Strange ground textures

[Bushpounder]

Can anyone tell me what could be causing this to happen. It happens on land, in sea, but only in this one particular scenery (Miami City X) It comes and goes randomly and is also random in where it shows. Any ideas? I have a 4gig machine with 32 gigs of RAM and a 4 gig video card. It works perfectly everywhere else. Thanks for any help!

Don

***See picture below!

[Dumonceau]

Can you show a picture? Tells more than a thousand words!

Johan

[Bushpounder]

I meant to put the picture up, buy I was distracted. Here you go -

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v254/bushpounder/FUN/miami_black_zpslsnliw9a.png

Don

[DaveB]

I see this sometimes Don. Much depends on what I'm flying (is it a resource hungry model) and what I have going on. I take it these tiles come back eventually? Mine do. I'm guessing that this particular scenery is pushing your system above and beyond what it can keep up with.. astonishingly given the system spec you have.

ATB
DaveB:)

[Bushpounder]

I get what you are saying about the airplane. I have tried all the types - from light to heavy detailed - same result. Yes, they are like that for only a second or so, then the correct ones return. However, a second later or five seconds later it can occur in different areas and different sizes of areas within the scenery. Once I leave the area, all is fine. I like the scenery as it comes with a few other airports, but I may need to scrap it and go with LatinVFR Miami instead. I went to their forum (Miami City X) and I only found one other issue like mine from back in 2012. I have a hard time believing it is my computer. I run sliders maxed all the time w/o a problem. Stumped and am getting a flat forehead! Thanks for the input!

Don

[DaveB]

I understand your frustration Don. If I fly around the Midlands (in the UK) into the area covered by EarthSimulations Shawbury Fields, I can pretty much guarantee I'll see this happening. Damned annoying as Shawbury Fields brings the whole area alive. On my 3gig E8400 WinXP rig.. it would get to a point where the entire ground would go black and OOM. On my i5 Win7 Ultimate rig.. I can get away with black tiles every now and again:banghead: Devs will suggest either reducing background processes and/or reducing your graphic settings. I honestly can't see the point of reducing the graphic settings if you miss a whole bunch of what you want to see!!

Hope someone finds an answer for you;)
ATB
DaveB:)

[Bushpounder]

Someone posted on my site that there are similar complaints for their NY scenery as well. I guess I will look for a different company for New York. Again, thanks for the help!

Don

[DaveB]

That's a shame Don. I notice too that a lot of buildings in the upper tile and beyond are also void of textures. I wonder if one or more of them is causing excessive drawcalls. It looks like nice scenery too which is a bummer. I can only imagine what New York would do!!

ATB
DaveB:)

[Bushpounder]

When it doesn't go into convulsions, it's a very nice scenery. The textures do draw out on the buildings. I'm not too happy about some of those textures either. It's great to fly a med helo through the downtown area. :)

Don

[stansdds]

If the black patches do not eventually fill with a texture, then you are missing textures. If the black patches do fill in, then it is just your computer being slow to load textures. I see patches of ground and water flash black too, always in areas of intense scenery.

[Bushpounder]

I can't see how it could be my system. It's pretty hefty. This doesn't happen anywhere else in the world which is why I don't think it is the system. I read others have this problem in the same location as well as some other area sceneries. These sceneries were developed prior to a machine like mine. If those computers ran it, mine certainly should - unless they have their sliders cranked WAY down. I have tried to crank mine down, and it still occurs. I am wondering if it may have something to do with the mesh.

Don

[Lawman]

I can't see how it could be my system. It's pretty hefty. This doesn't happen anywhere else in the world which is why I don't think it is the system. I read others have this problem in the same location as well as some other area sceneries. These sceneries were developed prior to a machine like mine. If those computers ran it, mine certainly should - unless they have their sliders cranked WAY down. I have tried to crank mine down, and it still occurs. I am wondering if it may have something to do with the mesh.

Don

It's probably not your system as such (meaning your hardware), but FSX running up against its VAS-limit.

[StormILM]

I bought Miami City X late last year and in general it runs well but on some days I would see temporary black squares just as you have. That scenery is notorious for high VAS consumption and invariably, unless I move back my density sliders, I cannot complete a trip into there (from another high density scenery) while flying my PMDG 737-NGX or Aerosoft Airbus without a crash. With some aircraft models, Miami works just fine but others, the opposite. My system is pretty hefty too, i7-3770 3.4 ghz CPU (no OC) 16gb ram, 2gb HD7770 GPU.

