Photo Scenery, VAS and the AVSIM guide

[Raven9000 272]

Hi folks, having tried some of MSE's products, I really liked them and will be having an install of just photo scenery  + some airports based FSX  (as well as another install in parallel with other types like orbx, etc).

 

Anyway, since I will be buying a whole lot of it, and I want to have it installed in my sim, and as I have also been reading the AVSIM config guide, I found this small section mentioning it:

 

 

 

Photoscenery - If you own a lot of add-on photoscenery, such as from Orbx/FTX, Aerosoft, MegaSceneryX, MegaSceneryEarth, Tile Proxy, or Blue Sky, you should know that these products will all install in the background even though you may be using only one or two scenery areas for your current flight plan. Photoscenery loading in the background will take up an exceptional amount of Virtual Address Space (VAS) and degrade performance. In the Scenery Library you should only enable the add-on scenery that you will be using during a particular flight plan and disable the rest

 

 

So my reaction/questions is basically:  Huh???

 

This makes no sense at all...  Why would the sim load "all" the scenery in your library? (and wouldn't it -if it were true- be the same case for *any* scenery you have active in your library? -also mentioning photoscenery and orbx, again huh?-).

 

To further relate that this makes no sense, imagine I *don't* go crazy and buy just ONE state from MSE.... even the smaller ones are like 4/6 GB...  If what the guide states were true, I would deplete my VAS just by starting a flight up...

 

I have heard that FSX isn't very good at releasing memory it loads up, and I see where that could be a problem, but from there to saying it will load up *everything* that's active in my library...  Isn't this an error/miswritten or something?

 

Can anyone comment?

[Jim Young 2,356]

 

 

This makes no sense at all... Why would the sim load "all" the scenery in your library?

 

This information about Photoscenery is in the 777 or 737 Intro Guides too.  Check around page21.  Photoscenery textures are treated differently than default textures or non-photographic textures.  I discovered this issue when I downloaded and installed almost all of the US States.  I had them all enabled in my Scenery Library.  So what I'm saying, if you are flying over Texas and Texas only, you do not want to have Washington State or photoscenery in Europe enabled.  It is taking up VAS.  If you do not believe me, then set up the Process Monitor so that only FSX and FSX addons are seen during a flight (see page 4 of the AVSIM CTD Guide).  It will show you what is loading during your flight.  Why do you want photoscenery textures from, say, Europe loading and you are only flying over Texas?  And, while they are loading, you will definitely see a degradation of performance and I can guarantee you that with a lot of photoscenery running at the same time, you definitely will get an OOM (which is running out of VAS).  You doubt me?  LOL!

 

Best regards,

[Raven9000 272]

Hmm.. I will check that out (the monitor you mention), and you're right in that fo course I would NOT want them to load, but what I mean is each state is GBs and GBs of scenery, so there is no way it can get loaded completely or you wouldn't have enough memory on your computer (let alone FSX's VAS) for that to be true. Do you mean it loads (for some reason) *bits* of non-relevant scenery maybe?

[Don t moderate me this way 882]

The tool is Process Explorer. Huge areas of photoscenery (USA complete, for example) can take up around 1 GB of VAS. So it's not the PS bgl's size that go into VAS completely, but rather some "fraction" of it.

 

Another concise article here:

http://support.precisionmanuals.com/kb/a108/vas-management-stopping-out-of-memory-oom-errors.aspx

[mgh 89]

 

 

So it's not the PS bgl's size that go into VAS completely, but rather some "fraction" of it.

 

That's true. I use VFR Photographic Scenery for  Southern England & South Wales in the UK - that's only one part of the three volumes.  The full installation that part on disk requires 27.9GB.

[Jim Young 2,356]

 

 

Do you mean it loads (for some reason) *bits* of non-relevant scenery maybe?

 

It will all eventually load but it is taking up system resources in the process.  It does not take up your 4GB's of VAS but system resources.  Just like loading the 777 or the default scenery around your aircraft.  Those things use system resources and take up Virtual Address Space.  Default scenery around the perimeter of your aircraft/flightplan, is loaded and unloaded as you fly.  Photoscenery continues to load in the background whether it is in your perimeter or not taking up valuable resources that could be used elsewhere.  I mentioned Orbx in the guide as I think there are some .bgl's that contain photoscenery in their products.  I may be wrong.  They have so much and I wanted everyone to be aware that you might disable the Orbx scenery if you are not using it.  I'm not talking about FTX Global or Vector stuff.  Just scenery like in the PNW for example.  Oliver and Gerry are right on and Oliver has a direct link to the information in the PMDG Intro guides.

 

I know VAS and memory and RAM are all very confusing to many.  With the advent of high powered computer systems, VAS has gotten more and more into the mainstream.  We didn't talk too much about it a few years ago other than to tell everyone to use the /3GB switch so that your system can 'see' more VAS than just 2GB's.  Apologize for any confusion I might have caused in the guide.

