by Hooray » Mon May 31, 2021 3:25 am
well, complexity of artwork (3D models, textures) can be procedurally decreased (osg optimizer), but many aircraft are "complex" in the sense that they add a lot of Nasal scripts, FDM systems or Canvas stuff that needs to be recomputed/updated fairly frequently. So there's that, too.
While it's possible to manually optimize things to a fair degree (see Richard's work/comments), that requires a ton of experience and you'd basically require years of experience understanding FlightGear/SimGear internals. It's probably much easier to optimize the core side of things than each aircraft individually, at which point you'll want to know C++ and how to patch/rebuild FlightGear.
You can basically see for yourself what can be gained from optimizing the artwork by disabling it entirely (via draw masks) or replacing the corresponding models/textures. Sooner or later, you'll realize that stuff like Nasal scripting and the Canvas are the main performance suckers. Also, it doesn't help that FlightGear still lacks building blocks to neatly structure/organize aircraft systems properly - again, this is something where Richard's groundwork can certainly help, but adopting that basically requires a background in software engineering or years of experience contributing to FlightGear.