A few questions regarding pop ups and weather station location

[cmpbllsjc]

Umberto, I have had this scenery since it came out and it is by far one of my favorites. However, I also have your KORD, KLAS, Geneva, and Zurich and these two things are bothering me with KFLL that don't seem to happen at the other FSDT airports.

1. I'm not sure if this is an AFCAD/ADE issue, or perhaps just the way FSX is, but I seem to have a weird weather problem at KFLL where the weather can change or be different from different sides of the airport and it seems that when I am on approach to 9L I will get a new weather condition almost as I pass I-95. It's as if the weather station boundry starts or ends at that point. This is both with the default weather engine and ASA. I though that maybe it could be an issue of the weather station having been relocated on this scenery? In most cases, the weather condidions seem to stay the same when you are in the boundry of the nearest weather station. For example down the road at KMIA, when I am in the vicinity of the aiport the weather condititions stay consistant, however at KFLL they seem to vary almost within the boundry of the airport.

2. The second thing with KFLL is that I seem to get a lot more pauses when the additional scenery items load than I do with the other FSDT aiports. I know that the older ones were maybe designed a little different, but KLAS is a newer aiport than KFLL and I don't seem to have such long pauses at that airport when scenery items come into view. At KFLL I sometimes get up to a 5 second pause as I turn off of 9L and start to approach the North side of the main terminal. I also get shorter intermittent pauses when landing on 9L just after touch down.

I have read that using the addon manager you can adjust the scenery pop ups, but I wasn't sure if I can adjust the pop ups for just KFLL, or if by adjusting the pop ups it will affect all the FSDT and Cloud9 products?

Also by changing the pop up slider will it affect any of the default FSX pop up items for stock airports or autogen?

I looked in the PDF's but didn't see any intructions on using the addon manager for things like this, so please advise me with what you think I should try.

I do know that it could perhaps just be my system since I am only running an dual core E8400 at 3.84 on Win XP 32bit and 2 GB RAM, and a 1GB video card. However, I'm not so sure it's my system because I dont get these long pauses at your other airports, and KLAS is a much larger airport with what I imagine would be a lot more small pop up items in it.

I also defrag on a regular basis.

Thanks in advance.

[virtuali]

The weather stations boundaries do not have anything to do with the AFCAD or the scenery. They are defined in FSX somewhere else and KFLL might just happening to be at a boundary between two or more. Nothing to be done from our side.

The pop-up control is global for all the sceneries handled by the Adddon Manager. It doesn't affects the main buildings, because those have already a farily high visible range, but only the smaller detail things. By increasing it, those will be loaded in advance, and will stay loaded for more time, lessening the chance of stuttering and visual pop-up, at the cost of increase strain on the graphic card, that will need to draw more things.

The Anti Pop-up control doesn't have any effect on any other FSX scenery (default or 3rd party), because it's something that is relevant to the Addon Manager only.

Instead, all the other settings and tweaks on the Addon Manager page, are normal and very well known FSX tweaks, which are applied to the regular FSX.CFG so, they are Global for all sceneries.

[cmpbllsjc]

Ok thanks for the explanation.

I tried it out tonight and I moved the Anti Pop slider to 4 to test. It seems to have smoothed it out some, so maybe after further testing I will leave it there, or maybe try increasing it.

This leaves me with another question.

In the Addon Manager there is a tick box that says "View Optimization" if I remember right. Not sure if that box needs to be clicked or not? I clicked the tick box since I figured that was needed to actually see the difference.

Also, after I set the Anti Pop up control to 4 and exited, when I went back in later I noticed it was back to 1. I set it back to 4 and this time I hit the button to the left that says "Save to FSX" and noticed that when I opened mf FSX.cfg it added a bunch of enteries like Bufferpools, Dirtyparticles, etc. I would rather not have all these other enteries since after Michael at FS-GS set me up, we weren't using them. However, I did see the cfg entery that said:

[FSDREAMTEAM]
AntiPopUp=4

So can I just delete all the other enteries the the Addon Manager added and just keep the [FSDREAMTEAM]AntiPopup=4 entry and edit it in the cfg going forward so I dont get all the other edits posted to the cfg?

[virtuali]

In the Addon Manager there is a tick box that says "View Optimization" if I remember right. Not sure if that box needs to be clicked or not?

It's a setting. If it "needed" to be always checked, as if one option was good and the other bad, we wouldn't have made it user-settable, but rather have it always set in the "correct" way automatically.

So, clearly, is something that might give different results on different systems, that's why it's settable.

It adds a further optimization, that will make objects (only for sceneries handled by the Addon Manager) that are behind the user, to be entirely unloaded.

It's more orr less an experimental setting so, the default value is not to use it. It *might* help with lesser system, but it might be worse if you have a fast system with plenty of ram and vram.

The rule it's always the same, basically: the more powerful a system is, the more stuff you'll want to have it thrown at the video card and leave it there, instead of costant swapping in/out. But, of course, lesser systems don't have such luxury so, they HAVE to constantly swap in/out objects, because in *that* case, the overhead of swapping in/out is less than the actual impact those objects (assuming they *fit* in video memory in the first place) requires to be drawn.

I usually left it to off. But it has no relationship with the other settings.

I hit the button to the left that says "Save to FSX" and noticed that when I opened mf FSX.cfg it added a bunch of enteries like Bufferpools, Dirtyparticles, etc. I would rather not have all these other enteries since after Michael at FS-GS set me up, we weren't using them.

Well, don't think that, just because you don't see the entries in the FSX.CFG, FSX do not use those settings. It always use them with some value, it's just that, if they are not in the FSX.CFG, they'll be initialized at their default value, otherwise what is written in the FSX.CFG will take precedence. The default values for the Adddon Manager should be the same as in FSX so, basically, there should't be any difference compared to not having this settings in the FSX.CFG, unless you start playing with the sliders and save them.

So can I just delete all the other enteries the the Addon Manager added and just keep the [FSDREAMTEAM]AntiPopup=4 entry and edit it in the cfg going forward so I dont get all the other edits posted to the cfg?

Yes, this will work too.

[cmpbllsjc]

Thanks for the clarification, I guess I will just edit the [FSDREAMTEAM]AntiPopup=4 manually in the cfg then if it works the same.

However, your reply about the "View Optimization" has confused me a little. If leave my cfg alone except for the [FSDREAMTEAM]AntiPopup=4 edit, and I mark the "View Optimization" box, that will completely unload the scenery from memory when not viewing it? I think my system is fairly fast at E8400 3.85 ghz, even though I am still on 2GB of RAM, but I have a 1gb video card. Editing the popup slider to 4 didn't seem to make a difference in FPS, but smoothed it out a bit and I may try a higher value. Now I am not so sure if I need to leave the "View Optimization" box checked or not.

I am probably just not understanding the function of that box. What I figured it did was allow me to preview the settings made in the Addon Manager without actually saving them to the cfg.

Thanks again for the help Umberto. Sorry I am not understanding the View Optimization box.

[virtuali]

Now I am not so sure if I need to leave the "View Optimization" box checked or not.

As I've said, with a reasonably fast system, it should be off. Which is why it defaults to off.

I am probably just not understanding the function of that box. What I figured it did was allow me to preview the settings made in the Addon Manager without actually saving them to the cfg.

Nothing of that sort. It acts on the scenery objects, and removes those that are behind your viewpoint.

[cmpbllsjc]

Ok, I understand now. I'll just leave it unchecked.

KFLL seems to be a lot smoother now at 4.

Thanks for the info.