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


EmilG

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One thing I though I would share with anyone of you not already aware of this great feature in FSUIPC is how you can configure it to show your free VAS in realtime in the FSX title bar. Very convenient if you ask me!

Since the add image feature on this forum for some reason doesn't work for me (I think it's compatibility issues with IE11) I will attach the jpg file instead showing what you need to do but in a few words what you need to do is to add a 'Specific value check' under the 'Logging' tab in FSUIPC with offset 024C and type U32.

By doing this you will always see how much VAS you currently have free simply by looking at the FSX title bar and without the need for any external memory management application.

post-716-0-42829500-1390926273_thumb.jpg

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I just want to get something in the air here.

People are funny when they have an issue. The immediately think, well if I have it, others must have it! And the product is broken!

Someone said they don't have OOM issues at MMMX. Funny, because I OOM'd there every time I tried to go there when the product came out. Does that mean that everyone must be having that issue? No. Does that mean I am the only one? No. But I took the time to check my setup and solved the OOM's there.

Nobody said this product is broken. It is large and detailed, you cannot deny that.

Say you show up at my 1'500 square foot house (4GB VAS FSX.EXE) with a tractor trailer load of amazingly beautiful 17th century art and furniture (Thesolinki X). Then I say "hey this won't all fit in my house", then I get told "hey if you get rid of your sink, fridge, stove and bathroom it will all fit!". Nothing is wrong with my house, nothing is wrong with the 17th century artifacts. Some folks just don't want to give up their bathrooms, fridge and stove to have all these beautiful things in their 1'500 square foot home.

So, maybe you could be so kind and share or explain how you fixed your OOM errors at MMMX? That would be most helpful...

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@ Kyle

What you say of course is often true but I also think there might be a rather significant number of unpreported cases like discussed a couple of posts ago.

In this particular case I'm really curious what is the real culprit since again some have no issues at all and some have using what seems to be very similar setups but let's see where all this ends. As have been brought up earlier in this thread when EFHK was first released many people had the very same issues and at the very beginning most comments were pretty much the same as they've been now for this product and then in the end the developers came up with some great 'patches' that made the product perform perfectly in most situations with no more issues. I'm not saying this comparison is 100% perfect because the sceneries of course and the techniques used developing them might be very different but the phenoma where some users have huge issues with OOMs and others haven't looks very similar to me.

Haven't had the time to do a complete flight using the new City Configurator tool yet to remove some of the VAS footprint from LGTS but the quick test I did yesterday showed great results with approx .5 GB extra VAS availaibe after using it so I'll keep my fingers crossed I'll be able to complete next flight ESSA-LGTS without any more OOM issues ending the flight prematurely.

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@ altstiff (sorry I can't properly quote messages and again I think it's IE11 compatibility issues)

That is a great simile with your house :D

Couldn't have expressed my feelings about all this any better myself and as you say and as far as I can remember without going through every post in this thread I can't recall anyone claiming the new LGTS scenery is broken...only that the way it's developed appearently causes OOM issues in certain situations under certain conditions.

Let's hope Emil will be able to figure out what is really going on here and looking at the masterpiece of scenery he developed my hopes are high he'll be able to sort out these issues just fine in the end. The speedy release of the City Config tool he already gave us was most impressive in my eyes and maybe this tool will fix the issue for at least most of us although I remember reading a few posts where people tried it but still had issues. Probably it won't be able to fix the issue if there are also other things that needs to be fixed with the FS setup etc but at least it will hopefully stop anyone "on the edge" from falling over and into the dark land of OOMs ;)

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So, maybe you could be so kind and share or explain how you fixed your OOM errors at MMMX? That would be most helpful...

Hi gents, one thing I do want to point out is that my post was general, but was also pointed towards those who do not have any OOM issues. I saw some very pointless posts to that regard in another forum.

Anywho, Last year when I bought MMMX it was the first time I've ever had an OOM issue. 6 years of buying addons and never a one. I tested it out and bam, again OOM. So I went into research mode and long story short- my solution was disabling all sceneries I'm not currently using, using a tool call SceneryConfigEditor (can be found in the Avsim library).

I free up a few hundred MB of VAS by doing this. For instance on flight to LGTS, I just flew from KIAD to LGTS in the T7, and the only sceneries active were KIAD, LGTS, and LGAV (my alternate). So, instead of having 80 other sceneries in the background (photo sceneries are the worst, they always load even if you're not there!) I only have 3. I found that gives me a sweet buffer. Add that to killing off using AA/TF from inspector and leaving it to FSX, I've not seen an OOM since, at MMMX or anywhere else.

