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:
Good research! But we still donāt know lol
I donāt understand that image to be honest. Something heavy going on if it can cripple a 3090!!
Hahahahah - āquote of the monthā
![]()
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 ābird placement methodā ,
ādue 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
ā¦
"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!
Hah cool.
But they didnāt say what their method was exactly? Itās not really random, just āappearsā that way? (ā¦just out of curiosity)
Well good luck with that! By the time you see them you wonāt have time to react (unless youāre in a microlite perhaps) ![]()
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 Iāll use it but was fun for a few times that Iāve 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 didnāt care for it as just seeing a few pigeons flying over the runway was underwhelming. But over time itās really grown on me. In some ways it reminds me Seafront Simulationās 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 Iād 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, Iāve 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, itās well worth the investment imo.
Same. As someone who lives in Dorset and wants to enhance my local area Iām really hoping we get UK South soon.
- REX AccuSeason
- FSLTL
- FS Dreamteam GSX Pro
- rkApps FS Realistic
- South Oak Co FS Birds
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 havenāt benchmarked with versus without, but I certainly havenāt noticed a performance hit.
I had stuttering quite bad in the UK and amongst other things I removed this and itās better now. I get the feeling it ācontributedā to the stutters but itās for sure a compound effect of all the other mods I had as well. Not just one things āfaultā but it all adds up to sending the CPU over the knife edge. I donāt have the best CPU so that doesnāt help.
I actually removed (temporarily) your We Love VFR region and Powerlines and Solar Farms to try and diagnose but Iām 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 itās the heaviest hitter of all those global things.
Seems itās 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 Iāve 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 theyāre adding tons of objects with animations which is even worse for CPU load.
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, (donāt own the product for further investigations). Their āflockā 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, wellā¦those are millions of object ![]()
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, shouldnāt affect FPS too much
Got one new vote, so Iām making a little chart update here today.
New item added is FSLTL (Live Traffic Liveries) as voted for by @Sierrafox87 . Iām not actually sure who to credit that app to. Itās done by a collaborative team that doesnāt 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
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. ![]()
Great!! Please do ![]()
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!
My list:
FSLT Traffic
Henrik Nielsen GAIST
Iceland Overhaul
Mamu Marinas
Floyd Epic Clouds

