Re: [Flightgear-devel] Random Buildings - memory consumption

[Renk T. <tho...@jy...>]

> Using the default random building density,  the tiles that are loaded
> initially when sitting on the runway generates ~ 340k random
> buildings.

We might be generating too many buildings then?

The greater Los Angeles area has between 13 and 16 million inhabitants (dependent on what you count).

Assuming you haven't changed the visibility range from the startup default of ~16 km yet, checking with satellite images you should get about 1/12 of the greater LA urban area at startup, that means you generate 340k * 12 = 4 M houses in the greater LA area. The average number of people per household in the LA area was about 2.9 in 2006, so we have just populated Greater LA with ~12 million inhabitants - seems okay.

Here's the catch:

That's just assuming that the number of households per house is really 1 - but I think this assumption doesn't hold in dense urban areas, you can easily have 10 parties living in a larger building (even while I was living in Durham, NC we had 14 households in one building - and Durham NC had plenty of space to spare). Assuming for the sake of the argument that we might have on average 5 households per building in a dense urban area,  we'd be overestimating the actual population by a factor 4.5.

=> use less, but somewhat larger buildings.

Cheers,

* Thorsten