I'm with you all in that LGTS is a heavy hitter, I'm still in the mid 3's of VAS with the NGX, but what did you expect when you saw the screenshots? I saw the shots and knew, this'll be like MMMX. How could it not be with that much detail? Those were my thoughts at least.

Before I drone on off topic let me share my settings:

ASN, AS2012 textures, TML=2048, MyTraffic 5.4. Like Richard only HIGHMEMFIX=1 as a tweak. No other tweaks.

post-36841-0-20837600-1390928379_thumb.j

post-36841-0-38390000-1390928394_thumb.j

post-36841-0-65468500-1390928406_thumb.j

post-36841-0-34242200-1390928419_thumb.j

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What should also be mentioned is that this scenery is still looking good in a "lite II" installation:

So, for a nifty move, solely marketing-wise, just rename those configurations:

lite II => "default"

lite I => "advanced"

default => "extreme" (Thank you very much, Gary Summons! :lol:)

BTW (I), GSX doesn't seem to have much of an effect on VAS. It could be some 50 MB, rough estimate from a quick check I've just done. (Sorry, Aerosoft, for a check on AES I would have to buy even more credits ... but its VAS impact probably is negligible, as well)

BTW (II), for a VAS readout from FSUIPC you'll need the registered version. For users of the unregistered version, just download Process Explorer from Microsoft. It's a separate application that hardly uses any CPU cycles. VAS is called 'Virtual Size' there as you can see in Emilios' screenshots.

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@ altstiff (sorry I can't properly quote messages and again I think it's IE11 compatibility issues)

That is a great simile with your house :D

Couldn't have expressed my feelings about all this any better myself and as you say and as far as I can remember without going through every post in this thread I can't recall anyone claiming the new LGTS scenery is broken...only that the way it's developed appearently causes OOM issues in certain situations under certain conditions.

Let's hope Emil will be able to figure out what is really going on here and looking at the masterpiece of scenery he developed my hopes are high he'll be able to sort out these issues just fine in the end. The speedy release of the City Config tool he already gave us was most impressive in my eyes and maybe this tool will fix the issue for at least most of us although I remember reading a few posts where people tried it but still had issues. Probably it won't be able to fix the issue if there are also other things that needs to be fixed with the FS setup etc but at least it will hopefully stop anyone "on the edge" from falling over and into the dark land of OOMs ;)

See the little paper clip on the upper left of the reply screen? Click it to obtain plain text and you can quote away! It is an issue with IE11 and HTML on these types of fourms (IE11 has the same issue at AVSIM).

Hi gents, one thing I do want to point out is that my post was general, but was also pointed towards those who do not have any OOM issues. I saw some very pointless posts to that regard in another forum.

Anywho, Last year when I bought MMMX it was the first time I've ever had an OOM issue. 6 years of buying addons and never a one. I tested it out and bam, again OOM. So I went into research mode and long story short- my solution was disabling all sceneries I'm not currently using, using a tool call SceneryConfigEditor (can be found in the Avsim library).

I free up a few hundred MB of VAS by doing this. For instance on flight to LGTS, I just flew from KIAD to LGTS in the T7, and the only sceneries active were KIAD, LGTS, and LGAV (my alternate). So, instead of having 80 other sceneries in the background (photo sceneries are the worst, they always load even if you're not there!) I only have 3. I found that gives me a sweet buffer. Add that to killing off using AA/TF from inspector and leaving it to FSX, I've not seen an OOM since, at MMMX or anywhere else.

I'm with you all in that LGTS is a heavy hitter, I'm still in the mid 3's of VAS with the NGX, but what did you expect when you saw the screenshots? I saw the shots and knew, this'll be like MMMX. How could it not be with that much detail? Those were my thoughts at least.

Before I drone on off topic let me share my settings:

ASN, AS2012 textures, TML=2048, MyTraffic 5.4. Like Richard only HIGHMEMFIX=1 as a tweak. No other tweaks.

Kyle this is great advice. Thanks for sharing it. I recall years ago seeing stuff for Africa loading into the sim when I was in North America so this tweak has some merit for those with lots of stuff installed.

One thing I will say here, LGTS has a truck load of autogen that doesn't seem to change much with the autogen slider. Even on sparse I still see many, many trees and buildings SOUTH and EAST of the airport, even getting closer to downtown I see hundreds of small homes and trees surrounding the airport. I am sure if Emil came up with a way to cut back these trees and generic houses it could have a large impact on the VAS footprint. They did this with Mega Airport Helsinki and it made a very big difference.

