Administrators Popular Post iniBuilds Posted November 2, 2020 Administrators Popular Post Posted November 2, 2020 Hello all! We hope you have been enjoying the product and wanted to give you some insight into our up and coming V1.1 update for the iniSimulations A300. This development update has been written by our lead technical team and is more focused on what we have done with one of the main concerns some users had with the product; and what action we have taken. This new version will focus on FPS and SASL usage. What does this mean exactly, and how have we addressed these areas? Firstly, let’s explore plugin usage and what this means on your flight sims FPS. Usage is expressed in units of time that it takes for your PC to process all the code. The higher the value, the worse the usage is and vice versa. With a lower usage value, you PC is able to spend more time on running X-Plane which gives a higher in-sim. This is a simple explanation of what actually happens but applies to the below content. If there is 9000 usage in the ini A300, will there be the same FPS for the ini A300 compared to when there is 9000 usage with other X-Plane airliners? No, because in-sim FPS depends on how well the 3D model is optimised. If it is poorly optimised, you will see an FPS hit. Your code usage will not read any higher as it has nothing to do with code. The ini A300 3D model is very nicely optimised so we have always had that on our side! Let’s breakdown the usage on the A300 a bit more. We have 2 sections: 1) FLIGHT LOOP - This is running all the systems on the aircraft and within each “loop” of the code, the systems are updated at a set rate. This takes CPU time and thus gives us the usage seen. 2) DRAWING - This is how much time the code spends on drawing all the screens, including the PFDs NDs or even the EFBs. This takes quite a large chunk of usage and is the main area of improvement for V1.1, which will be explained in detail later. What has changed in V1.1 compared to previous versions? For the V1.03 to V1.04 update, we undertook the first step for improved FPS. We reduced the amount of times the system talked to the code for each loop and lowered the FLIGHT LOOP section of the code. This was complex and took multiple weeks of work to get the systems to operate as they did in V1.03, but was required and provided the foundation for V1.1. In V1.1, we have optimised the flight loop even more by making sure the systems are only called on when needed and not running in the background wasting usage. By far the biggest change you will find is to the flight plan. With V.1.04, the FMS is looping a fair few of the waypoints most of time. This causes you to have higher usage on longer routes, which is not ideal when trying to push the range of the A300 to the max. Hence why we have completely re-written the system and it is now unaffected by route length, giving you much better usage no matter what type of flight you are performing. This change lowers both drawing and flight loop because waypoints are no longer drawing that are not needed. Moving on from the technical talk, what is the final impact to your flying experience? Below, you will find some examples comparing V1.1 to V1.0. Currently 1.04 will give you a lower flight loop than shown (as discussed above) but we wanted to be able to show you how far we have come! Please note the V1.1 numbers are taken in the passenger version of the A300 which sees a 1-2 FPS hit from the cabin; however the numbers still speak for themselves! One final note, usage also depends on the power of your CPU. The more powerful a CPU is, generally the less “usage” you will see, as it can process the code faster. EHAM-EGKK V1.1 51 fps V1.0 39fps EHAM-OMDB V1.1 53FPS V1.0 28fps In Summary V1.0 to V1.1 on longer routes we are seeing up to a 100-200% reduction in usage and massive FPS boost. In the test case, FPS went from 28 to 53. On short routes, we are still seeing large improvements across the board. On average, 30-40% reduction can be expected which also gives a big boost. In our test case FPS went from 39 to 52. To conclude, this post is fairly lengthy, but we really wanted to breakdown what has been causing these issues and how we have spent the time post initial release to completely re-write the whole backend of the aircraft to give much better performance on any length flight you undertake. We really thank all of our customers for their time, patience and understanding and most importantly feedback; with many reports we were able to identify some underlying issues beyond the testing conducting pre-release that allowed us to make the significant improvements we have been able to achieve. We thank you greatly, and cannot appreciate your support enough! We will be leaving the comments open on this post so we can engage with you below! We hope this gets you excited for 1.10, and really explains what we have been doing! Work is now in the final stretches on 1.10 which will consist of the free passenger expansion, bug fixes, WXR radar functionality, ASXP compatibility, and Mac compatibility! Kind Regards, Lead Technical Team 46 12 1
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