I have a link to share regarding the freeware Nexus/Skyrim Mods FSX/P3D Texture Optimizer (I'm sure someone has posted this here on the forum before). I have not used it yet but soon will. Several of my friends are using it and are getting excellent results (slightly to moderately better FPS and much lower VAS consumption). The good thing is that it backs up the original textures so in case there is a negative effect/problem, you can revert back. Check it out:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=25&v=Q8Aonc200ZM

[Bushpounder]

Just as an experiment, I dialed back ALL the sliders to the halfway point. It still did it in Miami. I then flew around New York with all sliders maxed again and tried Tampa for the heck of it. No problems at all. I agree, it doesn't do it constantly during one's entire flight through the area. It just does it now and then during the flight, randomly, as one transitions through the area.

Don

[Shylock]

I get it with their New York City scenery and my system is a a beast. I'm running Core i7-950 Overclocked to 4.1, 24GB of Corsair Vengeance Memory, GTX 580 Super clocked with FSX on a separate SSD. I get the black boxes too and sometimes they don't go away. With Manhattan X scenery I get 20 FPS with everything to max on my system and running UTX and Active Sky Next, but with theirs, I get 9. So its not your system. FSX has its limits and with those scenery's you're at them.

[gman5250]

I don't have any of the sceneries mentioned, but I can take a stab at this question.

It's not your system, it's the limitations of the sim. The big challenge is the 32 bit container that cannot manage the complexities of the technology we are loading into our simulations. Your card is not being utilized to it's full potential and the sim cannot handle the staggering number of calls when facing any particular direction.

I will assume that there are a gozillion individually modeled buildings in this scenery, much to the author's credit. This is a massive amount of work that has been put into this package. I'd be keen to see the actual file size and .bgl model library for the Miami scenry...it would tell me a lot. If it's over one gig...it's a monster.

I would guess that when the sim is looking down the barrel of this scenery it is loading a ton of custom buildings and autogen, along with hand painted and photo real ground polys while simultaneously running weather, geo spatial mesh and a sophisticated aircraft.

There are tricks to building ultra complex sceneries and they all need to be integrated into the working model with the broadest applicability to find a balance of realism and performance, while satisfying the broadest spectrum of home simulator computers. It's not easy, and quite frankly most developers tend to design thinking forward...myself included. When we are looking at an imminent 64 bit platform, designing for 32 bit becomes prohibitive. That said, all developers realize and acknowledge that 32 bit will always represent a large market segment, thus it cannot be entirely abandoned. This is a paradox that will remain with us for quite some time.

The phenomenon your are showing appears to be the sim looking to load a specific ground poly, possibly masked in at a higher resolution than the surrounding blocks. In the background the sim is also loading everything else as well. The autogen seems to be loading, but what appear to be custom buildings with textures and possibly a modeled freeway section have failed to call their textures. The black area is not loading the ground poly, the buildings are not loading what I would predict would be custom textures.

From what I see in your screen cap, I would bet money that the entire city has been hand annotated with individually placed autogen buildings and trees placed correctly on top of the photo realistic ground poly. This is absolutely the best way to create an entirely accurate model, but very costly for the sim in terms of resources required.

At the point this happens your system has hit the VAS wall and your card, governed down to 32 bit, is screaming WTF? The cause is primarily based on the direction of your point of view and the targets down range. This would explain the random nature of the display anomaly. Facing any given direction this could happen. This could theoretically occur even if you had not logged mileage over other scenery prior to flying in the megalopolis.

All major cities will be vulnerable to this display anomaly and performance will depend solely upon how the model was constructed.
Example: I simply cannot fly the CS or PMDG Boeing 777 into NCA/Flightbeam KSFO...it just won't happen. Too much is being asked of the 32 bit framework, even though my system is a rock crusher. These are all magnificent aircraft/sceneries, but the sum total of the resources required are huge.

My consolation is that a 64 bit platform seems to be right around the corner, so I'd enjoy the scenery for now and forget about all of these inconveniences when we are able to take better advantage of the systems we have invested so much time and $$$ into constructing.

Don't lose any sleep my friend...the solution is near.

[Bushpounder]

Guys, THANK YOU for all of your input here. Gman, you explained things very well. Yes, there are 100's of buildings, if not thousands plus. Very complex for sure. It would be a shame to turn down detail. I tried that and I lost the control tower, main buildings, it isn't worth it because one misses the reality of the scenery. I hope the 64 bit down the road comes soon! LOL! Then people will start building 128 bit scenery! LOL! Watch! ;) Thanks again, all!!

Don