Blurred terrain textures

Hi. Does anyone have any thoughts as to how to fix blurred terrain textures in FS2004. I can be approaching an airport and all of a sudden the terrain blurs. It takes a while to correct itself, but by then my enjoyment of the flight has taken a serious hit. I've attached 2 screenshots. One is the clear view and the other the same one blurred. My guesses are:

(1) My graphics card is a AMD Radeon R9 200 Series and might not be as good as another type

(2) My EZ Scenery addon might be incompatible now with FS2004 played on Win 7

 

Perhaps you guys have some insight. Would be glad to hear.

 

My computer: Intel Core i7-4790 CPU 360 GHz; 16G RAM

FS2004 does most of it's graphics processing on your CPU, and it will always maintain FPS over any other process such as rendering. Therefore I have my FS2004 locked at 25fps which gives my CPU more time for rendering sharp graphics.

I second that the 25 fps lock will give you the best chance of seeing properly rendered ground textures. Anything higher than that is anyway a waste as your eye cannot tell the difference between 25 and 35 fps.

Texture Updates 1,2 and 3 for Sidney Schwartz FS9 Scenery Objects might be needed. Their all available here. They cured this issue for me. I'm MS 8.1.

We have found that sometimes it can be a bad texture file (typically of a library object) that can cause this as well. Typically, if you spin around in slew mode and suddenly the ground textures blur out, the object with the bad texture has just appeared on your screen. I can usually get things to sharpen up again by going to full screen mode and then back to windowed mode. But as soon as that object appears again on the screen, back to blurry.

 

We have also found that a common problem is small textures (smaller than 64x64 pixels, but I'm not sure of the actual threshold) in DXT format can cause these problems. Converting this small texture file to 256 colors (usually not a problem for such small textures) cures this.

 

Hope this helps,

Tom, although I think his ground texture "fuzzy" problem probably isn't caused by an errant object texture as it seems to recover too quickly, until yesterday I also didn't think that a ground texture could cause a CTD!?! You know how making scenery goes, with FS9 sticking out a foot to trip you up whenever it can, and I am making CYRC at the moment. Yesterday it crashed, and removing the scenery objects and then the ground texture revisions showed me that it was a ground texture problem. It only occurs when I switch from Cockpit view to Top Down view in slew mode. The new ground textures are very normal, airport grass background and cool mixed forest to trim the size of the nearby town and I have used both hundreds of times before. A puzzle as to why, but it can be lived with.

Hi Tom. Thanks for your reply. What you describe matches much of my experience. I figured there might be a texture file messing around in there. But here's a complication I don't understand: I notice that after I had improved one of the stock airports using EZ Scenery, a neighbouring airport lost all its textures on approach, even the aircraft sitting on the tarmac. While I thought it had to be that faulty texture file associated with the airport I had 'improved', the next flight I took in a different region also lost its textures, so my theory about a bad texture file gave way to a suspicion that my graphics card was playing up. What gets me is that the problem can be so random.

 

Can you tell me more about converting textures in DXT format to 256 colours? Where do I look and how do I carry out the conversion?

 

We have found that sometimes it can be a bad texture file (typically of a library object) that can cause this as well. Typically, if you spin around in slew mode and suddenly the ground textures blur out, the object with the bad texture has just appeared on your screen. I can usually get things to sharpen up again by going to full screen mode and then back to windowed mode. But as soon as that object appears again on the screen, back to blurry.

 

We have also found that a common problem is small textures (smaller than 64x64 pixels, but I'm not sure of the actual threshold) in DXT format can cause these problems. Converting this small texture file to 256 colors (usually not a problem for such small textures) cures this.

 

Hope this helps,

Thanks. I'll check these out.

Texture Updates 1,2 and 3 for Sidney Schwartz FS9 Scenery Objects might be needed. Their all available here. They cured this issue for me. I'm MS 8.1.

Crashes due to ground textures might be due to lack of mipmaps, other than that I don't know. I know that a missing custom terrain texture, or one not in DXT1 format with mipmaps can cause a crash.

 

DXTBmp can convert a DXT file into a 24 bit image, and then any paint program can reduce that to 256 colors.

Thanks Tom. Judging by what you, Roger and 31448 suggest, it's looking like it could be a faulty texture file. I will have to play around with my recent textures and scenery objects. Hopefully I will have something to report later.

Two last things to hep find a misbehaving texture. Look at the textures in the texture folders with the settings at large or medium icons, not at "list". Any texture that is 24 or 32 bit will show as a picture not an icon. It could, however, also be an 8 bit texture, and those are not a problem. To find a texture that is not mipped among a herd of mipped textures (and Tom rightly pointed that out as a possible problem that we hadn't mentioned) open them 10 at a time with the imagetool.exe that comes with SBuilder and you will be able to see if there are or are not mips; you can also check if a texture is an 8 bit or a 32 bit with it. Given that this seems to happen at more than one airport (is that correct?) I don't see it as an object texture problem, unless you have the same object at a lot of airports. Sid had one faulty texture with his apron lights, called "Zinc"; look for that. And if you already knew all that, sorry.