 

Best regards,

[cmpbellsjc 2,963]

Raven,

 

Another way you can confirm that all the states of photoscenery are loading at once is to set your a/c in the middle of the US (assuming all your photoscenery is in the US) and then go to Top Down view and zoom out until you can see the whole US. From that vantage point you will see that the photoscenery is loaded everywhere, not just where you are flying.

 

The reason it take up more VAS is because it's not repetitive ground textures like the stock, GEX, or FTX Global use to display ground tiles. Since regular ground tiles have a limited amount of tiles to use, it essentially puts a cap on how much VAS can be consumed. However, photoreal doesn't use repetitive textures and land class to determine which tile to display, so it has to load the whole batch of tiles as once. I think that is the easiest way to explain it to you.

 

Airports are generally ok to leave enable as they don't load until your within 10 miles or so of them, but if the airport includes photoreal ground textures for the vicinity of the airport like a lot of ORBX, LatinVFR, T2G, FlyTampa do, then unless those airports are disabled, they will load the photoreal textures when you are not there. The exception is scenery made by Flightbeam and FSDreamteam, who use another method to suppress the loading of those items until you get near them.

[Raven9000 272]

Thanks to all for the explanations.

 

So is there any useful tool that can let me build oresets of what I want? I know it won't be "automagically" but maybe some profiles one couod create to activate/deactivate certain scenery?

[Don t moderate me this way 882]

Thanks to all for the explanations.

 

So is there any useful tool that can let me build oresets of what I want? I know it won't be "automagically" but maybe some profiles one couod create to activate/deactivate certain scenery?

 

 

Scenery Config Editor is also free and you can define groups of scenery with it, that can be deactivated and reactivated by a single mouse click per group. The only drawback is that it requires Java to work, so you should disable Java in your browser to keep up internet security at least .

[Raven9000 272]

Scenery Config Editor is also free and you can define groups of scenery with it, that can be deactivated and reactivated by a single mouse click per group. The only drawback is that it requires Java to work, so you should disable Java in your browser to keep up internet security at least .

Thanks, I'll take a look

Another way you can confirm that all the states of photoscenery are loading at once is to set your a/c in the middle of the US (assuming all your photoscenery is in the US) and then go to Top Down view and zoom out until you can see the whole US. From that vantage point you will see that the photoscenery is loaded everywhere, not just where you are flying

Hmmm you know I was just thinking.. How do you know that by doing that you don't have a "chicken and egg" situation...? You can see it loads if you go to top down zoomed out view, but maybe it loads precisely because you are going to top down zoomed out view...

 

Also, I still need to go look too understand it, but of course I do believe you guys that it loads scenery, but it's the part you were mentioning about "loading up everything at once" that I can't come to grips with... A single state is larger than all the RAM in my computer. There's no way it can load the whole thing up... There's gotta be something we're missing.

[Jim Young 2,356]

 

 

but it's the part you were mentioning about "loading up everything at once" that I can't come to grips with... A single state is larger than all the RAM in my computer. There's no way it can load the whole thing up... There's gotta be something we're missing.

 

It does not all get loaded into VAS and I think that is where you are confused. You are right, that would never work. It is loaded into a cache ready to be used if you fly into that area. But it is loading in the background and it is taking up system resources that could be used for FSX.  If you look at your Page File, it can get large sometimes.  If I enable five or six photoscenery States that I will fly over during a flight, I can guarantee I'll see an OOM at the end of the flight.

 

Best regards,

[Kuragiman 227]

It does not all get loaded into VAS and I think that is where you are confused. You are right, that would never work. It is loaded into a cache ready to be used if you fly into that area. But it is loading in the background and it is taking up system resources that could be used for FSX.  If you look at your Page File, it can get large sometimes.  If I enable five or six photoscenery States that I will fly over during a flight, I can guarantee I'll see an OOM at the end of the flight.

 

Best regards,

 

Yep!   I own most of MSE US and when I am planning my route I am also planning which states to turn on.   I can get away with about 5/6 states before things start to go south in the 737NGX with Payware airports and AI traffic turned on.    You have to plan it out.   You can't just load everything.  Besides... the load time becomes so grand you can go have dinner while you wait when you have to much turned on in your scenery.cfg file.

[Jim Young 2,356]

the load time becomes so grand you can go have dinner while you wait when you have to much turned on in your scenery.cfg file.

Very good description on the pains of loading photoscenery Brian!

 

Best regards,

[Lorby_SI 2,072]

I'm using the ScenerySets in SimStarter for this, plus a little utility that reduces the scenery.cfg to the active sceneries only. Speeds up loading time considerably and helps a lot keeping OOMs in check.

[GaryGB 10]

SimStarter web page would not load for me in FireFox, so here's a Google cache version:

 

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:OSNEWPXzdkgJ:aviation.pero-online.de/wordpress/%3Fpage_id%3D105+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

 

http://aviation.pero-online.de/projects/SIMstarter/readme_EN.pdf

 

 

Hope this helps ! :smile:

 

GaryGB