KIAH - A loading and visual masterpiece. Reminds me of how the latest Flightbeam and Taxi2Gate airports load.
With relationship to loading, since Flightbeam also uses our Addon Manager / Couatl modules, their loading strategy it's
identical to our own. KIAH has a loading range of 11.0 NM, so it's more similar to Flightbeam KSFO and KPHX (both loading ranges are 10NM), rather than KIAD (16.0 NM) or KDEN (20.0 NM)
It doesn't have anything to do with Taxi2Gate airports, that don't have any loading strategy: since the scenery is a regular .BGL, they don't have any control on the loading range, which is done entirely by FSX itself.
Want to know
KLAX - At 15.9nm out there is the slightest (~0.25s) pause that likely wouldn't be noticeable if I wasn't watching for it. But as I monitored from afar, this one seems to dump the whole airport at once unlike KIAH or other developer sceneries. But overall, very good.
KLAX has a loading range of 16.0 NM, and it loads exactly like KIAH. Other developers sceneries comparisons are not relevant, except Flightbeam so, in this regard, KLAX is identical to KIAD, when loading strategies are concerned.
KJFK - A wreck. At approx. 7nm out the entire sim comes to a screeching halt for almost 2s. Yikes. The entire ground base turns white and then I painstakingly watch the whole airport dump at once. Sorry, that is not a flyable airport/approach in my opinion
KJFK loading range is correct for all the reasons already explained above. And nobody ever complained being "not flyable"
Loading the airport in quarters or eights depending on distance seems like much more appealing and much less noticeable (staggered) way to go. I know other developers do it and it appears you've done something similar with KIAH.
Other developers (if with "other developers" you mean anybody else except Flightbeam), don't have any means to control their loading range, because the FSX SDK and the .BGL format doesn't have any way to specify the loading range of an object UNLESS they use the old FS8/FS9 file formats, but in that case the fps penalty will offset any supposed benefit of loading objects later/earlier.
They might play with LODs to have part of objects disappear on distance, but that's NOT a "loading strategy", an object with some empty LODs might *display* later, but it will load and will use VAS at its maximum range that, when using the normal FSX SDK, it's entirely out of control of the scenery developer.
In fact, if with "loading the airport in quarters/eights", this is EXACTLY what WE do already. Provided the "Anti pop-up" slider in the Addon Manager is set to its default value.
- If the Anti Pop-up slider is set to its default value of 1, the airport will load the most important buildings at the overall loading range, and the smaller/detail objects at several different loading ranges (usually from 0.5 to 1NM) depending on their size and type. This will result in MORE pauses, of a SHORTER duration. And, usually, the best fps.
- If the Anti Pop-up slider is set to an higher value (for example at the maximum), EVERYTHING will load at the overall loading range of the airport. This will result in A SINGLE, LONGER pause.
But it's not so easy. The time FSX takes to load scenery objects is NOT the same. It depends how taxed your system is in the scenery area. At JFK, since the surrounding area is already very heavy and with many different objects from the default scenery, so the time it takes to load KJFK is not the same to load KIAH, which resides in a very fps-friendly area.
But as I've said, if we just enlarged the KJFK loading range, so it will load much earlier like the others, in THIS area it will cause lots of issues BOTH with fps AND VAS usage, due to the very close proximity of other large airport like LGA and EWR, the high-detailed Manhattan area and the overall N.Y. scenery, which is very dense even without any add-ons, but will be much worse if you have more detailed than default products, like vector data add-ons.
That's why we cannot just set JFK at 16.0NM and forget about it, that's why the 7.0 NM loading range is correct, and that's why you are mislead into thinking KIAH has somewhat "better" loading strategy, when in fact it's just resides in a more favorable area, that allows faster loading, and we can't do anything about it.
