Draw masks

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Property browser with draw masks shown

Another goal is to add more node bits (and a GUI dialog to control them) so various categories of objects can be disabled during the update pass. This will mean the direct hit of, say, AI models vs particles vs random trees can be measured. Of course it won't account for resources (memory, textures) burned by such things, but would still help different people identify slowness on their setups. — James Turner (Jul 19th, 2012). Re: [Flightgear-devel] Rendering passes question. (powered by Instant-Cquotes)

There's so called "draw-masks" which are property-controlled switches for enabling/disabling rendering of certain scene details, including 1) scenery/terrain, 2) aircraft, 3) models, 4) clouds.This can be used for troubleshooting performance issues - you can basically toggle individual scene graphs on/off, to see if/how performance is affected.For example, if performance improves dramatically by disabling the terrain, you are mainly affected scenery complexity.Equally, disabling the (main) aircraft, will tell you if it's the complexity of the 777 3D model (cockpit). — Hooray (Nov 29th, 2014). Re: FlightGear 3.2 with B777 running extremely slow. (powered by Instant-Cquotes)

Beginning with FlightGear 3.1+, you can also toggle individual scenegraph traversal masks on/off (these can be changed at runtime using the Property browser:--prop:browser=/sim/rendering/draw-mask--prop:/sim/rendering/draw-mask/terrain=0--prop:/sim/rendering/draw-mask/aircraft=0--prop:/sim/rendering/draw-mask/models=0--prop:/sim/rendering/draw-mask/clouds=0 — Hooray (Nov 29th, 2014). Re: FlightGear 3.2 with B777 running extremely slow. (powered by Instant-Cquotes)

Those draw masks will not prevent stuff from being loaded (=consuming RAM/memory), it will merely disable updates to the already loaded data. Which also applies to other stuff like aircraft.Which is why heavy aircraft like the 777-200 or the extra500 will still perform much worse than comparatively lightweight aircraft like the ufo, ogeL, santa or the default c172p (especially the 2D version is fairly lightweight). — Hooray (Jul 5th, 2014). Re: Flatland. (powered by Instant-Cquotes)

To open a property browser with the corresponding properties, use --prop:browser=/sim/rendering/draw-mask (can be also added to your fgfsrc file)