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


EmilG

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@ Mathijs in response to your last reply in the other thread

I hear what you say but I don't agree it's as simple as "blame the last product you installed" that tipped you over.

This new LGTS scenery clearly plays in it's own league when it comes to both visual detail but therefore also memory usage and like I already wrote in a previous post I don't think it's fair not informing potential customers they might not be able to use the product unless they are also willing to start flying a different aircraft and/or stop using some other addons such as weather programs etc.

What I was expecting? After looking at the screenshots and reading what people said who already tried the product was expecting an amazing piece of new airport scenery not only visually but also from a technical pov using some new technique allowing this high level of detail but still with great performance. What I didn't expect was to have an OOM error on my first flight into this airport and especially since I just like you never have OOM issues until now.

Well...looking forward to try out the new City Configurator tool tomorrow which I hope will solve the OOM issues for me without me having to replace my NGX with some other a/c and without having to get rid of Active Sky Next.

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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.

Emil, you wrote 'low' global texture resolution, I tried 'normal' instead and this works! VAS usage after landing was still very high (between 3.7 and 3.8) and maybe only one step away from the worst case, but it works (I used the same conditions as yesterday: identical aircraft, scenery, weather, time etc.). So, finally no warning sounds anymore, no texture loading problem and of course no OOM...

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I flew yesterday from LGIR to LGTS, Dusk time, NGX aircraft FTXG, no other sceneries activated in library, no UTX, no ActiveSky, no REX...

over ATN, my VAS remains at 2800 - 3000MB.. and on approach LGTS, the VAS boosted all of a sudden to 3950 ending in OOM.

I used the scenery configurator to Thessaloniki lite version.

in FSX, no extra clouds, no traffic, My PC is a market standard, I7 / 6 MB, Windows 7 64 bits.

To me, Thessaloniki has overpassed the FAIR quantity of VAS thagt shoud be allowed to a scenery, assuming people can use their NGX

and a minimum Orbx conform. Sorry guys

Dom

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That's what we need to elaborate now, all the community... Fair VAS quantity for aircrafts, sceneries, third part addons, untll new solutions.

New rules for a crisis situation unless you want to deny it.

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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.

(...)

Not sure about all the contributing factors, but: During those 15 mins AI aircraft flew into EGHI ("textured objects filling my VAS"), I opened panels (in 2D) and cycled through the 'A' views (in the VC) to operate those knobs and switches. Guess those additional textures added to my VAS usage.

(...)

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 (...)

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

Yep, VAS-wise there's an advantage leaving DX9 behind. DX9 isn't really efficient in handling video memory, but 4GB will remain the VAS limit for the 32bit fsx.exe. You gain a couple of 100's MB in efficiency - no more, no less.

(...)

After all those many hours flying planes like the PMDG B777 into places like New York, London airspace and so on, posting and reading in forums ... these have been my findings so far:

  • The VAS limit of 4 GB is a "hard" limit: You can't fill 1.5 litres into a 1.0 l bottle without spilling your stuff.
  • 4 GB of VAS is a lot to fool around with: Nice scenery, good-looking flightdecks, deep aircraft systems and more - yes, it's all possible with this 8-year-old sim!
  • You have to balance your stuff, and you have to manage your settings: a LOD radius of 5.5 or even 6.5 looks good in a screenshot, but it's not advised for flying high-end aircraft into heavy sceneries
  • LGTS offers two ways to manage the "weight" of the scenery: The configurator ("castrator") and the manager. But you can still use native FSX tools like scenery settings, profile definitions and more.
  • Your other addons may have an impact, too: What is the texture size of your addon clouds (no, 4.096 bit clouds do NOT look best!), how many cloud layers do you use, what are your settings in the NGX performance manager? There's no performance manager for the PMDG T7 yet, but what about your high-resolution VC checkbox in the native FSX settings?

Aircraft systems become deeper and deeper, sceneries become more and more detailed. As Mathijs has stated, you can have it all, but it'll become more and more difficult to use all your addons, each one maxed out, all at the same time.

And that's actually a good thing: You can fly a medium-weight (VAS-wise) scenery with a heavy-weight airliner. Or fly a lighter plane and crank up your scenery settings at the same time.

