Square blocks of colour in sea.Horrid or what

[HoratioWondersocks 4]

Hello AllThere is one thing that irritates me more than occasional stutters,more than higgly jiggly scenery as you fly over it,more than slow drawing Vcockpits and that is square blocks of colour in the ocean is there any way of fixing this as there is nothing more unrealistic as perfect squares in a turbulant sea.What do you use as sea textures?can you tell me what you think is best?cheers Andy

[tunnelcat 1]

Andy,There are two FS9 quirks that may be causing this. I see these squares in the ocean also and I am also running Flight Enviornment which has all new water textures. Microsoft uses large squares of texture to paint the landscape, it's the only way to get land and water drawn with our current memory and cpu limitations. One cause is if you have dawn to dusk texture blending turned on, you will get a mix of texures as the light changes, but I tried turning that off and didn't like the way dawn and dusk were rendered, it was quite abrupt. The other problem may have to do with what has been called the "blurries". Texture tiles have slightly different colors between lower resolution ones and the higher resolution ones that are closer to you. You notice this on the ground in the form of less sharp detail, but in the water you are more likely to notice different colored squares of water. I've tried changing the draw distance and adjusting FS9's config. file using Koorby's 2 Minute Tweak Guide but I haven't been successful in getting a uniform color to large areas of water. You can search this forum for a copy of that guide I posted recently.I'm not a programmer so if anyone out there has a better explanation and fix, let us know. Kim K

[Guest neslesman]

Assuming we are talking about the same thing I found the "Soft Horizons" (I think that's the name) file helped me a lot in this regard. The sim just doesn't see quite as far out now so it lessens the chance of getting those bad delayed textures on the distant water and even on land sometime.

[Guest MikeGTO]

Since FS2004 uses tiled textures, sometimes you can see seams or blocks that are repeated. I'm not sure if that's what you mean.Another thing is, that if you don't have "extended terrain textures" turned on, FS2004 will not draw the ocean textures all the way to the horizon. This makes the ocean in the distance get blocky and look bad compared to the ocean right around your aircraft. However, using extended terrain textures does use more computer resources.I use the water texture from Real Environment Pro (freeware)...I have not tried any others but I think it looks pretty good. With water effects set to "high" you get rippling waves and reflections. See pics (click link for full size):EDIT EDIT I totally fail at posting images on this forum. I can't figure out how to make a clickable thumbnail from imageshack work, imageshack code works on other forums, but not this one. And when I only post a simple http link to an image, the forum DISPLAYS THE IMAGE instead of the link, even when I'm NOT using IMG tags. Why is the forum downloading and displaying an image from just a URL with no IMG tags? I've spent 15 minutes uploading pics to imageshack and trying to get them to display right here, but forget it.

[John_Cillis 2,406]

"I totally fail at posting images on this forum. I can't figure out how to make a clickable thumbnail from imageshack work, imageshack code works on other forums, but not this one. And when I only post a simple http link to an image, the forum DISPLAYS THE IMAGE instead of the link, even when I'm NOT using IMG tags. Why is the forum downloading and displaying an image from just a URL with no IMG tags? I've spent 15 minutes uploading pics to imageshack and trying to get them to display right here, but forget it."Why do you have to link to imageshack. You don't. Pictures are allowed in this forum if they support an answer to someone's questions (other than the "can you show me what "abc" add-on looks like?"). The steps to upload them are easy:1. At bottom of post, just below the attachment field choose "Click here to choose your attachments" link2. Check "JPEG image file", and always check "Check this box if you wish to embed attachment URL...."3. Browse to your file, select it, then click "Upload File"Repeat steps 2 and 3 until you're done (limit is ten files @ 150K each and 1024x768 max)When you're done, click the "Close this window" link.Many people are still on dial-up and linking to a third party site can make their browsing experience here really suffer.That said, I wanted to offer one correction and also thank the person who mentioned my add-on Soft Horizons. Checking "Extended Terrain Textures" won't draw ocean textures or any textures to the horizon unless you limit vis or draw distance to approx. 60 miles or less.MSFS uses three tiers of textures--inner textures, extended terrain textures if you check the option, and a "generic" scenery which is supposed to blend fairly well with the DEFAULT textures. I emphasize DEFAULT because so many have texture add-ons and those are the folks who most often notice a sharp definition between the extended textures and the generic scenery (which usually starts around 60 miles from the aircraft viewpoint and beyond).One of the reasons I wrote "Soft Horizons" was to help make that distant generic scenery fade into the haze. Even in our clear deserts the terrain fades into the haze even when the visibility is a hundred miles distant. I also understand there's an add-on out there that causes water squares to be quite prominent. It replaces one bitmap file and apparently when you restore the default it fixes the problem. Others have mentioned other causes, all of which can cause the same issue. Reducing your LOD in the fs9.cfg to 20 can solve some issues around dawn and dusk.Anyway, hope I've been a help here. Getting sleepy, time to bid farewell.Regards,John (Among other things, author of "Soft Horizons")

[Guest MikeGTO]

Thanks for the reply. The reason I didn't attach the image file is that it's bigger than the 150k size limit for attachments hosted by this forum. On most forums the preferred method to deal with large files is to use third party image hosting and either show a thumbnail that can be clicked on (if desired) to load the full size image, or, simply put a link to the image in the message so people who are interested can download it if they so choose, without forcing everyone reading the thread to download a huge file.I don't know a way to do accomplish either of those things here. What is the best way to make a ~300k image file available for people to view?

[John_Cillis 2,406]

Why can't you just resize the image to 1024x768 and post it directly? A jpg with minimal compression should easily come in less than 150K at that resolution.-John

[HoratioWondersocks 4]

Thanks Guys for your thoughts.I have also tried Flight Environment Pro(freeware)and some of the effects that adds i do like ,but the sea textures do suffer from the same square block problem so i am hunting through Avsim and i am trying different textures from there.I'm surprised its seems so hard to get something that looks more realistic(I have no gripes about the land textures they seem fine to me).The current sea textures I'm using(Cant remember name) now seem less block prone but the colour again seems(to me anyway highly unrealistic)i was flying over the Great lakes yesterday and i don't know what they are like in reality at this time of year,but in the sim they looked so paradise island blue that i felt like a nice swim would be in order.(PS even in the sim you get an idea how huge these lakes are)US and Canada are Humongous.I did find a very good inland water textures download called Aawater(i think)this gives a more greeny tinge to inland waters(very good glacial water look in snowy areas).Anyway i shall continue trying ,after all what would simming be like without a #### good tweaking session.Cheers Again Andy:-)

[Guest macman4]

John, "I also understand there's an add-on out there that causes water squares to be quite prominent. It replaces one bitmap file and apparently when you restore the default it fixes the problem" John don't want to get anyone in trouble, but could you Post or email me the name of the bitmap file and the default one. Thanks Bobmacman4@ameritech.net

[John_Cillis 2,406]

This thread by Holger may help the best: http://www.sim-outhouse.com/sohforums/show...=water+problems-John