Random Loss of Ground Textures - Mega Blurries!

Gi'day Hans,

 

Warning bells just went off upon reading your last post.

 

Just wondering if any of your addon airports happen to be using any Sidney Schwartz static objects. If they do, it might be that some objects may need texture replacement as outlined by Sidney in his "FS2004 Texture Update 1 For SS Scenery" pack.

 

Just a thought.

 

Good hunting.

 

Regards,

Dorian

A bad aircraft texture CAN cause blurry ground/building textures randomly....

 

I didn't say it couldn't cause a problem, only that there is no logical reason for a bad texture on an aircraft to affect anything other than that aircraft itself. Other than inept programming.

... especially when slewing around on the ground.

 

...

 

Slewing, on the ground or in the air, will often cause blurry terrain simply because the system cannot keep up with the texture swapping required when you are essentially zipping around at Mach 10.

 

You can experience a similar situation if flying a very fast aircraft at very low altitudes.

Gi'day Hans,

 

Warning bells just went off upon reading your last post.

 

Just wondering if any of your addon airports happen to be using any Sidney Schwartz static objects. If they do, it might be that some objects may need texture replacement as outlined by Sidney in his "FS2004 Texture Update 1 For SS Scenery" pack.

 

Just a thought.

 

Good hunting.

 

Regards,

Dorian

 

Thank you Dorian. That's very useful. I have a lot of Sidney Schwartz' stuff scattered around the world and I don't believe I've applied any updates though I suppose they may have been included in whatever I downloaded.

 

I'll be applying three updates later anyway:

 

FS2004 Texture Update 1 For SS Scenery

https://www.flightsim.com/vbfs/fslib.php?searchid=94149454

 

FS2004 Texture Update 2 For SS Scenery

https://www.flightsim.com/vbfs/fslib.php?searchid=94149446

 

FS2004 Texture Update 3 For SS Scenery

https://www.flightsim.com/vbfs/fslib.php?searchid=94149457

 

D

Those updates are e very good idea.

 

The way I figure out which texture might be a problem:

 

1. Park yourself in slew mode just outside the airport, 100 ft or so above the airport.

2. Point yourself away from the airport so it is not in view.

3. If you have blurries now, press Alt-Enter to change display modes, the blurries should disappear (if the problem is at this airport). You can press Alt-Enter again to go back to your preferred mode (I normally do this in windowed mode).

4. Slowly rotate the plane towards the airport, taking close note of when the blurries occur. The object with the bad texture has just entered your view.

5. Once you identify and fix that texture, restart FS to get things back, and repeat the above.

6. Continue until you can slew 360 degrees without the blurries.

Slewing, on the ground or in the air, will often cause blurry terrain simply because the system cannot keep up with the texture swapping required when you are essentially zipping around at Mach 10.

 

You can experience a similar situation if flying a very fast aircraft at very low altitudes.

 

Sounds very logical indeed but maybe one of you can also comment on the following:

 

1. During any first slew such blurries can appear quite often but if I just wait a few minutes they suddenly disappear, leaving everything crisp and clear again. In this situation I can, in spot plane view, now slew aroud at maximum speed, at different altitudes and zoom settings, without any blurry problems ???

 

2. I was watching the active runway from a stationary slew position when an AI aircraft suddenly came into view as it was landing. Bang !! The blurries were immediately there again and without me slewing.

A possible bad AI texture or model ??

 

I shut down my FS9, opened the AI plane's aircraft file, changed it's aircraft type so that it became selectable and checked it's visible appearance from close up. No problem, it was perfect as far as "perfect" goes for AI aircraft and that included it's contact points. I opened it's textures, saw nothing out of the ordinary and re-saved them in their standard DXT3 format, as they were previously. I did the same for the other paints.

 

I re-opened the previously saved "flight" at the same airport and slewed back to the same position, waiting for the "culprit" AI aircraft to (re-)appear and land. Well, it did appear and even landed normally,

only this time without the blurries !!!

 

Blurry problem solved ??

 

I just cannot believe it because nothing has really changed, except that this AI aircraft's textures have been opened and re-saved ?? Only now possibly including mips ??

 

What if this AI aircraft would be parked normally in it's original form somewhere on this airport, while one of us would be making a normal approach for landing ?? Would it also cause the blurries as soon as it came into view, even if it was not (yet) actually visible ??

