Fix for Textures slow loading !!!!

[DCT]

RealFlight g3
,, I would like to point out a problem with g3,,, and a fix,, that I have found and I have no idea why it works ,,, but it does every time...
When loading RealFlight g3 every thing loads fast on my computer but not TEXTURES...
It can take two minutes to load.!!!
Here is how I can make it load very fast,,( and I don't know why,, )) when Textures are loading,,, I put my mouse over SIMULATION AND START CLICKING..
Even tho it is grayed out..I works Evey time... Very fast,,,, I hope, if you do work on RealFlight g3 you can use this information and come up with a patch..
Oh,, I run a Dell 3Ghz Pentium 4 with 1,000 MB of high speed ram and a ATI radeon 9800 pro with 256 MB on the card.. And yes I have up dated patches for card...
And I have all the updates for RealFlight G3....

[Joe Teibel]

There is an explanation for this: think about what happens when the sim is running and you click on the menu. The sim stops running as if it were paused. While the menu is greyed out during the loading screen, clicking on the menu will still stop the simulation from running. Textures are loaded in a seperate thread from the main thread so while the terrain and airport objects are being loaded the textures are being loaded simultaneously. When you pause the simulation by clicking on the menu you are relieving the CPU from processing the main thread and therefore it can spend all it's time loading the textures in the texture thread.

There are a myriad of reasons we designed the loading system the way that we did which I won't get into here but to test this assertion try this: when the airport objects are loading, click on the menu. Notice that the progress bar stops. Click inside the window (not the menu), it resumes. If you do that only a couple of times while the airport objects are loading, you'll notice that the "Loading Textures" progress bar doesn't even come up. That's because the textures were loaded in the texture thread while you had the simulation paused during airport object load.

This multi-threaded loading is also the reason why, if you'll notice, you will sometimes see a different number of textures to load, during the texture loading process, for the same airport. For example, one time I load RealFlight Ranch it may switch to the texture load progress bar and say "1 of 30" and another time it will say "1 of 52" or something like that. It just depends on how many textures get loaded in the texture loading thread while the terrain and airport objects are being loaded.

Just a suggestion: to much punctuation makes a post hard to read.

[Ken Morano]

Is everyone still doing the "click on the top bar" trick to free up texture loading or am I the only one in the dark about a better solution?

The normal check when I load G3 says there are no new updates but I'm wondering if there's an unofficial patch out there.

[opjose]

I have NO texture loading issues what so ever.

Initial startup is about 15-20 seconds, before I'm at the airport with the plane in view.

Of course I'm using 2 gigs of ram and a SATA Stripped dual drive array on a 3.6 gHz system.

Those textures ARE big if you select the 3D airports and turn up the graphics settings.

If you want to improve the loads on slower machines, try turning down texture resolution.

[Ken Morano]

opjose,

Thank you for the feedback.

Did you purchase the add on pack for G3? I didn't have a slow loading texture problem untill I installed the G3 add on.

I, too, have 2gigs with a good hard drive and cpu. I can run G3 with all the options (except trees) turned to max so it would kill me to have to turn down the settings. I guess I'll stick with the click, click, click workaround.

[opjose]

Yeah, I've got them all.

You may want to play with the video settings.

A large part of this, is how the video adaptor deals with textures, and what it reports back to the software.

e.g. it may not need compressed textures, so uncompressed may result in a faster load.

[Ken Morano]

opjose,
texture compression?

Is that a setting in G3? I couldn't find it.

Or is that in your video driver? I have an ATI 850 type card and, again, couldn't find it in my driver (Catalyst Control Center).

Or is it that a general suggestion to keep in mind for other software? In which case, yeah, I like to turn it off, too, for better quality.