Scenery and Framerates

Framerates with addon scenery is always a problem. Any addition of numbers of 3D objects will put strain on the Scenery drawing engine. With my sceneries I am attempting to minimise this problem in several ways :-

(1) Using Library objects wherever possible.

Objects that are used several times in a scenery only need to have one copy in memory if they are done as library objects. All my objects are created as library objects in this scenery.

(2) Using Multi-res objects wherever possible

Multi-res objects are capable of being drawn at different levels of detail depending on how far away they are. This is the main method of keeping framerates up and works in exactly the same way as Multi-Model Aircraft. All my objects are Multi-res in this scenery

(3) Using CFS2-Optimised Textures

CFS2 has many texture formats to choose from. The ones that perform best are the new DXT ones introduced with CFS2. All my textures are in optimised formats

(4) Allowing variable levels of detail

Objects in scenery can be written in such a way that they can be turned on or off by varying the "Scenery Density" setting in the CFS2 Scenery Library. My sceneries are organised in the manner shown in the table below. By varying the Scenery Density between Very Dense and Very Sparse the user can lower the amount of scenery being created and so boost framerates.

The only true test of framerates is how much they differ in the given area with the scenery activated and deactivated. Too many other factors like CFS2 Display settings, Graphics card options, Terrain density, Ground shadows etc etc will affect fps so there is no hard and fast rule for calculating expected framerates.