Is there a way to turn off the trees and generic houses? Or at least cut them down to 25%-50%?

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I am sorry but I feel this is not fair.. we have been working so much for you, developer´s have too (them most ofcause in developing it). Some of the request´s you set, would make us wounder do you only want the airport, as it could be cut down to this only.. But whats the point then in the project..

We have tryeid to provide data from our test that´s normaly not published, for the general public. And tryeid to make it clear what add-ons it was tested whit, but for some reason some still ask if it was tested..

What do you wan´t developer and us to provide.. we have tryeid to help you and point in areas we know could help if some settings are set to high. we even have a tester that gave you input for Activesky next, as he was tester on that project aswell..

The developer try to ask you for something, and a new reply came up, and then here it goes. I am sorry but we can´t help you, aslong as you don´t try what developer has to say.

Thats the basic we can expect in order to Help.. I know the developer has been working on those updates, that errase some of his work, but you still keep sayeing do this and that, how fustrating do you self think it is.. right after release he worked at all kind of day to help thos affected and just get a door in the head.. in the end I said to him take a brake. now i have been open to share what goes on behind the public stage.

As reminder all you say here, would you be able to say all that, face to face to the developer? As it seems like a SMS, where there is a psychological difference, as you don´t stand face to face..

Said in another way, if you had spend lot of time in a project, and just hear remove this. All your work would be removed, and in the end how do you think the motivation would be, to create such a nice project in the future.

We can agree that there can be problems for some users, I tryeid it myself and it is fustrating. But remember to se it from the other side.. we spend lot of time in testing to try to prevent it.. but we all know some would have problems.

I never seen a project that diden´t need a polish in some way.

Often it´s combinations of add-ons and such, we testers try whit what we have on our side, but you can´t expect that we have all add-ons in the world.

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I am sorry but I feel this is not fair.. we have been working so much for you, developer´s have too (them most ofcause in developing it). Some of the request´s you set, would make us wounder do you only want the airport, as it could be cut down to this only.. But whats the point then in the project..

(...)

Be assured I want it all!

Just to second Kyle, I just grouped a vast no. of my library entries in Scenery Config Editor (SCE) and switched them all off there. (The ones I do not need for LGTS, of course!)

Gave me another 0.4 GB of free VAS. Now think for yourselves:

  • SCE is free.
  • It's easy to use.
  • You can build a group of scenery entries that can be switched on and off all together by a single mouse click.
  • You can define different groups of scenery entries for different regions of the world.
  • You can save a multitude of different scenery.cfg files that way, which results in different pre-configured scenery libraries for (all) your different flights - or at least for your most frequent ones.
  • It can be used in a way similar to FTX Central (looks completely different, though) - but you can define your own regions and you can determine how many regions you would like to have. Customized FTX Central's for everyone, even outside FTX, even without being an ORBX customer, and for free!
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I am sorry but I feel this is not fair.. we have been working so much for you, developer´s have too (them most ofcause in developing it). Some of the request´s you set, would make us wounder do you only want the airport, as it could be cut down to this only.. But whats the point then in the project..

We have tryeid to provide data from our test that´s normaly not published, for the general public. And tryeid to make it clear what add-ons it was tested whit, but for some reason some still ask if it was tested..

What do you wan´t developer and us to provide.. we have tryeid to help you and point in areas we know could help if some settings are set to high. we even have a tester that gave you input for Activesky next, as he was tester on that project aswell..

The developer try to ask you for something, and a new reply came up, and then here it goes. I am sorry but we can´t help you, aslong as you don´t try what developer has to say.

Thats the basic we can expect in order to Help.. I know the developer has been working on those updates, that errase some of his work, but you still keep sayeing do this and that, how fustrating do you self think it is.. right after release he worked at all kind of day to help thos affected and just get a door in the head.. in the end I said to him take a brake. now i have been open to share what goes on behind the public stage.

As reminder all you say here, would you be able to say all that, face to face to the developer? As it seems like a SMS, where there is a psychological difference, as you don´t stand face to face..

Said in another way, if you had spend lot of time in a project, and just hear remove this. All your work would be removed, and in the end how do you think the motivation would be, to create such a nice project in the future.

We can agree that there can be problems for some users, I tryeid it myself and it is fustrating. But remember to se it from the other side.. we spend lot of time in testing to try to prevent it.. but we all know some would have problems.

I never seen a project that diden´t need a polish in some way.

