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RealNZ Nelson missing cars and tarmac

PostPosted: Fri May 18, 2018 10:31 pm
by mac
I just bought RealNZ Nelson and Dunedin from Godzone Virtual Flight today. I installed Nelson first into my Orbx FTX NZ scenery, followed the instructions and everything to the letter including going to the FTX Central setup to do the library insertation point as well too. I already had the VLC library installed but let the installer install the library however it stopped partway through and it said that it was already installed so stopped there.
However there are a lot of cars missing showing just their wheels without the bodies and I also notice that the tarmac is missing from in front of the Air Nelson Maintenance hangar. I checked the preview vid of NZNS by Toprob and pictures and can see the cars and the tarmac are both there. Is there something missing? Might it have something to do with the VLC library? I have uninstalled RealNZ Nelson for now and will try reinstall again later.

Re: RealNZ Nelson missing cars and tarmac

PostPosted: Sat May 19, 2018 12:25 am
by toprob
The tarmac at that particular place is just a simple photo texture, so it will display a little differently compared to the airside tarmac -- if it really looks bad, you may need to turn the Terrain Texture Resolution up -- try 15cm.

The cars are default library vehicles -- I'm aware that Prepar3d v4 has moved away from this old style of displaying objects, so some people will have display issues. I am pretty sure that LM will update these libraries at some stage. In the meantime, to overcome this some users -- including me -- recompiled the default vehicle libraries to add drawcall-batching, which improves things a lot -- not completely, though, I still have a few cars without wheels, but that's better than wheels without cars...

I'm aware that not everyone has the tools or experience to do this, so unless you understand what that is, then it isn't much use to you.

For NZCH, I'm hoping to add a lot of new vehicles to the VLC library, which only has half a dozen cars at the moment. However it is a huge job getting enough cars modeled. Again, the best solution is that LM recompile their libraries. I have my fingers crossed.

Re: RealNZ Nelson missing cars and tarmac

PostPosted: Sat May 19, 2018 8:45 am
by mac
Hi Toprob, I have FSX/Acc and don't have P3D. The Terrain Texture Resolution slider is all the way up to 7cm, so to bring it to 15 cm I would have to pull the slider backwards. The 7cm setting was recommended by Orbx in their guide to settings for their scenery, but I'll try the 15cm setting and see how it goes.
If the cars are default FSX library objects they should be able to show up in my FSX sim, it does look weird to see all these wheels sitting on the ground with nothing on them. About a quarter of all the cars in the scenery are missing their bodies and are only showing their wheels...as you say it must be the result of the recompilation of the default library cars?

Re: RealNZ Nelson missing cars and tarmac

PostPosted: Sat May 19, 2018 11:23 am
by toprob
Ok, sorry about the confusion, I should have asked which sim version.
I have fired up my old FSX, and I see the same thing with the vehicles. I'll give some thought to why this has happened, but initially I would think that the only real changes to my FSX are via FTX Central. I suspect that FSX/FTX is simply getting swamped with objects, so it gives up on the older library models. (I assume that FTX models all use drawcall batching, which is a lot more efficient than the old libraries, which really go back to FS2004 and maybe earlier.)
Prior to FTX, problems with the cars were normally due to the road traffic settings being too high -- reducing the number of cars on the road made it easier for FSX to display all the static models. However with FTX I wouldn't have thought that this would happen, as they use their own models?
I'll give some thought to how to improve things, but it may take a while -- it may actually mean building our own car libraries, adding the the handful of VLC Library cars. This isn't an overnight job:)
Now would be a good time to remind members than we are always looking for some library additions -- if anyone had a real love of cars, for instance, it would be a good project!
The tarmac issue is really just the way it was built - to keep performance up, the ground detail is kept to the main taxi-line, so the further from the airside tarmac the less detail. As systems improve, this becomes less of an issue, so if I was to update Nelson then I'd probably redo the ground textures -- I have updated them once already, but this scenery is getting quite old now. (Still current enough to sell well, but heavily discounted:)

Re: RealNZ Nelson missing cars and tarmac

PostPosted: Sat May 19, 2018 7:53 pm
by mac
I have just reinstalled Nelson again, and the same things still happen regardless. I tried the 15cm setting, but it looked less crisp. 7cm is the highest setting for clearer and crisper textures so went back to 7. Yes, I think FTX have their own static vehicle models. I played with the traffic slider but that made no difference. In FTX central there are two Library Insertion points, one for FTX entries and the other is for openLC. I've only adjusted the FTX entries but left the openLC alone as it is. The wheels are still there...no change.
It does look like a good opportunity for someone to add some static objects to replace those missing cars...in fact I could easily do it using Instant Scenery to add the missing vehicles. I would have to have your permission to do that if I would have to share the finished work with the sim community. If it's just for my own personal use then it would not be going any further than that.
Regarding the ground in front of the Air Nelson hangars would it be possible to add a new ground poly to make the tarmac using ADEX that I could do?
The Nelson airport scenery is still a great scenery package in spite of these things.

Re: RealNZ Nelson missing cars and tarmac

PostPosted: Sat May 19, 2018 9:10 pm
by toprob
To further illustrate what the issue is with the vehicles, here's a couple of screenshots. The first shows the carpark with the Scenery Complexity setting set to Dense. The second shows a setting of Normal. So increasing the scenery density actually overloads FSX if you have FTX SI installed. (These are thumbnails, click them for the full-sized image.)

Image
Image

So a quick fix is simply to reduce the scenery complexity.

You can certainly add your own tarmac with ADEX, just make sure you start with the Godzone airport facilities file. Just be aware that there are very few visible ADEX-style ground polys, so you won't get a perfect match.

Re: RealNZ Nelson missing cars and tarmac

PostPosted: Sun May 20, 2018 9:04 pm
by mac
Great - thanks Toprob. That means the scenery complexity had an effect on the cars... turning the slider back fixes that. Orbx FTX does recommend the scenery complexity slider to be set to the far right for best setting for their FTX scenery, all my settings are set to FTX's settings. Sliding it back would be a compromise to the scenery but the cars all appear. If I still want to keep the high settings I will add the cars with Instant scenery. I have both Orbx S.I and N.I as well as their airport scenery for NZ. I just recently added your Hokitika scenery and put it at the top above FTX in FTX central and it appears complete in the sim.