 

I'm testing further.

 

Hans

I have gotten blurries from a bad airport texture when I was still far away and the object was not visible on the screen, so perhaps.

Hi Guys,

 

While doing something else "constructively" I waited for hours in a stationary slew position at my (ex-)blurry airport and saw many AIs land/take off normally and which included the AI of which I had had re-saved it's textures, now most probably with mips.

 

The only conclusion I can therefore now come to is that it was the absence of an AI plane's texture mipmaps, which had caused the sudden blurries. Moreover, all the airport's textures were mipped correctly and when suddenly a non-mipped AI aircraft appears, it could cause a graphics system rendering problem (= blurries), at least that sounds logical to me.

 

Completely separate from the above I also found that zooming out too quickly in "top-down view", is a definite cause of (tempory) blurries, especially when complex (addon airport) sceneries are concerned, as JGF points out when slewing around too fast.

 

Now then, back to my other "blurry" airport TAPA, where I will try Tom Gibson's procedure.

 

Hans

I am geting blurries on and off but primarily forcus on flyng, so no big issue (except when I completely lost runways at JFK!) But would not it be great if there was a tool showing which sceneries, textures, AIs are loaded at any given time. Giving us indicaton what could be the blurr problem?

... if there was a tool showing which sceneries, textures, AIs are loaded at any given time...

 

For mesh and terrain textures there are maps showing what files are used in each cell, note your coordinates and check those files. But LC files are also painted on the terrain. many of these are global but some are custom to specific add-on scenery. For AI it is much more difficult, you may have an aircraft that only runs its route once a week; or it could be a static aircraft parked at an airport.

 

It is this unpredictable interaction that makes troubleshooting such an odious task.

Gi'day Hans,

 

Warning bells just went off upon reading your last post.

 

Just wondering if any of your addon airports happen to be using any Sidney Schwartz static objects. If they do, it might be that some objects may need texture replacement as outlined by Sidney in his "FS2004 Texture Update 1 For SS Scenery" pack.

 

Just a thought.

 

Good hunting.

 

Regards,

Dorian

 

On your kind advice and a possible solution for blurries I found and downloaded Sydney Schwartz's textures but before actually installing them I did a check to see if I actually already had any of them hidden somewhere in my FS9 system. I found none, so my blurries are still winning.

 

Hans

This is a very interesting and informative discussion - thanks everyone. I reinstalled the airport add-on in question, flew in from the north (KMKE) in a Dash8 - no blurriness. Approached from the east in an Airbus and again, no issues. Then I flew in from the west again with three totally different aircraft and as I neared KORD with runways in sight, the blurry ground textures appeared. When I pressed P to pause - the ground immediately cleared up. P again and the blurry ground returned. This kind of thing can make us all crazy as apparently there can be many variables and/or causes for this - and I'm still playing around with it. Fortunately - if this doesn't happen everywhere and only occurs at or near some airports - we all have a big alternative world to explore.

... so my blurries are still winning.

Hans

 

Hi Hans.

 

Did you find all the updates? If not, that may be why your blurries are still there. There are three downloads: see post #30.

 

D

 

edit: the links don't work... I guess you'll have to search; the downloads are called

 

ss_textures_update_1.zip

 

sstexturesupdate2.zip

 

sstexturesupdate3.zip

Edited November 5, 2022 by defaid
How do I post links to library files?

 

Hans, which AI model was it?

 

RJ

 

The AI plane which seemingly caused my blurries was a Shorts SD3-60 turbo-prop and the model was made by Dee Waldon. However, I must repeat that I could not really find anything wrong with the 5 different AI paints I have of this model and which were all of the correct looking sizes.

 

Just to be sure and as a kind of last resort, I'm now going through the massive copy of my World texture folder, in order to standardise it's contents to DXT1 format and to structurally add or replace all their mips. If that has no effect on my blurries then I can always go back to the backup of this folder.

 

Regards

 

Hans

Hi Hans.

 

Did you find all the updates? If not, that may be why your blurries are still there. There are three downloads: see post #30.