Hi Roger. Thanks for the info. I did not know any of that, so you have been helpful. Much appreciated.

Then I will add a bit more. Click on "file" and then "open" in Image Tool. Select 10 textures and click on "open". You will see the textures one at a time and if they have mips you will see those. The info for each texture will be on the right, so that will tell you they are 8 bit, 32 bit, DXT1, or DXT3. If they are 32 bit (or 24 bit) then click on "Image" and then "Format" and select either DXT1 or DXT3. If you have already seen they have no mips click on "Image" again and then on "Create Mipmaps". Then save. If when you select 10 textures nothing happens, select 8 instead; if they are too large then they overpower the prog.

Thanks again, Roger. I will have a go this weekend.

Hi Roger. You mentioned the possible faulty texture file called 'zinc'. I have found several and I am not sure what to do with them now that I have found them. In the main texture folder I see 'zinc 2 128' and 'zinc'. In the texture folder of the Addon Scenery, I see 'zinc 2 128', 'zinc 2 128_LM', 'zinc', 'zinc_LM' and 'zinc03'. Any guidance on what to do with these files? Thanks.

 

Two last things to hep find a misbehaving texture. Look at the textures in the texture folders with the settings at large or medium icons, not at "list". Any texture that is 24 or 32 bit will show as a picture not an icon. It could, however, also be an 8 bit texture, and those are not a problem. To find a texture that is not mipped among a herd of mipped textures (and Tom rightly pointed that out as a possible problem that we hadn't mentioned) open them 10 at a time with the imagetool.exe that comes with SBuilder and you will be able to see if there are or are not mips; you can also check if a texture is an 8 bit or a 32 bit with it. Given that this seems to happen at more than one airport (is that correct?) I don't see it as an object texture problem, unless you have the same object at a lot of airports. Sid had one faulty texture with his apron lights, called "Zinc"; look for that. And if you already knew all that, sorry.

Some files to investigate:

 

https://www.flightsim.com/vbfs/fslib.php?searchid=58643043

 

https://www.flightsim.com/vbfs/fslib.php?searchid=58643167

Hi Tom. Thanks, but I don't seem to be able to get anything other than "No search results" when I follow these links.

Some files to investigate:

 

https://www.flightsim.com/vbfs/fslib.php?searchid=58643043

 

https://www.flightsim.com/vbfs/fslib.php?searchid=58643167

Hi,

 

I didn't realize those search links were session specific.

 

Just do a search here for:

 

sidney schwartz update

 

and that will list the 3 texture updates that fix many of the blurries issues.

 

And there are a couple more done by someone else; I don't know if these have overlap with the first three. Do a search for:

 

sidney schwarz

 

Hope this helps,

My default Cessna 172 and Baron 58 (for example) airplanes paint and logos blurs as well as the scenery ..I used to think my old computer

was overheating or whatever.

Now my new computer 16 years later it is doing the same ..so it is possibly not a computer with FS2004

 

It usually comes good after a period of time,

but not always unless I restart.

Sorry to but in here, just out of interest is there a program that searches out certain texture types and auto converts without you searching manually?

Obviously make a back up first.

Hi,

 

a program that searches out certain texture types and auto converts without you searching manually?

A tool !

Search Avsim for dxtfixerx_v2.3.zip

 

DXTFixerX v2.3 - neumanix 2020

----------------------------------------------

 

This tool fixes the stutters caused by dxt3 and dxt5 textures without an active alpha channel.

The bug occurs when using Imagetool to convert a 32bit bitmap files with a 100% opaque(white) alpha channel to DXT3 or DXT5.

This causes stuttering in FS2004 (FS9). It's not as big of a problem in FSX/P3D as they mainly use DDS compression, but it's still good

practice to use DXTFixerX here as well, as 3rd party addons might have these faulty textures sometimes.

 

 

INSTALLATION:

-------------

You can NOT run the program from within the zip file, you MUST unzip it first!

Just unzip to any location you like. A folder will be automatically created, called DxtFixerX.

 

 

HOW TO USE

----------

Click the "SELECT ROOT FOLDER" button to tell the program from where to start searching for textures.

It will search all the subfolders from this point.

 

For example, if you have your sim on a dedicated harddrive, like D: then just select D: as root and all textures in

all subdirectories on that drive will be searched. If you only want to check a few textures in a folder somewhere, then

just browse to that folder and select it.

 

DxtFixerX is perfectly safe to use, as only DXT3 and DXT5 compressed BMP files will be searched and modified.

And they should ALWAYS have an alpha channel, so you can't do anything to mess up your sim.

 

Enjoy!

 

Tested to work in FS9, FSX and P3D.

 

 

Regards,

Peter Nyman (neumanix)

neumanix@gmail.com

 

You can donate using PAYPAL to the same email adress above. Thank you!

Edited March 17, 2021 by Avechelice