Your TOP 5 World Enhancement Mods

I managed to open the KML file but it has brought my 3090 to its knees trying to render it - What I will say is there is a good amount of pigeons:

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Good research! But we still don’t know lol

I don’t understand that image to be honest. Something heavy going on if it can cripple a 3090!!

Hahahahah - ā€œquote of the monthā€ :slight_smile: :rofl:

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Because I figured I was in this quite deep already I decided I had no choice but to reach out to the developer directly to try to get to the bottom of this. It seems that they are very happy with their ā€œbird placement methodā€ ,

ā€œdue to our bird placement method combined with the length and varied natured of the flying animations creates an effect that makes the birds appear to be randomā€
…
"That is correct, the birds will appear random. This add-on replicates the requirement to visually scan outside your aircraft when flying to avoid a bird strike "

This sounds good to me, I am going to purchase and will report back - thanks for bringing this addon to my attention!

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Hah cool. :+1: But they didn’t say what their method was exactly? It’s not really random, just ā€œappearsā€ that way? (…just out of curiosity)

Well good luck with that! By the time you see them you won’t have time to react (unless you’re in a microlite perhaps) :rofl:

Yes it sounds like the birds are placed (probably as per that screenshot with all the pins) but due to the animations they appear random - I assume they are all on big loops and constantly moving ?

I did ask the question about visually scanning as it is an important part of VFR flying and nice to have it in the sim !

Upcoming new First Person mode in FS Realistic looks interesting!

Also I bought the Campout by //42. Pretty cool in fact. Dunno how much I’ll use it but was fun for a few times that I’ve remembered that I have it so far. I keep forgetting to revisit my camp I placed though haha. Wish it would last more than 1 week!

I have the UK version. I really like it. Initially I didn’t care for it as just seeing a few pigeons flying over the runway was underwhelming. But over time it’s really grown on me. In some ways it reminds me Seafront Simulation’s AI vessels, which replaces the default FSX leisure boats which much better custom models, with wakes and night lighting.

The first time I tried it I headed out from Exeter to the coast and flew up to Weymouth and saw about two ships and thought it was a waste of time. But using it for the past year or so I’d never be without that add on now as those one or two yachts you see as you fly over a UK costal town, or the beautiful flickering lights of a small boat as you fly over at sunset are some of the atmospheric moments in the game.

FSBirds is the same, flying out to some remote coastal islands, say the Outer Hebrides or the Orkneys, and seeing flocks of seagulls circling around the cliffs makes the sim feel so much more life like.
The coverage is great, I’ve flown as far north as Uist in the Shetlands and as far south as the Scilly Isles and Jersey and there are birds everywhere.

If you do a lot of flying in the UK, it’s well worth the investment imo.

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Same. As someone who lives in Dorset and wants to enhance my local area I’m really hoping we get UK South soon.

  1. REX AccuSeason
  2. FSLTL
  3. FS Dreamteam GSX Pro
  4. rkApps FS Realistic
  5. South Oak Co FS Birds
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How is the performance tax of FSbirds? MSFS is very good at handling thousands of objects but the number of these looks massive and I guess they are animated.

I haven’t benchmarked with versus without, but I certainly haven’t noticed a performance hit.

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I had stuttering quite bad in the UK and amongst other things I removed this and it’s better now. I get the feeling it ā€œcontributedā€ to the stutters but it’s for sure a compound effect of all the other mods I had as well. Not just one things ā€œfaultā€ but it all adds up to sending the CPU over the knife edge. I don’t have the best CPU so that doesn’t help.

I actually removed (temporarily) your We Love VFR region and Powerlines and Solar Farms to try and diagnose but I’m adding stuff back in now since SU10.

I have re-enabled WLVFR and Solar Farms (not powerlines yet) with no issues and want to try Birds again but I think it’s the heaviest hitter of all those global things.

Seems it’s not airports fault and not the Orbx GB packs. Although I have stopped loading ALL my UK freeware at all times and only activated my favourites and Payware ones but it does seem a lot better now although I’ve not flown a lot or deeply tested.

Every add-on like WLVFR or Power Lines adds a load on the CPU, so you can get over the edge and get stutters. Hopefully, the next version of WLVFR will be better optimized, as some of the models could be made more cpu friendly (especially the construction cranes).

I was asking about FSbirds specifically because it looks like they’re adding tons of objects with animations which is even worse for CPU load.

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I know from creating my Malawi (We have Hippos) and Maasai Mara (Animal Safari) sceneries that animal animations are VERY heavy on the CPU.
i.e. I had to tone down the planned bird flocks in my Malawi scenery and the number of animals in the Maasai Mara addon a lot after the feedback of my beta testers.

I had seagulls too in my Marinas add-on, but I have scraped them almost immediately because they caused bad stutters when loading (If someone wants them I have still a big cage full of them).
This was likely due to using worldscripts to generate proper flocks, because each animal is AI driven, the route calculation are very heavy (I used custom flocks, the default ones are exaggeratedly overcrowded and will kill CPU)

Looking at the fsbird, they are most likely simple animated objects, (don’t own the product for further investigations). Their ā€œflockā€ are indeed quite small, so are quickly discarded from memory.
(Objects are kicked out of memory when they are 0.5% of the screen size)
Yeah, by looking at their .kml locations seems a lot, but compare that to Powerlines or Boats, well…those are millions of object :zany_face:

My Powerlines or Puffins towers are quite large, and stay in memory for longer time (e.g. my wires can have a bounding sphere with a 300/500 meters diameter, to free up CPU calculations you need to be some 50 km away!(

In the end, the birds,in the fsbirds way, shouldn’t affect FPS too much

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Got one new vote, so I’m making a little chart update here today.

New item added is FSLTL (Live Traffic Liveries) as voted for by @Sierrafox87 . I’m not actually sure who to credit that app to. It’s done by a collaborative team that doesn’t have a name as such I think?

So Rex AccuSeason and FS Realistic each take another step up. AccuSeason knocking at the door of the top boys now

Here it is as PDF: https://www.dropbox.com/s/q6o6yi8mvqtnqhi/MSFS%20Mods%20Ranking%20(14).pdf?dl=0

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I saw this thread just now. Very interesting, thank you for this. I will share my list later, I need to think of it first. :slight_smile:

Great!! Please do :slight_smile:

You seen my other 2? One for Top Aircraft and 1 for Airports?

I do. The Top5 aircraft is one of my favourites. Thank you for your work with these!

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My list:
FSLT Traffic
Henrik Nielsen GAIST
Iceland Overhaul
Mamu Marinas
Floyd Epic Clouds

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