Think of your brand-new LGTS like some fancy sports car: It's capable of 320 km/h, but there will be lots of situations when it's more sensible to adhere to a speed limit of 120 km/h. But then again there will be sections where you can drive 250 km/h and more. You have different sets of tyres (configurator/manager) and a gear box (graphics profiles). Now all it takes is a clever driver who knows how to put this equipment to its optimal use ... and that's YOU!!!

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Just to add up to what Oliver said above. The configuration posted above by me (post 75) gives you 800-1GB (!) of free VAS on the NGX with almost all the eye-candy you want on your approach. That's pretty much what Flytampa's Dubai gives you too.

It's up to you to spend all that free memory by selecting other settings than those advised, multiple add-ons- FTXG, weather, etc..etc.., or whatever else you want.

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What kind of FSX setups did the test group use?

Clearly someone within the group must have been flying the NGX, after all it's probably one of the most widely spread a/c for FSX. And likewise someone must have been using a weather addon such as ASN or similar. And if yes then I don't understand how no one during the testing ever experienced any OOM issues because these are the only 2 addons I've been using now when I've tested the VAS usage and with only the NGX and ASN running after panning around in the v/c and then switching over to a wingview and then finish up by panning around a bit in spot view my VAS usage is about 3.8-4.0 GB. And this is in a cold and dark NGX...

One thing I'm just about to try is using DX5 clouds instead of 32bit and see what that gives before I try your City Configurator tool because it doesn't really feel that good to cut off a big part of a product I just purchased only to be able to use it.

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I don't have the scenery but I like the IFR/VFR idea. I fly mostly IFR so I don't have that time to enjoy the sourrounding area of a scenery but I see the drop in FPS (still flyable) and the VAS readouts, which makes me thinking about the product I bought... I also see a steady increase of the needed VAS from the developers other the last year's...

End: Many times I need the airport only!

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Just found out using DXT compressed textures (for clouds and water) only gave me another approx 50 MB vs using 32bit compressed textures so that won't fix this issue.

Next thing will be to try out the City Config tool but that will have to wait until tomorrow.

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Couldn't help myself from trying out the City Configurator and I'm happy to say that gave me about .5 GB so that is great and tomorrow I'll do another flight similar to the one I did today and see if I'll be able to land.

Will report back after I did the flight.

Big thanks for releasing this City Config tool so quick, that is truely great support !!

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Emil, you wrote 'low' global texture resolution, I tried 'normal' instead and this works! VAS usage after landing was still very high (between 3.7 and 3.8) and maybe only one step away from the worst case, but it works (I used the same conditions as yesterday: identical aircraft, scenery, weather, time etc.). So, finally no warning sounds anymore, no texture loading problem and of course no OOM...

Emil, I don't know why but I used the wrong slider! ;) I set 'Scenery complexity' to normal, not 'global texture resolution'. Sorry about. Anyway, it works so far. At the moment I make another test flight from Earth Simulations Isle of Man to Thessaloniki. I keep my fingers crossed...

@ olli4740: Sorry, but this comparison is far-fetched! And if it's not possible to fly an 'heavy-weight' airliner like the NGX to an 'heavy-weight' LGTS, then Aerosoft should mention it in their product description.

@ Mathijs Kok: Your argumentation is really inappropriate! By the way, I reformated my hard disk already 2 months ago and I'm using a Win 7 64 bit version. But telling me to not use any tweaking (exception: high mem tweak) is kind of ignoring the reality! Nearly everyone is using the Bojote tweak or something like this. I also don't care about polygons, visibility ranges or whatever. I'm the customer, so I'm simply not responsible for that. The area of T2G's MMMX is comparable with the LGTS scenery but obviously they managed it better regarding to the VAS usage. And you exceed your authority by writing 'You are pushing your system over the limit and you are blaming the last product product you added'. Are you an tele-diagnostician ?? You are running down YOUR CUTOMERS in this way, maybe you don't notice that. I will write it again and again: My FSX was running without any OOM since years and now you're really want to say that this is only my mistake?

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OK, what I'm going to say won't contribute to the solution of the PMDG/LGTS OOM problem, but I think the way to go for the foreseeable future (until the advent of a Prepar3d-64Bit that is) will be to do it like the folks at Majestic did.

They wrote (or purchased) their own simulation kernel for their Dash8-Q400 which they run outside of FSX. They use FSX simply as their display engine, nothing else, and have a very basic flight model that resides inside of FSX. They don't use this flight model but rather move their arcraft in slew mode from outside of FSX.

