OK, what the heck just happened?

Just today, I noticed something new. :rolleyes:

 

I've got a bad case of texture smearing when water reflections are turned on at night. Daytime runs just fine with no issues. :confused:

 

I've tried turning anti-aliasing, bi-linear and tri-linear filtering off and on, no effect.

 

The only thing I've been goofing with recently are the Halo and Spotlight BMP's in the main texture folder. Halo and Spotlight control how your and the AI lights appear and how your landing and taxi lights illuminate the ground, this shouldn't have an effect on water reflections but just to be safe I loaded my old files back into the texture folder. Again, it makes no difference :confused: The only way to stop the smearing is to turn off water reflections at night. I haven't played around with the MIP mapping function yet, but this shouldn't be the cause.

 

Its also possible its caused by a driver update from either M$ or Nvidia, but so far only FS2002 is effected.

 

Wierd, has anyone else noticed this problem? :pilot:

..and just like that, its fixed (well, sort of). :rolleyes:

 

I'm posting this reply as an exercise in trouble-shooting FS problems.

 

Pay attention to what you've been changing. I didn't change just the BMPs recently. I also had added some scenery that was cutting-edge back in 2003, and its just as cutting-edge today. :rolleyes: When I was testing the Halo and Spotlight BMPs, I jumped to this airport scenery I had installed instead of just changing the time of day. Part of this is due to being FS-lazy :pilot: but, to be fair, I also wanted to verify the landing light changes didn't mess up some cool light effects in this scenery.

Not affected with current AMD drivers, however I understand the problem and have seen it exhibited in other old titles in the form of draw order after a recent driver install. This phenomena came and went for me quite often around 2013/4. Must have been DX11/12 frameworks or something along those lines replacing legacy code.