placeholders, is this possible ?

[Robsoie]

As mostly everyone in Flightgear I like to fly not only with the stock fleet, but with several kind of addon aircrafts during my offline play.
And when i want to fly online i like to actually be around other people, so i usually tend to start where there are actually several pilots, like on KSFO by example. As if i wanted none around, offline play is good enough.

But unfortunately, some of the addon aircraft tend to be a bit too much high poly and have large textures and from what i understand the game load not only the external model, but will load the cockpit even if from your point of view there's no use to this as you're not in someone else aircraft.

And so if i have them in my aircraft folder and join an area in which people are flying several different kind of them, the lag is really horrible as every of those models will be loaded and rendered.
So to get back to decent and smooth flysim, i have to remove those aircraft addon, so the very low poly placeholders will take over the missing models, but then i can't fly those addons aircraft in multiplayer.

So is it possible, to actually assign for a category of aircraft (light/heavy/etc..) an existing model (either placeholders or existing low poly aircraft model) that will then be visually displayed for every other players around you instead of how it is now with the real models+their cockpits all loaded (when you have them in your aircraft folder) and crippling ressources ?

[AndersG]

Yes, just put a replacement model with the exact same path as the main model has from $FG_ROOT but below the $FG_ROOT/AI/ directory. FlightGear will then load the model below the AI directory instead of the main model for MP pilots.

/Anders

[someguy]

Anders, I have models in /data/AI/Aircraft, and they're not working for me. If the model exists in /data/Aircraft, that's what I see; if not, the yellow glider. I had to remove most of the large airliners and the C172P from /data/Aircraft to have a usable frame rate. My computer is not slow--without those models I get 30-60 fps, with them I get 7. Should I assume the low-poly system is broken, at least on Tat's Mac git build?

[AndersG]

Anders, I have models in /data/AI/Aircraft, and they're not working for me. If the model exists in /data/Aircraft, that's what I see; if not, the yellow glider. I had to remove most of the large airliners and the C172P from /data/Aircraft to have a usable frame rate. My computer is not slow--without those models I get 30-60 fps, with them I get 7. Should I assume the low-poly system is broken, at least on Tat's Mac git build?

Hmm.. ok, if it really has broken then I think this is an issue for James to look at (since I'd suspect the new --aircraft-dir changes to be involved in that case :).

Cheers,

Anders