 

D

 

edit: the links don't work... I guess you'll have to search; the downloads are called

 

ss_textures_update_1.zip

 

sstexturesupdate2.zip

 

sstexturesupdate3.zip

 

Yes, I found the three Sydney Schwartz's texture update files and have in the meantime, downloaded them.

 

During a day of hard work I searched my whole FS9 system for each of Sydney's replacement textures but found only a few of them actually active in some of my (very much dated SCASM-type) sceneries, the rest just sitting in my main texture folder as ballast and which will all be deleted shortly, together with the mostly RWY12 BGLs, which call for them.

 

I checked the active textures by opening them one by one and re-saving them, while at the same time making sure that at least their alpha channels and/or mips were correctly replaced. However, no problematic textures were found and my whole day's work did therefore not help my blurry problem in any way. No problems were afterwards seen in their related sceneries either.

 

Blurries being hardware related ?

 

It's now become my opinion that especially the temporary blurries, are (also) caused by graphics cards being overwhelmed by very strong texture swapping, in turn being caused by, e.g. slewing around too quickly and/or by zooming out too quickly in complex scenery combinations.

As soon as the graphics card is able to catch up, those blurries quite suddenly disappear, at least in my own FS9.

 

However, I must also confirm that under normal flying conditions I've never (yet) seen blurries, but only when "messing around" in complex airport sceneries, in combination with mesh, LC and other enhancements, e.g. extra added EZ statics, etc.

 

Hans

Hey Guys,

 

I ran up against a hefty blurry problem at one of my Mexican airports but after structurally adding mipmaps to all of it's textures via a freeware utility named "Mipmap Manager", the blurry problem, at least at this particular airport, was solved.

 

Hans

3Green,

 

After having been involved in this very interesting thread, more or less from it's very beginning, it seems that blurries can be caused by many things, as you correctly point out.....BUT..... I've always ben lead to believe that ALL objects which can be viewed from varying distances, e.g. ground scenery objects, airports, trees, etc. must have mipped textures and this should therefore also be true for AI plane textures. Only flyable planes are exempt from mip-mapping because thay are normally never viewed from varying (and greater) distances.

 

This is the way I've always understood it:

 

The human eye can only see maximum details of any object at close quarters but as the distance increases these details become less and less visible, untill finally the object itself disappears from view.

 

However, with PC graphics systems this is quite different because at great distances the texture details will still be rendered (= worked on) by the graphics card, even although the object itself is no longer visible to the viewer. Hence the mip-mapping concept, whereby each (primary) texture has a number of linked copies behind it, each getting less and less detailed, until the last one is (almost) blank. The technology behind this is to releave the PC graphics (card) system of unnecessary work, all for the good of the highest possible frame rates.

 

My PC specs:

 

CPU Intel i7 3930, 6 core

Memory 32 Gb.

2 SSDs in RAID-0 setup for my Win7 Proffessional 64bit. Original from the DVD(s). Never been updated.

1 larger SSD for my FS9 and other data.

 

Graphics card:

 

AMD Radeon HD 7900 Series.

3072Mb GDDR5 memory.

Core Clock 900Mhz.

Memory clock 1250Mhz.

Memory bandwidth 240Gb

 

My PC has never had an internt connection and consquently no Windows7 updates.

 

Comments please, anyone ?

 

Regards

 

Hans

Actually FS is smart enough to create mipmaps for many textures when the texture does not contain them. It may slow texture loading a bit, though. If I mipmap AI aircraft textures they display somewhat blurry, while a friend must mipmap his AI aircraft textures or he gets bad glittering - his are not blurry though. Probably depends on the computer/video card in use.

Yes,

got blurries often, but mostly it is just temporary. Also looking at my aircraft from outside sometimes shows it blank, with colors slowly appearing. Also the skipps are quite common.

Have used the advice from User Manual from the Full Environment 9 (fe9_v1_3) on how to optimize FS9 and tweek the figures in FS9.cfg. But little help noted. So going with the flow. Fs9 is great anyway as is!

Peter,

 

If blurries are temporary it almost always means that your graphics card (or system} is initially being overwhelmed and needs to catch up after any of your view changes, (= "texture swapping"}. You in fact need a more powerfull (and more expensive) graphics card.

 

Aircraft having one or more blank textures is very strange indeed and especially if the related textures then sowly begin to appear.

