POI Billboards of USA - State of California
Now the VFR dream comes true!
Now it is possible to have a detailed information on the area seen 1000 feet below you, injected directly into the scenery!
This upload will add POIs as “POI Billboards” - MSFS static scenery objects, for a given country/area, brought to you by 3DSpotters Team.
Here is California with 57142 POI points.
Refer to the included maps.
You may turn ON/OFF each part independently.
Please also check our "POI Billboards of" series for other countries.
To install
Drop the scenery folder from ZIP to the Community folder or (preferably) use any of good MSFS Addon Linkers.
A Technology
POI Billboards, that you will download here, are based on a completely different mechanism than Microsoft/Asobo built-in POI’s. That way you will get thousands (and I mean thousands) of billboard signs scattered all over the country, based on OpenStreetMap (OSM) information, supplied by OSM contributors, with minimal to non-existent FPS hit. You can see a lot of information at once: cities, towns, villages, attractions, train stations, temples, lakes, rivers, island and so on (assuming you have good eyes and paused the simulator). POI Billboards were designed to provide this information to the simmer, while not obscuring the landscape too much and keeping FPS high (well, you will judge).
HOW-TO minimize MSFS loading times
The only possible drawback could be extended MSFS loading time, so to minimize the time try the usual ways:
turn off Windows File Indexing feature,
switch on only the scenery you will really fly VFR in a minute,
keep your sceneries on SSD disks, preferably on M.2 ones,
do the same with all other sceneries/aircrafts/liveries :)
Credits
Credits go to:
OpenStreetMap Authors & Contributors at: https://www.openstreetmap.org
Overpass-Turbo service at: https://overpass-turbo.eu/
WinHour, member of 3DSpotters team, for JAVA POIOSM2FS software tool at: https://github.com/Winhour/POIOSM2FS-Converter
For additional information please refer to docs/files saved on this (first) scenery main folder (when unzipped to Community or elsewhere).
Hi, is there a way to limit load times and space by extracting a state county only (instead of the entire state)? For example, just the POIs for Los Angeles county.
11 months ago
No, sorry. But there some hints to boost loading times, see FAQs
11 months ago
RipPipPip
bofhlusr
FYI - we invite you to our Discord server to ask questions, make suggestions and so on here 😊
https://discord.gg/QSS6zNpZGZ
3 years ago
RipPipPip
Thanks for doing California!
3 years ago
That is the biggest ONE CHUNK I've done as I recall, so it is good for testing MSFS loading times for each config ;-)
3 years ago
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THartmann9374
FYI - I just tried California POI and it locks up MSFS everty time I activate it. I uncheck it from Addon Linker and MSFS works fine? I will try another state to see if there is an issue.
I just tried Washington state and that only took a minute to load so that wasn't so bad but I tried again California and gave up after 13 minutes of loading. 😞
3 years ago
Clutch, I am sorry to hear that. POI Billboards sceneries can eat some amount of MSFS resources and California is one of huge areas (57+ k POI's and Washington state 20k+ POIs), that is why. 13 minut to start up is not so bad anyway, I have an average PC config and had start times more than 1 hour sometimes. Now...never ever more than 10-15 minutes because - as we wrote in the readme:
"HOW-TO minimize MSFS loading times
The only possible drawback could be extended MSFS loading time, so to minimize the time try the usual ways:
The positive part is that when MSFS starts in the end (and do believe me, it will), you do have fluent flight everywhere in the area.
3 years ago
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ClutchCargo
Please create Croatia and Austria, thanks
3 years ago
A good hint - I will put these on my list.
BTW: there are 195 countries in the world today, and 50 states in USA and ... ;-)
We have put a link to GitHub in a readme, where one developer can find a technology: POIOSM2FS JAVA tool helping create above sceneries and we wish somebody help us to fill the world with POI billboards...
3 years ago
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onehyperborean