Often it´s combinations of add-ons and such, we testers try whit what we have on our side, but you can´t expect that we have all add-ons in the world.

Excuse me. Are you finished?

I think you have a large misunderstanding as to what is going on and being said here in this discussion.

Nobody is demanding anything, being unfair, rude or saying the scenery is broken. And Emil and the rest of the support team have been fantastic in response to the issue some users are having. How are we not being fair and who says we didn't try the suggestions so far? You assume this because we say we are still having issues?

Is this forum not supposed to be open for collective discussion, suggestions and ideas? Furthermore is this not a support forum where users/customers come to get support for issues they are having?

I have not seen one person getting out of line or being rude so I do not understand what your issue is except to complain that people are saying that they are having an issue.

According to your statement we shouldn't say anything because you worked so hard?

CONTRIBUTE please or move on.

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Be assured I want it all!

Just to second Kyle, I just grouped a vast no. of my library entries in Scenery Config Editor (SCE) and switched them all off there. (The ones I do not need for LGTS, of course!)

Gave me another 0.4 GB of free VAS. Now think for yourselves:

  • SCE is free.
  • It's easy to use.
  • You can build a group of scenery entries that can be switched on and off all together by a single mouse click.
  • You can define different groups of scenery entries for different regions of the world.
  • You can save a multitude of different scenery.cfg files that way, which results in different pre-configured scenery libraries for (all) your different flights - or at least for your most frequent ones.
  • It can be used in a similar way to FTX Central (looks completely different, though) - but you can define your own regions and you can determine how many regions you would like to have. Customized FTX Central's for everyone, even outside FTX, even without being a ORBX customer, and for free!

This is excellent news Ollie as 400MB is massive (seriously it's 10% of 4GB!).

Going to have to try this....(except AVSIM is down here for me)

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I don´t say you should say anything. I self helped this way, But whit what there has been said in here and the other tread. it´s the combination that developer try to help and some come say our system runs grate and such, it can be but something is causing the main oom. We testers and developers, Aerosoft aswell according the post. try to find a cause but quite hard as we dont experince it. in the end we can try advise and such but we can´t always tell whats on your mashine that might be a problem in the combination. But keep reducing is not the way forward as said the work is just waste of time and no fun for customers we cant do the work for the costumers we can advise.

now the developer tryeid several things to help the users, but little luck and then I can turn it around is it the Project that is the problem even he keeps reducing? at some point it might start to help but perhaps for a limited time..

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Hi gents, one thing I do want to point out is that my post was general, but was also pointed towards those who do not have any OOM issues. I saw some very pointless posts to that regard in another forum.

Anywho, Last year when I bought MMMX it was the first time I've ever had an OOM issue. 6 years of buying addons and never a one. I tested it out and bam, again OOM. So I went into research mode and long story short- my solution was disabling all sceneries I'm not currently using, using a tool call SceneryConfigEditor (can be found in the Avsim library).

I free up a few hundred MB of VAS by doing this. For instance on flight to LGTS, I just flew from KIAD to LGTS in the T7, and the only sceneries active were KIAD, LGTS, and LGAV (my alternate). So, instead of having 80 other sceneries in the background (photo sceneries are the worst, they always load even if you're not there!) I only have 3. I found that gives me a sweet buffer. Add that to killing off using AA/TF from inspector and leaving it to FSX, I've not seen an OOM since, at MMMX or anywhere else.

I'm with you all in that LGTS is a heavy hitter, I'm still in the mid 3's of VAS with the NGX, but what did you expect when you saw the screenshots? I saw the shots and knew, this'll be like MMMX. How could it not be with that much detail? Those were my thoughts at least.

Before I drone on off topic let me share my settings:

ASN, AS2012 textures, TML=2048, MyTraffic 5.4. Like Richard only HIGHMEMFIX=1 as a tweak. No other tweaks.

attachicon.gifCapture.JPG

attachicon.gifCapture2.JPG

attachicon.gifCapture3.JPG

attachicon.gifCapture4.JPG

Using the SceneryConfigEditor might be a great tip depending on what type of scenery you've installed. I tried this myself in the past and disabling all default FSX scenery for areas where I don't fly did absolutely nothing to VAS. I then tried also disabling all my payware addon airports (about 35) except for the two airports I flew from/to and that gave me 100 MB extra VAS. Not that much if you ask me considering I disabled over 30 payware airports and some of them rather big/advanced but in this case with Thessaloniki those 100 MB could very well be what makes the difference between a OOM or not so maybe I'll give it another go!

