Hi all,

The gliding experience has finally been implemented in FS, many many year after the first Schweizer glide was included in FS 5... or whas it 4 ? Anyway, gliding in FSX is just cool and I completely love it.

My question is about the thermal visualisation: there are three choices: none, natural and schematic.
None and Schematic are clear to me, no problems.
Natural is quite obscure, I could not understand what it was, nothing appears, nothing happens, excepted a little drop in the frame rates 

So basically, what does this "natural" visualisation look like ?

In fact the option concerns only the visualisation I guess, since even when I choose "none", the thermal I was soaring is still there...

Birds ? Really ?
I tried to trigger this visuallisation while I was at Sion, could see a lot of thermals in schematic mode, but no birds in natural mode ?  
I will try again right now. Thanks for the info.

EDIT: just finished trying again and again. I could not spot any birds. The only thing I could really spot was the missing 7 FPS that lead me to 13 FPS in the places where normally I fly with 20... Something must be consuming those ressources, but I could not see...

i have been looking for those animals too for hours, havent found them. Maby has something too do with scenery settings.

Maby it is a bug or something, because obviously the computer is calculating something when the setting is changed.

Daube wrote on Jan 1^st, 2007 at 5:40pm:



Here is NickN’s answer


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Hi John,

To answer your questions:

1.
Scenery stutters on turns during flight… That is a sign of 3 things.

a.      Sliders or texture bandwidth multiplier too high (or a combination of both)
b.      System not able to handle above settings with weather, including thermals.
c.      Hard drive is full or is slow

Unlike FS9, FSX will tax the hell out of scenery loads. People though thought FS9 was bad, FSX is 4 times as demanding on a hard drive to load scenery so you either need a RAID-0 array, a SCSI system (those are for the fastest) or a really good hard drive such as a WD Raptor along with using my method to optimize in the defrag. The combination of the right hard drive and optimizing will cut FSX loads on a system drastically.


2.
Birds and animals. These are modeled into other items. For free flight birds in thermals you must have them set to NATURAL. Also, many people are doing texture mods and autogen mods. The tree autogen fix I had you install comes with a price. A loss of birds in areas special trees are designed to trigger them is one of them. The sim has birds connected to models all through the simulation. The Statue of Liberty has birds modeled with it and many fishing vessels as well. Lighthouses will also have birds modeled in them. The scenery sliders must be up for those. For birds around boats, raising the traffic in those areas will make them appear.

For birds in the mountains and other areas it is my understanding they were modeled with certain autogen trees and therefore if a tree (time of year) + location are detected + thermals set to natural, you will see them. In other locations the thermals are not needed but since they are so very small, it is hard to find them.

Boot NYC and fly around the Statue of Liberty in a Cessna. See if you spot them and if not, play with the sliders a bit for ships and scenery to see if they appear. Keep in mind birds are TINY and hard to see until you get up on them.

The birds and animals are not controlled by GA Traffic (at least not that I am aware, I could be wrong because they added easter eggs all over the sim) but instead are defined by time of year, location and the addition of a model being rendered with high enough scenery ability (cars, ships included). Also, you will see more animals in missions simply because they did that to make them more interesting.


Hope that answers your questions.

Nick
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