simply because you can? Also there's lots of sceneries where you will get amazing detail but still without any VAS issues - the new ENGM v2 is only one example...EFHK is another one. I guess what makes LGTS stand out from the crowd is how not only the airport has been modelled in high detail but also a huge amount of the surroundings.

I only did one flight so far into LGTS from ESSA and unfortunately it ended with an OOM error on short final. I then tried disabling all features using the config tool that came with the scenery but quickly found out that even then with all features disabled the VAS usage was still dangerously high only by sitting in a cold and dark NGX on the apron.

I was then pointed to this thread and just downloaded the City Configurator tool which I will give a spin and hopefully that will let me use the product the way I planned in the NGX with ASN and the rest of my addons running. If that's not possible and you need to fly a more "light weight" a/c to be able to use this new scenery I think you should clearly put that warning in the product description because I do all my flying in the NGX and I have no interest in any other a/c only to be able to use this new scenery.

And Mathijs...my FSX installation and configuration already is "sorted" and works perfectly fine with all other 30+ airport scenery addons I already have installed and mostly of them from you (Aerosoft).

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  • Aerosoft

Mathijs, with all due respect: I really need to start thinking about what? To be honest, in my case (Emilios confirmed my settings are good) it should be possible to make a flight from A to B without any OOM issues! Today I loaded a flight with the NGX at Taxi2Gate's MMMX Mexico City Xtreme (which is similar on it's area and scale to Thessaloniki) and VAS usage was aout 500 MB lower than loading a flight with the NGX at Thessaloniki.

And I can do so without any problems. Now I claim that we got a few thousand other customers that can do the same without problems. And if you reformat your disk, install Windows (any 64 bits version), FSX, the NGX and Thessaloniki (add the high mem tweak) I am 100% sure you can do the flight without problems. You need to think about that as that is all we claim this product to do. You are pushing your system over the limit and you are blaming the last product product you added. That's blaming the balloon for bursting because of the last puff of air. And you are putting one of the greatest scenery products I have ever seen in doubt because of that.

And your comparisons with Mexico Xtreme are not very correct, I got both and there is a difference of a few million polygons, it also has FAR shorter visibility ranges. A fine product but not in the same ballpark, not even the same country.

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  • Aerosoft

I saved the flight in cruise. After shutting down and restarting FSX and reloading the flight, guess what my VAS readout was? 2.8 GB again? You're wrong!!! Because I dumped the "VAS residua" from my departure scenery (by shutting down FSX and firing it up again), this time my VAS was merely 2.2 GB.

I am surprised by this. If I try the same with one of our aircraft I see nothing like that. A slight increase in memory use but why the NGX gobbles up memory while you are standing still and doing checks begs for an explanation. I actually doubt it has much to do with the NGX and smell a memory leak in something else. I know it is very demanding on memory and is causing similar problems for other scenery, but I do not believe PMDG released it with a memory leak.

But for sure it is a big sign that memory conservation should be on every developers mind. That's just hard to do because it basically means deleting stuff. PMDG believes that the aircraft is the center of the simulator and there is a lot to be said for that. With the Airbus Extended we decided that (as we sell a lot of other stuff) we should leave a lot of resources for other add-ons.

I am 100% sure however that before this year is over you will not be able to combine the most complex aircraft with the most complex scenery at standard settings. It's a game I do not want to play in.

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Rather than trying to blame someone or something why not try focusing on what is actually going on here and how come some have no problems at all where other have huge VAS problems. Telling a customer with severe problems that the solution is to reformat his computer maybe isn't the best possible way to handle the situation...?

Not sure if it was in this thread or the other thread discussing the very same issue but someone said something about how DX9 works and how it maybe can be of importance how much memory your graphics card is fitted with and that it might actually be a bad thing having a card with lots of memory. I have a Titan with 6 GB so if having lots of memory will make VAS problems more likely that maybe could explain a few things here.

What do you think, maybe someone with great knowledge of the inner workings of DX could shime in and shed some light?

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  • Aerosoft

Rather than trying to blame someone or something why not try focusing on what is actually going on here and how come some have no problems at all where other have huge VAS problems. Telling a customer with severe problems that the solution is to reformat his computer maybe isn't the best possible way to handle the situation...?

Not sure if it was in this thread or the other thread discussing the very same issue but someone said something about how DX9 works and how it maybe can be of importance how much memory your graphics card is fitted with and that it might actually be a bad thing having a card with lots of memory. I have a Titan with 6 GB so if having lots of memory will make VAS problems more likely that maybe could explain a few things here.

What do you think, maybe someone with great knowledge of the inner workings of DX could shime in and shed some light?

I'm not saying you should reformat your system. I am just saying that the product is not at fault. I can almost guarantee you that ALL the super detailed scenery we'll be selling this year will cause the same problems on your system.

You simply do not have enough available memory (after some time). Your are either leaking memory (and unfortunately there are many add-ons who do) or you are using a combination of add-ons that need more memory then you got. It really is that simple.

And we are not at all surprised you see this first with this product, I honestly doubt you got any scenery that has so many polygons in view, I know I got 500 scenery add-ons installed and I do not. That's what makes it looking so good.

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Reason we are sure about our product is all about testing, and this has been tested with various diferrent setups.

I will make our results public if need be, but for now here is what LGTS will gives me on a vanilla setup FSX SP2 (+REX)

LITE II configuration ( LITE gives same results +50-100MB)

All options active from our manager tool

I seriously believe that a 800MB-1000MB margin for memory is more than enough.

FSX Settings

post-40439-0-21987000-1390850670_thumb.j

post-40439-0-21987000-1390850670_thumb.j

post-40439-0-70645300-1390850687_thumb.j

post-40439-0-83272100-1390850740_thumb.j

VAS READINGS

Loaded at the Apron

post-40439-0-42813300-1390850778_thumb.j

ON APPROACH FROM LGAV (FLytampa)

post-40439-0-56656500-1390850810_thumb.j

LANDING (important as all the grass models start loading up)

post-40439-0-46764600-1390850849_thumb.j

PARKED AT THE APRON

post-40439-0-06732900-1390850869_thumb.j

post-40439-0-32371800-1390850679_thumb.j

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