Snail's Pace

[Hicks]

This is a great piece of software except I can't use it. It takes forever to load, and doing anything requires a slow redraw of the map.

Pentium 4, 2.4Ghz-2 Ghz ram-nVidea GT7300.

If it is my pc then I can't use this software. Everything happens in slow motion. Very slow motion.

Hicks

[tim arnot]

How slow it is will depend on the amount of detail you have displayed -- obviously the more overlays that need to be drawn, the slower it will be. The speed of your Internet connection will also be a factor here. Please indicate the zoom level you are operating at, and what overlay layers you have switched on (airports large, small, airspace types, waypoints etc). Please also take a look at the log file (Plan-G_Log.txt) in case there are any problems indicated.

[Hicks]

Zoom is a tick towards negative from center. If I turn off everything except large airports I can grab the map and move it around. With anything else turned on I grab the map and try to move it but it takes 10-20 seconds or more to redraw the map. I checked the log file and didn't see any indicated problems but I don't know what I'm looking for. And I am using DSL.

Hicks

[tim arnot]

That's quite widely zoomed out. If you are looking at at a very dense area such as the US or Europe, there will be many thousands of overlay elements to draw, depending on your window size, and yes that can take time. 0.9.1 has a show/hide Map Overlays checkbox that will allow you to scroll and zoom around the map without repeatedly redrawing the overlays, which should make those operations faster.

[Hicks]

Thanks Tim, I'll zoom in for now. Looking forward to the next incarnation. As I said I really like this flight planner. Thanks for the response.

Hicks

[BozoClown]

Yeah, the drawing performance of the overlays is horrid.

Almost as if the coder drew everything to the client window instead of to an offscreen buffer first.

[LeeC22]

Same problem here. I have Large airports, VORs * NDBs, Lower Airspace, ICAO airspace & ILS (basically, defaults) and am at default zoom. I am getting about a 5 second delay when accessing menu functions and ribbon controls.

Surely if I am not interacting with the map, then it shouldn't be redrawing it?!? As someone else has said, draw overlays to an overlay buffer and then just display a single overlay, rather than many. If the app is using GDI+, drawing to offscreen buffers is much faster, only redraw/update on a change, which will prevent excess validations of visible controls.

I don't normally post system specs but I'm running an i7 920@3GHz, 6GB 1600 DDR3, ATi 5850, Dual display, SATA Raid 0 OS drive. Which should be ample power to run the amount that this app is displaying.

[tim arnot]

If you started Plan-G before running FS (on a single PC), try starting Plan-G AFTER you've run up FS. There is an MS bug in the window code that kills performance when a directX app is started.

The overlays are handled by the Google Maps overlays manager. Buffering, GDI+ etc is completely irrelevant.

[yair1956]

..  I love all the features but I'm running Plan-G  on a  Client, and it's really very, very slow, at list if you compare it to other similar packages, like FSCommande 8.6   .............

[BozoClown]

If you started Plan-G before running FS (on a single PC), try starting Plan-G AFTER you've run up FS. There is an MS bug in the window code that kills performance when a directX app is started.

The overlays are handled by the Google Maps overlays manager. Buffering, GDI+ etc is completely irrelevant.

Well, I guess their overlay code sucks then.

And im not just saying that. I've done my fair share of graphical coding in C# and GDI+.

In any case, my initial statement stands.  Since you can see the overlays being drawn one at a time while it's refreshing.. it's pretty obvious that there's no double buffering or other optimization going on.

Have you atleast tried setting these "styles" on that control?

            SetStyle(ControlStyles.UserPaint, true);
            SetStyle(ControlStyles.AllPaintingInWmPaint, true);
            SetStyle(ControlStyles.OptimizedDoubleBuffer, true);

That should stop any "background erase" messages, and enable double buffering for that client window. That alone would speed it up. But then again, im not familiar with the google map control, so i dunno whats possible with it.

p.s. having to enter a captcha just to make a post is annoying as hell.

[ldlcholester]

Ditto Hicks.  Simply not usable.  For several reasons.  Set on minimal settings, zoomed in, takes a over a minute to redraw.  Settings will not stay put.

Good interface.  Good options.   I wish it were usable.  I like it better than FSnav and FSCommander.