Idea for FSUIPC

[Guest MattFox]

I had an idea and thought FSUIPC might be good program to implement it. Maybe it's a bad idea or not even possible, but thought I'd throw it out there anyway.

Is it possible to control the different scenery setting sliders? If so then this might work and give everyone a boost in frame rates and the tweakers even more to tweak. If it's not possible to control the different settings than forget about the whole thing.

Basically, what I was thinking would be to take several of the key scenery display values and coordinating them to some value such as altitude, time of day, weather visibility etc. and then adjusting the scenery display sliders in a linear or on/off relationship to those varius factors. For example:

Maximum Visibility. It's nice to have this set to a high value when at high altitude, but at low altitude or on ground it can be much lower.

Texture Quality - ??

Terrain Detail Textures. This could be on at low altitude and off at high altitude.

Aircraft Cast Shadows - On only when on ground.

Cloud Density - Higher if frame rate is above certain level, lower if not.

There are probably others, these are just a few I could think of off top of head. Again, this may not even be possible, not really sure. There used to be a program called FSAssist that sort of did this, but not automatically.

Anyway, keep up the great work Pete.

Matt

[Pete Dowson]

Is it possible to control the different scenery setting sliders? If so then this might work and give everyone a boost in frame rates and the tweakers even more to tweak. If it's not possible to control the different settings than forget about the whole thing.

That's exactly what Lago's "FSAssist" did for you, automatically, in FS2000 -- it had different settings you could adjust for different modes of flight -- taxi, takeoff, climb, cruise, descent, landing. That sort of thing.

For some reason in the FS2002 version they only monitor these settings and allow manual adjustment by hotkey. I don't know why the automatic adjustment was removed. Possibly because FS stops and reloads textures et cetera when some of the settings are changed?

I really don't have a clue where in FS they get these parameters nor how they adjust them. Maybe one day I will have time to do some research and find out, but if FSAssist is also provided for FS2004 I would not want to undermine their product in any case.

Maximum Visibility. It's nice to have this set to a high value when at high altitude, but at low altitude or on ground it can be much lower.

This is precisely what the Graduated Visibility option in FSUIPC is for. You don't need to reduce the "maximum" only the actual setting, which is what FSUIPC does.

Regards,

Pete

[Guest Matt Fox]

Ya, FSAssist in FS2000 was great. The 2002 version didn't really have the same effect. Hopefully they will improve upon it for FS9. Unfortunately a lot of the settings do require reloading the scenery.

I'll have to mess around some more with your graduated visibility settings.

thx.

Matt