Vancouver International Airport version4.2 FPS fix
Vancouver International Airport is a large airport with many buildings, and my latest version (CYVR4.2) for FS2004 suffered from low frame rates, due to this density of objects. I did not have much trouble on the ground or take-off, but approaching the airport, frame rates dropped significantly. Approaches were too jerky, even although I have near top of the range equipment (as always, by "yesterday's" standards).
After some tests of his own, fellow simmer, Norman Meznarich, kindly informed me that the fuel trucks and fire trucks were major resource hogs. I knew the fence was a frame rate hog and in anticipation of the pending payware scenery of the Lower Mainland by Jon Patch and Holger Sandmann, I was spurred into trying to better the performance of my scenery.
"Fix" is a bit of a misnomer - my modifications have realized about 4-5fps increase, not as much as I would like but at current levels, every little bit helps, or "many a mickle makes a muckle" as a Scotsman would say. I also tried converting all textures to DXT but that did not appear to make any noticeable difference but I plan on exploring this option some more.
Modifications
1. I replaced the api trucks with MS default trucks, they look perfectly okay although not quite so authentic as my originals; I also gave them their own files which allows for their removal, if need be.
2. I have adjusted the fence to be visible at 3 km; before it was at 30km and certainly not visible to the eye until well into the 3km range, but nevertheless using up valuable computer resources.
3. I adjusted the various apron lights, the Iona fence, the Iona outfall, and some of the miscellaneous buildings to the same parameter, ie visible at 3 km.
4. I removed the lonesome ship trapped between bridges on the North Arm of the Fraser River.
5. Most importantly, thanks to"Guru" Arno Gerretsen, I have solved the problem of disappearing textures at the Air Canada hangar near the threshold of 26R
6. I modified the AFCAD file to stop the aircraft conflicting with the lights at the UPS and FedEx terminals
Installation
This fix only applies to CYVR4.2, either the full version in a single download, or version CYVR4 with all the subsequent updates to bring it up to 4.2.
In the Vancouver scenery folder, remove the following files (I suggest you put them in a back-up folder for safekeeping in case you want to re-install them):
and replace them with the files from the fix\scenery folder
Copy the two files in the fix\texture folder into the vancouver\texture folder, and overwrite.
I hope this fix makes things a bit better for you, and recheck the original CYVR4.2 readme which gives various suggestions for improving fps, including removing some of the bgl files.
There have been over 13,000 downloads of this scenery at four sites, either as the full download or the upgrade, since its release last August.
Nigel
Vancouver
pngrant35@shaw.ca 17 November 2005
My System:
AMD Athlon 64 3500+
Gigabyte GA K8NS ULTRA-939 mobo
ATI Radeon X800XL video card AGP (Omega 2625a drivers)
1GB Samsung PC3200DDR RAM
IBM 40GB 7200rpm hard drive
Maxtor 80GB 7200rpm hard drive
Creative Sound Blaster Live! with latest drivers
NEC FE950+ crt monitor
CHProducts PCI yoke and pedals
Windows XP Home edition with SP2
DirectX 9.0(c)
iCute 400W power supply with five case fans four suck, one blow