 

Regards

 

Hans

Yes,

Also looking at my aircraft from outside sometimes shows it blank

 

Yes, I figured this one out but after the last response I got from trying to help a user with the issue I gave up. Hi Hans! lol

Thanks Hans also Mark

Got Intel® HD Graphic 520 Card, with NVIDIA GeForce940MX video card. Older HP with W10. Believe it should suffice for 18 years old FS9?

Also on aircraft texture issue I mentoned maybe it is because of the amount of aircraft I have total 1,182 folders with at least 10 textures each, which makes it over 11k!

But as mentioned can live with it.

Thanks Hans also Mark

Got Intel® HD Graphic 520 Card, with NVIDIA GeForce940MX video card. Older HP with W10. Believe it should suffice for 18 years old FS9?

Also on aircraft texture issue I mentoned maybe it is because of the amount of aircraft I have total 1,182 folders with at least 10 textures each, which makes it over 11k!

But as mentioned can live with it.

 

Check to see if the texture load problem is with all aircraft or just certain aircraft. FS9 depending what you run can still need a reasonably beefy system.

Hi Guys,

 

I'm slowly beginning to realise that I have finally solved the blurry problem at my addon (TAPA) airport, which in my FS9 was notorious for blurries.

 

I firstly followed Tom Gibson's advised method for determining the direction at which my blurries kept occurring, then slewing in that direction for about half a mile and again determining the direction at which the blurries occurred. I repeated this process until I was about 5 miles from the airport and where it became obvious that the blurries had nothing to do with the airport's textures themselves but must be a general, default or an autogen texture, somehwere far away.

 

The first thing I then did was to mip all the textures in my huge main texture folder via the Mipmap Manager program, which took about an hour.

However, the texture names beginning with "sky..." evidently did not like being mipped and which resulted in very strange colour effects throughout my whole FS9. I restored all of these "sky..." textures from the backup, which at least solved the colour problems .... but .... not my blurries.

 

I then did the same for my also huge EZ and RWY12 static library object texture folder, after which I did my best to re-create the blurries at the above airport but whatever I tried, no blurries and almost normal frame rates during my most drastic slewing (test) operations.

 

Blurry problem solved, at least in my FS9 setup !! A huge sigh of relief, even although I was not able to find which culprit texture it actually was.

 

A very happy....

 

Hans

Hi Guys,

 

I'm slowly beginning to realise that I have finally solved the blurry problem at my addon (TAPA) airport, which in my FS9 was notorious for blurries.

 

I firstly followed Tom Gibson's advised method for determining the direction at which my blurries kept occurring, then slewing in that direction for about half a mile and again determining the direction at which the blurries occurred. I repeated this process until I was about 5 miles from the airport and where it became obvious that the blurries had nothing to do with the airport's textures themselves but must be a general, default or an autogen texture, somehwere far away.

Hans

 

Hi Hans,

I was having the same problem with the KORD add-on airport in my original post. For some reason, I only experienced ground texture blurries when approaching from the west. If I flew in from another direction, everything looked fine. Thanks for your hints and guidance here, but I lack the experience (or patience) to start playing around with textures - which may fix my problem. On another note, I suspect that I'm not the only one who has tried many variations on my cfg numbers from suggestions posted here and on other forums in attempts to improve frame rates and ground clarity. I may have finally found one that works for me - but I don't know why. Overall, with frames locked at 30, everything looks sharper and clearer and for now I'm happy! Others results may vary as I understand there are many variables. I don't know where this was posted originally but whomever submitted it credited "Jobia":

 

[TERRAIN]

TERRAIN_ERROR_FACTOR=100.000000

TERRAIN_MIN_DEM_AREA=0.000000

TERRAIN_MAX_DEM_AREA=200.000000

TERRAIN_MAX_VERTEX_LEVEL=21

TERRAIN_TEXTURE_SIZE_EXP=8

TERRAIN_AUTOGEN_DENSITY=5

TERRAIN_USE_GRADIENT_MAP=1

TERRAIN_EXTENDED_TEXTURES=1

TERRAIN_DEFAULT_RADIUS=4.000000

TERRAIN_EXTENDED_RADIUS=4.000000

TERRAIN_EXTENDED_LEVELS=2