This way, their aircraft simulation can be as complex and memory-consuming as they want it to be, and it doesn't add to FSX VAS. The only parts of their code that uses FSX VAS is what is needed for display of their panel/VC and the looks of the aircraft. Rather clever if you ask me. PMDG should take a closer look at this technique for their future products.

Just my 2 ct.

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OK, now: I just completed my second flight in the NGX to LGTS with 'Scenery complexity' set to 'normal'. And again from an VAS-intensive origin (Earth Simulations - Isle of Man). At the end, parked in front of the terminal, VAS usage was between 3.7 and 3.8. No OOM, no Windows warning sound or something like this. I even was able to change my aircraft to the Twin Otter Extended and I did a second VFR flight around the city. Can't believe it !!! And I can live with that changed slider setting.

Emil, thanks a lot for your support! My problem is solved and finally I'm able to enjoy everything! :)

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Anybody try this scenery out in DX10 preview mode with the available 3rd party fixer tool? Considering DX10 is more memory management efficient it would definitely help mitigate those OOM's.

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OK, now: I just completed my second flight in the NGX to LGTS with 'Scenery complexity' set to 'normal'. And again from an VAS-intensive origin (Earth Simulations - Isle of Man). At the end, parked in front of the terminal, VAS usage was between 3.7 and 3.8. No OOM, no Windows warning sound or something like this. I even was able to change my aircraft to the Twin Otter Extended and I did a second VFR flight around the city. Can't believe it !!! And I can live with that changed slider setting.

Emil, thanks a lot for your support! My problem is solved and finally I'm able to enjoy everything! :)

Hi again, glad that this 'by mistake' change in setup fixed your problem :)

I understand that possibly other add-on sceneries make use of the Scenery Density slider more than we do. If it is set at Ext.Dense before&during the flight it can load up the memory. LGTS is 'insensitive' to that slider, so you can keep it at normal to keep VAS at bay, without loss of our scenery density on final.

(btw: If you want a VFR tour on the Twotter, make sure you reload the Default stuff ;))

Your other add-ons possibly give you the extra 500Mb above what I have on the NGX (3.1-3.2GB) in my vanilla setup FSX SP2 +REX+UT2.

Now, I remember you have a Mid.1x at water, perhaps a compromise would be the Low2x. LOD should stay=Medium (at least when on the NGX)

Also 3D grass, that's a lot of polygons and a big VAS 'eater'; disabling it can further reduce your VAS load. I would also consider a default fresh FSX.cfg (only keep the HIGHMEMFIX tweak).

We do want you to enjoy this scenery with the NGX as much as you do. When the NGX with its +900MB VAS comes in, and you have another 500-700MB of other add-ons on top, you understand that we are left with very little that we can do to deliver a product of this quality.

We chose to give you almost everything that FSX can do at the moment, (surely P3dv2 can do even more), it just needs some extra time adjusting your FSX setup to give it some 'breathing space' assuming you wish to keep all your other FSX 'goodies'.

@Piper9t3: there are still some 'bugs' within that mode, but i ve came across a few online videos demonstrating DX10 in LGTS, and look good already.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ac1IXTbpJ4M

LGTS on 'heavy addons'

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBixddzONhk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUdUeTsykG4

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I was the one who posted about DX9 mapping "needed" video memory into the FSX.EXE virtual address space.

See this thread here & post #66

http://forum.aerosoft.com/index.php?/topic/78126-thessaloniki-x-out-off-memory-stackhash/page-2

I too cannot get off the ground in the NGX/ABX with this scenery without getting an OOM error (Using LITEII and 3dlights and grass off).

I also use DX9 and have a 3GB video card. Wonder how many other users that have issues with OOM errors are in the same boat (cards with large amounts of Video Ram and using DX9)

As a user who is having issues with OOM errors and this scenery I also resent being told to "get my sim in order" when my sim is working fine.

I am not blaming the scenery on it's own as I understand how the 4GB VAS limit works. You can't throw everything at the sim and not expect problems.

But awesome as this scenery is, once installed she weighs in at 1.35GB (default). That takes over 30% of the FSX.EXE 4GB Virtual Address Space. So the scenery is top heavy to say the least, even on LITE II she is still 1.31GB.