The way I understood it you will see much more difference in VAS usage if you have lots of photo scenery installed so this is truly a great tip for all of those out there that have. Also not specifically speaking about VAS the tool really is great for managing your scenery library and enable/disable/group sceneries in a very easy fashion.

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See the little paper clip on the upper left of the reply screen? Click it to obtain plain text and you can quote away! It is an issue with IE11 and HTML on these types of fourms (IE11 has the same issue at AVSIM).

Thanks but problem fixed by switching to Google Chrome instead :)

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Using the SceneryConfigEditor might be a great tip depending on what type of scenery you've installed. I tried this myself in the past and disabling all default FSX scenery for areas where I don't fly did absolutely nothing to VAS. I then tried also disabling all my payware addon airports (about 35) except for the two airports I flew from/to and that gave me 100 MB extra VAS. Not that much if you ask me considering I disabled over 30 payware airports and some of them rather big/advanced but in this case with Thessaloniki those 100 MB could very well be what makes the difference between a OOM or not so maybe I'll give it another go!

The way I understood it you will see much more difference in VAS usage if you have lots of photo scenery installed so this is truly a great tip for all of those out there that have. Also not specifically speaking about VAS the tool really is great for managing your scenery library and enable/disable/group sceneries in a very easy fashion.

That's true: This tip of disabling scenery came up a couple of months before the release of PMDG's T7: Some guy on the AVSIM forums, who had installed masses of photoscenery, was facing OOMs over and over again. PMDG's Ryan helped him out just to discover that disabling all that PS brought back about 1 GB (yes: 1.000 MB!) of VAS to this guy.

Those findings were discussed on AVSIM and have made it into the T7 introductory manual.

I installed quite some PS in recent weeks (freeware Canary Islands, freeware NL-2000, a payware PS for the Balearic Islands; I also had had some MSE, VFR Germany, BSS and other PS before) so I gained those 400 MB. You'll probably need a huge installation of PS to reach between 0.4 and 1.0 GB. (I have 538 layers in my scenery library!)

But flying into and out of London airspace, it will help for sure to disable all those Gary Summons airports you don't need (otherwise they will be loaded during those London SIDs and STARs and fill up your VAS as active scenery). The same is true for the N.Y. airspace and maybe some more (Hong Kong? Flying into YMEN, you may want to disable that huge ORBX YMML, perhaps?)

Anyhoo, "just" 200 MB of additional free VAS can make all the difference when descending into one of those addon airports.

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BTW (II), for a VAS readout from FSUIPC you'll need the registered version. For users of the unregistered version, just download Process Explorer from Microsoft. It's a separate application that hardly uses any CPU cycles. VAS is called 'Virtual Size' there as you can see in Emilios' screenshots.

Negativ sir, it's also available in the free edition!

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Negativ sir, it's also available in the free edition!

Thank you, Sir, my bad!

What I noticed after disabling "unnecessary" scenery were shorter loading times when firing up FSX, and even higher fps?!`Does that make sense, higher framerates when scenery that isn't even rendered in the first place, is deactivated??? Probably just a coincidence ...

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Thank you, Sir, my bad!

What I noticed after disabling "unnecessary" scenery were shorter loading times when firing up FSX, and even higher fps?!`Does that make sense, higher framerates when scenery that isn't even rendered in the first place, is deactivated??? Probably just a coincidence ...

As I wrote in a previous post I have little experience with the SCE but as I was told by some real FSX gurus in the past the impact disabling stuff in the scenery library unless you have lots of photo scenery installed is very small both in terms of pure performance and VAS but hey...if you see improved FPS just enjoy it regardless of what caused it :D

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One thing I though I would share with anyone of you not already aware of this great feature in FSUIPC is how you can configure it to show your free VAS in realtime in the FSX title bar. Very convenient if you ask me!

Since the add image feature on this forum for some reason doesn't work for me (I think it's compatibility issues with IE11) I will attach the jpg file instead showing what you need to do but in a few words what you need to do is to add a 'Specific value check' under the 'Logging' tab in FSUIPC with offset 024C and type U32.

By doing this you will always see how much VAS you currently have free simply by looking at the FSX title bar and without the need for any external memory management application.

Thanks Richard !

I didn't know this function in FSUIPC.

I find it very useful ! :excellenttext_s:

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Thanks Richard !

I didn't know this function in FSUIPC.

I find it very useful ! :excellenttext_s:

Yeah, it's a great feature isn't it!

FSUIPC is full of great surprises, Pete really seems to have thought of everything a FS nerd could ever need ;)

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