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FSXA Forcing autogen

codeywynne

codeywynne

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26
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us-colorado
Hey guys,

Quick questions... just stared working with autogen and came accross something, I'm using the annotator. And I just wonder if there is a way to force all buildings to show, no matter what autogen density the user has set?

And if not, and I choose to make all the buildings withing 3dsmax, is there anyway to make the buildings follow the fsx terrain? As I have a custom terrain bgl and I would rather not have to flatten the whole area.

Thanks for your help!
 
1. No, you can't force agn to display all objects at all densities. The sim will display a proportion of the total, based on the slider setting.

2. It may be possible to convert mesh into a template for 3DSmax, and place your buildings with that. 'Terrain following' is not possible unless the buildings are placed in small clusters. They are rendered relative to the object reference point, usually relative to AGL.
 
As indicated above, place each building model individually, so each has it's own reference point. You can also use generic buildings in lieu of modeled buildings.

Dick
 
You know thats something I was thinking about is making so many different styles of generic houses and what not that can be used.... I thought about importing the terrain into 3dsmax with DEM but the terrain still isn't exactly like seen in sim, obviously there is some difference in the way the two render the terrain.... I think my best option here is to make the different styles and place individually, which was what I was afraid of, although it really wouldn't be that different from the annotator I suppose. Thanks guys!
 
The mesh in fs also depends on the resolution the user selected of course in the settings. So you never know before how it will look.

Expect worse performance with custom objects than with autogen.
 
Well I know FlyTampa used custom objects for Dubai, but the area was also flat. How much worse are we talking about here? Enough to notice...? Because another problem I have is, I made the surrounding airport very dense with trees, and with the autogen density at Dense everything looks great, performs great, however when you turn up the density to Extremely dense, you start to notice an impact in fps... Im open to any recommendations you guys have!
 
Hi,

It depends of course on how big the area is. But if you would cover an entire country with custom objects expect a performance hit that is very noticeable.

For example on a project I worked on at first we had custom placed trees, later we replaced them by autogen. The custom xml placed trees (over 1 million) had quite a bad performance overhead, with autogen everything runs very smooth.

If course if you try to minimize drawcalls for your custom buildings , limit the area in which you use them, etc, you can still have good performance. But you need to be careful. XML objects just have more performance overhead than autogen.
 
Okay thanks arno I appreciate that very much! Right now I have about 140,000 placements for vegetation in the annotator.... And the area isn't really large, just a few square miles around the airport so I still think custom would be best, I think what I would do is still use the autogen texture I created for the autogen for the custom objects... if nothing else I can try and see how it goes, nothing says I cannot try both! Thanks again, I appreciate the help!!!
 
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