And we have seen this OOM issue before when Mega Airport Helsinki was first released, once it was optimized it was usable. I have personally found that any scenery over 1GB in size will lead to VAS issues and eventually an OOM issue.

As much as I love the look of this scenery she just can't have anything else running on top of it. I hope Emil can come up with a remedy to optimize the scenery for users flying big iron.

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Well, as I said before it would be great if a real DX guru could shime in because like Mathijs said we'll probably see this OOM issue escalate down the road with new extremely detailed sceneries being released and personally I don't think the solution is to ask everyone running a vanilla FSX to be able to use the products.

Looking at sceneries like the current version of EFHK and the new ENGM scenery apparently it's possible to develop very nice looking and detailed sceneries but still allow them being used with other demanding addons such as the NGX and ASN.

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(...)

Looking at sceneries like the current version of EFHK and the new ENGM scenery apparently it's possible to develop very nice looking and detailed sceneries but still allow them being used with other demanding addons such as the NGX and ASN.

I was tempted to post this earlier ... now I do:

While you can downgrade LGTS (and roll back the downgrade to the factory state via the configurator), there is no way to upgrade the factory states of other airport sceneries. In other words: LGTS gives you options at the highest end of visuals; options that simply cannot be provided by sceneries that are deliberately limited to smaller VAS footprints.

But pls. don't get me wrong as far as addons like ENGM are concerned: It looks stunning, features a couple of innovations and I like it a lot. I'm sure we will see more sceneries like ENGM, as well as we will see more releases "à la maison FSDG".

LGTS breaks new ground in terms of visuals and object placement, while ENGM pioneers into more operational features (like those "random NOTAMs"). Glad to see those differences in developers' handwriting. And glad to be free to pick what I like ... (or just grab them all! :P)

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I appreciate what you say how these sceneries are different and how that will affect VAS usage.

However when I freely picked this scenery I wasn't aware (or informed) I would have trouble using it with the NGX and ASN and should I've known that I would have thought twice before picking it. I do think that information should be in the product description.

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Maybe you're right and it should be mentioned in the product description/feature list. But I haven't seen that happening with DD's New York scenery, either. Nor with the PMDG T7. And they have received, or will receive, their VAS patches, as well. (The PMDG "VAS patch" - T7 performance manager - will take slightly longer than the FSDG "castrator", though! :P)

What's your suggestion for a developer doing a N.Y. airport (like KLGA or KJFK) or a London area airport that will finally tip the VAS scales with the multitude of addons we have already squeezed into those places? What would your warning sound like for those airports?

Well, for LGTS we have pp. 8-11 of the manual. It's linked to the Aerosoft LGTS product page. And I even managed to fly the T7 out of and back into LGTS with ASN running. That was even with the factory state of LGTS.

What else could I ask for?

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  • Aerosoft

As much as I love the look of this scenery she just can't have anything else running on top of it.

And yet we got hundreds of customers doing just that. I Just did circuits in the Twin Otter Extended, Airbus Extended, NGX and 777. No problems. Optimizing is a pseudonym for removing objects or reducing their visual range. That's needed for your system (and for a dozen more as we know so far), but not for the vast majority of users.

So in your statement you are missing 'on my system' at the end. I feel that is very important.

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  • Aerosoft

I appreciate what you say how these sceneries are different and how that will affect VAS usage.

However when I freely picked this scenery I wasn't aware (or informed) I would have trouble using it with the NGX and ASN and should I've known that I would have thought twice before picking it. I do think that information should be in the product description.

What information should be there? A complete list with products it might have problems with? We have none, I got no problem landing with the NGX there. There might be issues if you stack memory hungry applications on top of each other and have certain FSX settings. But that would be a massively complex list of conditions and nobody would buy the product. It would also mean the product would have spend months longer in testing and would have to be more expensive for that. As always we only claim this to work with a standard FSX. If there are other add-ons it works with we'll say so. If this would affect all users there is an issue, but we got many hundreds of users without problems and a handful that have. That's rather normal. If this would affect all users there is an issue, but we got many hundreds of users without problems and a handful that have. That's rather normal.

On your system the combination of NGX and ASN (I had to search what that was actually) leave very little resources for scenery. You will have problems with ANY scenery of this complexity and magnitude.

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