An observation from the Darkside

falcon409

falcon409

Moderator
Staff member
I have toyed with reinstalling FS9 so that some of the scenery I do in FSX can be translated over to FS9 as well. Finally took the bull by the horns today and got started. I reinstalled FS9, Ground Environment, Ultimate Terrain and a considerable amount of FSGenesis Terrain Mesh. I still have plenty of aircraft to install (most are currently residing in my FSX folders and get flown regularly). For right now, I'm looking over the "look and feel" of FS9 and I have to say, I have been spoiled by what I see daily in FSX. The biggest void that I see right now is in the area of autogen vegetation. . .even with all my sliders maxed. . .it looks desolate. I did some searching, hoping for a fix similar to FSX that allows you to up the number of trees/buildings within a given "cell" and thereby increase the overall density. Nope, according to the FS9 SDK, the autogen density level in the FS9.cfg (Slider maxed renders a high point of 5) is the max for a given cell and was done for playability reasons. . .higher autogen numbers would have bogged down the engine. I did find a thread over on the FSDevelopers Forum, but after reading through an entire page of "IIRC and IIUC's, and a lot of suppositions and heresay, what I came away with was that "what you see is what you get and nothing more", despite one mention that someone had posted somewhere else that changing the 5 to a 30 gave the "perception" of higher numbers of autogen. . . . .huh? I tried it just for grins and I can say without reservation that I saw no such perception. . .it was just as barren at 30 as it was at 5.

So, if anyone has cracked the autogen barrier and can give me some idea of how to increase the autogen so that FS9 looks like people actually are still alive on the planet, I'm all ears.
 
In the past I have read quite a few topics about this lack of autogen density in FS9, and unfortunately there has never been any solution for it.
When scenery creators want dense trees/buildings, they just create them as scenery objects, but of course this is done only in small distances around an airport, and since they never use the autogen textures (for trees for example), the blending of the scenery with the surrounding generic scenery is often catastrophic, especially upon seasonnal change.

The only thing I could find to make the trees autogen look a bit denser, was to replace the autogen textures with some alternative packages, like the freeware pack "TreeGen" for example. This pack replaces the texture of a tree by another texture showing three smaller trees. Not only does the vegetation look a bit denser (but not much), but it also changes the perception of distance, thanks to the reduced size of the usually GIANT trees. The final result was quite nice.

But don't dream. Now that you are used to FSX autogen, there's nothing you can do for FS9.
 
Daube said:
The only thing I could find to make the trees autogen look a bit denser, was to replace the autogen textures with some alternative packages, like the freeware pack "TreeGen" for example. This pack replaces the texture of a tree by another texture showing three smaller trees. Not only does the vegetation look a bit denser (but not much), but it also changes the perception of distance, thanks to the reduced size of the usually GIANT trees. The final result was quite nice.
Click to expand...

The only option for more autogen.




I like FS9. On low-end hardware, it offers a much better experience than FSX.
 
Bjoern said:
I like FS9. On low-end hardware, it offers a much better experience than FSX.
Click to expand...

Even on high-end hardware !
With FSX, if you get over a major airport with a complex airplane (PMDG and so), full AI traffic and bad weather, the performance will get problematic.
With FS9, under the same conditions, the performance will stay smooth.
Generally, when a new-to-FS simmer appears, I still advise him to choose FS9 if he is looking for IFR activities.

Of course, for VFR, it's the opposite.
 
I used to have "X" installed, and the one thing I noticed was the seasonal ground textures were way off. Summer here in Greensboro should be green, but when I went to W88, it looked like I was in the TX panhandle in the middle of an August drought. Yes, I know there are replacement ground textures, but why should I have to buy a software package and then spend a day tweaking and replacing just to make it correct? I hope to have a new rig soon, and if I get it, I'll be purchasing P3D' student version.

By the way, don't forget to install the 9.1 update:
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=9727
 
Thanks for the replies. I plan to use FS9 mostly for the ability to do scenery work for some of the "Flight19" excursions we do and to be able to set up flight plans a bit easier using FSNav. As a daily flightsim vehicle, the lack of autogen is a killer for me. Thanks again.:salute:
 
hey Ed, good to see ya's back in these parts, if ya's ever needing assistance with anything scenery wise just give me a shout :salute:
 
I like the scenery features and some of the aircraft features that are available in FSX. I do agree that FS9 runs better, it just does not look as nice as FSX, at least not without a ton of work. I still have FS9 installed, by the way.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top