On Saturday 23 February 2013 13:20:49 Emilian Huminiuc wrote:

> Guess what happens when memory is limited and visibility is set to 120km?
> You see the "end of the world", because no more tiles can be loaded to reach
> that distance.
> Guess what you need to adjust then, independent of what the "real world"
> says? Visibility distance (implicitly fog) to mask it.

I just tried it. Turned off random trees, objects and buildings and set 
visibility to about 120km using the z key with basic weather. fgfs used about 
960MB of memory. That's about 4€ worth of memory and well below any 32 Bit 
limit. I do have automatic scenery download enabled and it did not see a 
reason to download anything, so I'd say I do have the scenery tiles for this 
visibility range.

> Regarding trees: you think that way, I might, someone else in the know might
> too, but the average user sees that they work well with his setup in the
> default condition, why would he want to disable them?

He doesn't. Because he doesn't know they use so much memory. Instead he fiddles 
around with something that according to my test actually doesn't seem to help 
all that much.

> The only thing that new setting advertises is it  reads the METAR string in
> a more advanced way...

There are plenty of other options that do not advertise in any way how they 
affect memory usage. So it would seem that advanced weather simply sticks to 
what's considered normal for FG features.

> Manual setting of this has the added benefit that you're not moving tiles
> back and forth through the tile cache/display as memory becomes more or
> less available. You set a max setting that suits your machine and or the
> area you fly in (in the carribean you can easyly reach that 120km, not so
> much at KLAX) and you're done with it.

And how do I as a user know how much visibility I can afford? Do you suggest 
the solution for users is to do trial and error until he finds a setting where 
FG doesn't crash 5 minutes before landing? I just can't see how this would be 
better than FG just being more intelligent about memory usage.

> And why should you have to set that in _n_ places, when there was a
> perfectly reasonable documented setting in the first place.

Why do you want the user to have to repeatedly press a key after starting the 
sim instead of setting the maximum visibility once and for all in the advanced 
weather dialog? In other words: why should the user press a key _n_ times 
instead of setting a slider once?

> This thing with the visibility is just one part of a bigger problem here,
> that someone doesn't want, or doesn't uderstand that he has to take
> shortcuts, use tricks, and abdicate from a faithfull model of the real
> world. Instead he shoves everything but the kitchen sink in, disregarding
> what effects that might have, expects everyone else to accomodate any needs
> that might arise from that

And I'm very very grateful for this. As a glider pilot I can't express how 
much I love having even a somewhat realistic simulation of weather and 
atmospheric effects.
You know what's also great about it? It's all optional! If a user doesn't care 
about all these realistic details, he can just turn them off. Or even more: not 
turn them on since they are off by default anyway.

> and considers any bit of critique or negative
> comment as a personal affront.

This is simply not true. While I think that sometimes Thorsten may give people 
more benefit of the doubt, I'm actually very impressed with how civilised and 
patiently he reacts to criticism and how much time he spends explaining his 
rationale. Your statement is untrue and unfair and does not belong to a 
technical discussion.

Stefan

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