New Meshbuilder Budget

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A new entry has been added to Add-Ons Library, category CFS 3 Other Add-Ons

Description: This is an update of my previous offerings for a meshbuilderbudgets.xml file to be added to the Assets folder. This one requires a reasonably high end computer setup.
Its origins in conception come from Charles Simpson's Meshbuilderbudgets_OUCH file.

To test, fly from Chambery in France and compare your current budgets file with this new one.

To check it out, rate it or add comments, visit New Meshbuilder Budget
The comments you make there will appear in the posts below.
 
NachtPiloten said:
What does it do?
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It makes your terrain look as good as it can. There is potential in the old terrain mesh of CFS3, this helps maximise the potential. It does not exaggerate any elevation or anything like that. There is also new terrain mesh available by Xavier Jouve, I haven't fully tested the budgets file with that mesh.
 
Noticed no drop in FPS . Looks great . How can i get the trees to show up farther with WOTR terrain and assets ? Not related to this but Rene sent me some assets files that helped when i had the stock ETO scenery and now the trees pop up closer now.
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Problem solved with the trees popping up too close. Love the work you've done. Now i'm cooking with gas ! Regards,Scott
 
sixstrings5859 said:
Problem solved with the trees popping up too close. Love the work you've done. Now i'm cooking with gas ! Regards,Scott
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I think that would be related to the scenerybudgets.xml. Something to do with the number of rings and the scenery density settings. IIRC MajorMagee has posted his preferrred setup in an old thread - maybe in the knowledgebase sticky? I keep a variety of approaches to the scenery budgets.xml, and tinker with them occasionally. One thing that is annoying with the stock tree scenery models (.sm) is that there is a low res texture and a high res texture called for each tee. This causes a "popping" effect when one crosses the threshold from one texture to the other. Newer tree scenery models like ETO and Johno_UK v3, use only one texture within the model, thereby avoiding that slightly jarring transition between textures.
 
Scott indeed had been using an older file by me with the ETO scenery but probably threw it out when adding the WOTR files. I've since given him a new one but have no idea what he did with it yet.
 
Problem solved ! Used the supplied files Rene sent ,and so much better now.Should of asked my good friend if i had questions about installing things i know little about. He has helped me tremendously for a while now. Many thanks to all who help us have a great experience with CFS3. Kind Regards ,Scott
 
One thing I'm noticing in PTO is that the patch size seems to be altitude dependent in a way that makes little sense. This shows up as visible tile edges at moderate distance when at low altitude that snap to smooth edge transitions when I go higher (above 8250), and then go back to patches again when I drop again (below 6850). Yes, the change is different depending on if I'm climbing or diving! Changing the AboveGroundLevel has no effect on this, so it's either controlled by some other file (I've look without coming up with a good candidate), or it's hard coded.The tiles near my aircraft smoothly transition without visible edges at all altitudes.
 
I just checked, and I get the same behavior at the same altitudes in ETO. You don't notice it at extreme distances, or in close, but there is a medium distance band where it happens. More investigation required. p.s. I see the same altitude behavior in the stock game, but the patches are larger.
 
MajorMagee said:
I just checked, and I get the same behavior at the same altitudes in ETO. You don't notice it at extreme distances, or in close, but there is a medium distance band where it happens. More investigation required. p.s. I see the same altitude behavior in the stock game, but the patches are larger.
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I must cast a critical eye over it, too many irons in the fire at the moment. I tend to do my flying at lower altitudes, where the simplified budgets file seems to give a steady result.
 
Found out two things by flying in the high mountains. There is an element of AGL to the height band where this happens. For very high surfaces the altitudes are shifted up proportionally. Coming from the valley up over the peaks it will trigger twice. Once for the valley walls, then again for the peaks (once you get well above them). The second thing I noticed was that AnKor's shadows were showing the same tiling effect. A quick toggle off and, viola! no more altitude driven display switching. Now I have a place to go look to see if I can make the low altitude surfaces display smoothly like it does when I'm higher.
 
Yes, but I haven't had any more time to look into it this weekend. Perhaps something in the Terrain Lighting and Bump Mapping, but I don't know why that would involve a display method change triggered by altitude.
 
I've done a bit more testing and a couple of things occur to me. One is I am using the 2018 version of Ankors shaders (never been able to get later ones to work), and the other thing is the meshbuilderbudgets file is set up to run the terrain detail slider at 5. I should have made that clear at the outset. You can make the adjustment using the top right drop down menu in CFS3, but if you have your configoverrides file set to read only (to stop the defaulting of dual pass render to Y), then the configoverrides.xml file in your Appdata pathway needs to be tweaked. The setting is right down the bottom of the file.

And having just done some test flying around West Prawle, I could see the middle distance artifacts that Majormagee mentions quite clearly. For some reason that "blockiness" is not so obvious in my favourite test areas of Chambery and Nice, although on closer examination the artifact is there if you look hard enough.

So I guess the settings are not perfect. There is potential to improve even more. However IMHO I am overall finding the new meshbuilderbudgets file a great improvement over stock.
 
Yes, 5 is maximum, and what I have all my installs running at. I've tried a bunch of variations of the values within the meshbuilderbudgets file, and it had no apparent influence on the anomaly. It really must be related to something about how AnKor's shaders render ground shading.
 
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