TuFun
Charter Member
This is kinda interesting!
I didn't know about the Couatl engine that allow this to work without using up VAS.
FSDT
Posted by Umberto
We explained this on our Facebook page, since many users seems to be concerned about VAS and FPS impact of these features.
We do memory management in an entirely custom way, thanks to your friend the Couatl engine, which allows to save quite a bit of VAS, by creating/destroying objects using its own logic (without depending on the default memory management of the sim or, more precisely, the almost non-existent and bugged memory management of using plain .BGL files...), running a script which runs entirely outside the sim, using its own VAS space, multithreading on spare CPU cores cycles unused by the sim, and even running its own sound engine.
The Tower interior is a separate object and is loaded in memory, unless you go very close to it and to the correct altitude so, its bounding box is basically a cylinder only slightly larger than the tower itself. Outside this perimeter, not a single byte of precious VAS is taken away from the sim, which won't even know the tower interior is there.
This about the actual 3d object + textures, which are the only things that CAN take VAS from the sim. Only after being loaded, of course. After the tower is loaded, everything that belongs to it is allocated in an entirely separate VAS space. The custom collision data (which allows the Avatar to walk realistically inside a building), the background positional sounds (yes, if you have a surround system or a 5.1/7.1 headphones, you'll hear telephones, chat and other sounds according to their proper position in the 3d space) and all the program logic that drives all of this, has its own separate VAS (Couatl's), that doesn't take away anything from the Sim VAS.
The same is true for the EMAS system we shown a couple of days ago. The actual object is just a normal 3d mesh which is not particularly complex that we might have just included as static (in fact, we did it in KFLL: there's a "dumb" EMAS there..), but the logic that makes it work, and the sounds effect it does when you hit it, are VAS-VREE, from the point of view of the Sim.
Same for the interior of the FedEx maintenance hangar. It's NOT loaded anywhere in memory, unless YOU choose to OPEN it, using the appropriate menu command. When the doors are closed, the hangar is empty, so it's not taking any more VAS than it was an entirely static object to begin with.
In addition to that, there are about 200 animated scenes, with animated characters that populates every parking. If we had to do it in the traditional way, there was no chance in **ll the scenery would ever fit in memory. But thanks to your friend, the Couatl engine, we have a script that automatically populates parking spaces, but only loading the parking you are close to, and the 2/3 nearby parkings. And they are only created when you slow down the airplane (less than about 1 knot), so the process of creation/removal won't cause "stutters" while you are taxiing or flying.
We are taking VAS and FPS issues VERY seriously, which is one of the main point of the existance of the Couatl engine: it doesn't simply do cool tricks: it's there to save and optimize memory, or doing things that would be otherwise impossible because of VAS constraints.
Source:http://www.avsim.com/topic/488374-fsdt-wow-control-tower-fun/?p=3419059
I didn't know about the Couatl engine that allow this to work without using up VAS.
FSDT
Posted by Umberto
We explained this on our Facebook page, since many users seems to be concerned about VAS and FPS impact of these features.
We do memory management in an entirely custom way, thanks to your friend the Couatl engine, which allows to save quite a bit of VAS, by creating/destroying objects using its own logic (without depending on the default memory management of the sim or, more precisely, the almost non-existent and bugged memory management of using plain .BGL files...), running a script which runs entirely outside the sim, using its own VAS space, multithreading on spare CPU cores cycles unused by the sim, and even running its own sound engine.
The Tower interior is a separate object and is loaded in memory, unless you go very close to it and to the correct altitude so, its bounding box is basically a cylinder only slightly larger than the tower itself. Outside this perimeter, not a single byte of precious VAS is taken away from the sim, which won't even know the tower interior is there.
This about the actual 3d object + textures, which are the only things that CAN take VAS from the sim. Only after being loaded, of course. After the tower is loaded, everything that belongs to it is allocated in an entirely separate VAS space. The custom collision data (which allows the Avatar to walk realistically inside a building), the background positional sounds (yes, if you have a surround system or a 5.1/7.1 headphones, you'll hear telephones, chat and other sounds according to their proper position in the 3d space) and all the program logic that drives all of this, has its own separate VAS (Couatl's), that doesn't take away anything from the Sim VAS.
The same is true for the EMAS system we shown a couple of days ago. The actual object is just a normal 3d mesh which is not particularly complex that we might have just included as static (in fact, we did it in KFLL: there's a "dumb" EMAS there..), but the logic that makes it work, and the sounds effect it does when you hit it, are VAS-VREE, from the point of view of the Sim.
Same for the interior of the FedEx maintenance hangar. It's NOT loaded anywhere in memory, unless YOU choose to OPEN it, using the appropriate menu command. When the doors are closed, the hangar is empty, so it's not taking any more VAS than it was an entirely static object to begin with.
In addition to that, there are about 200 animated scenes, with animated characters that populates every parking. If we had to do it in the traditional way, there was no chance in **ll the scenery would ever fit in memory. But thanks to your friend, the Couatl engine, we have a script that automatically populates parking spaces, but only loading the parking you are close to, and the 2/3 nearby parkings. And they are only created when you slow down the airplane (less than about 1 knot), so the process of creation/removal won't cause "stutters" while you are taxiing or flying.
We are taking VAS and FPS issues VERY seriously, which is one of the main point of the existance of the Couatl engine: it doesn't simply do cool tricks: it's there to save and optimize memory, or doing things that would be otherwise impossible because of VAS constraints.
Source:http://www.avsim.com/topic/488374-fsdt-wow-control-tower-fun/?p=3419059