Beta7 / FS9 - Black Tiles Work Around Tip...

This has cropped up again on my system so I thought I'd post the results of some of my tests and a work around concerning the issue.If you get black tiles in an area surrounding your aircraft immediately upon loading FS9 with Beta 7 DON'T FRET. Some tests I've run has shown this seems to be a temporary condition with either your "first load" of FS9, or after switching back to FS9 from FSX, and seems to concern the new LOD pre-load functions of Beta 7. Once you've booted into this "black tile" condition, changing locations doesen't seem to help in most instances. Luckily, there's a workaround that also seems to "fix" it from happening again, either permantly (Step 1) or with preloads enabled (Step 2). Here's the work around: Disable the Preload Function1.Shut down TP and FS9 and then "trick" TP into disabling the TP preload function by changing the preload min/max entries in the proxyuser.ini file to look like this:preload_min_lod=9preload_max_lod=8Now start TP and FS9 and load a flight. Without the preloads enabled everything should load normally. If you want to you can leave your ini this way and just do without the preload function from here on, but if you wish, move on and try step 2.2. Now here's the wierd thing: After loading a flight WITHOUT the preloads enabled as in step 1, if you again shut down TP and FS9 and RETURN the preload entries back to thier original settings of:preload_min_lod=8preload_max_lod=12...and then load the SAME FLIGHT, everything then boots as normal (OK you say, that's not unusual because the textures are already cached right?), BUT get this, all successive flights seem to load without the black tile issue as well for some reason; and thereafter FS9 seems "fixed". I can even unload the TileProxy driver, clean out the World folder and Caches and it still loads fine. If I change to FSX for a while however, the same behavior in FS9 repeats all over again when returning to it. (!?)One thing FS9 users should also be aware of too, though Beta 7 can now preload LOD levels of between 8-17 in FSX, and while in theory FS9 the max preload limit is LOD 13 (4.75 meters/pixel), the reason my preconfigured FS9 proxyUser.ini from the Quick Guide is set at 8-12 because some tests have shown when a max limit of 13 is specified it will often load black tiles immediately under the aircraft, irregardless of the fix above. This further indicates that the preload function (for FS9 at least) should be the first thing looked at if black tile issues arise for you. I have also found that as an alternative to disabling the preload all together (as in step 1 above) just lowering the max level to 11 and loading a flight in A NEW LOCATION sometimes is enough to fix the black tile problem too. If this is successful, returning to a max of 12 thereafter also seems to do away with the problem in the same way a complete preload disable does. If you have both FSX and FS9 and sometimes will fly both, Beta 7 seems the best choice as the preloads and other improvements over Beta 6 are good for fSX, and the FS9 workaround seems to work fine... BUT for those who ONLY plan to use FS9 with TileProxy may wish to revert to Beta 6 and avoid these issues altogether....more info and a pre-configured Beta 6 proxUser.ini may be found at: http://edtruthan.com/tileproxy/tutorial/fs9users.htm These observations are of course based on my own system and experiences, but I've run the scenario several times to verify the behavior and always gotten the same results.-Ed