strange scenery problem

[Guest mao]

I recently encountered a very strange scenery problem.I have two overlapping sceneries of the same mountain (Alps by Frank). Scenery A only covers the top. Scenery B covers a larger area including the top and foot. Since I prefer A to B, I put A over B in scenery option. Everything works perfectly from a distance, as you can see from the first pic attached. But when I fly near, the top part of B pops up suddenly over A, as you can see from the second pic. How can this happen when the priority of A is higher? I guess it might be because the resolution of B is higher than A, so FSX automatically shift to the higher resolution even though its priority is lower. Is there a way to go around this problem? I so much like this particular area and I'm obsessed to make it perfect. Thanks in advance, and thank you Frank!

[LuisFelizTirado 33]

There are perhaps at least two possibilities. You can either:1. make a new scenery file that incorporates the best aspects and only use that instead of two separate files; or2. turn the ground texture slider down to the maximum of the file that you like, so that the maximum resolution of the file that you do not like is not displayed.Best regards.Luis

[Guest mao]

Thanks Luis. I tried your second suggestion and lowered the resolution but no use. The layer of lower priority still pops out upon approaching. As for the first suggestion, I don't have a clue how to do it. Does it need a third party scenery editor or something? Actually the two sceneries were originally one folder with several bgl files. Since it had the mentioned problem, I took out bgl B and created scenery B and made it lower priority. The problem still exist.

[Guest mao]

I am researching extensively from the forum seeking out the answer.It looks the same thing happens to terrain mesh. Mesh with higher resolution will be shown in close distance even if it is set in low priority.So this is also true to ordinary terrain?Also I read there is a "FS Altitude" by FranceVFR to show low resolution scenery in high altitude and high resolution scenery in low altitude. Maybe this program is also exploiting this FSX "feature"?

[scott967 62]

Depends what you mean by "ordinary terrain". Ordinary terrain has exactly 1 landclass value set for each tile (discounting mesh slope which complicates things a little), so there is no overlap possible. Custom (photo) terrain has the ability to be compiled at various LOD resolutions. The LOD that is used is determined by the sliders and distance from the viewpoint. Generally if the photo is compiled with LOD set to "auto" it includes all LODs up to the resolution of the source image and you never see any other texture.scott s..

[Guest mao]

Hi scott, thanks for the information.By "ordinary terrain" I mean photo scenery such as Frank's Alps sceneries.I am really annoyed to see other layers suddenly pops out as if from underground, especially in such beautiful sceneries.....

Depends what you mean by "ordinary terrain". Ordinary terrain has exactly 1 landclass value set for each tile (discounting mesh slope which complicates things a little), so there is no overlap possible. Custom (photo) terrain has the ability to be compiled at various LOD resolutions. The LOD that is used is determined by the sliders and distance from the viewpoint. Generally if the photo is compiled with LOD set to "auto" it includes all LODs up to the resolution of the source image and you never see any other texture.scott s..

[Guest mao]

Are there any cfg files I can tweak with? I can't find custom scenery items in scenery.cfg.Or are there any scenery editor to do the mod?

[Guest mao]

I think there might be no way to get around this by adjusting scenery option or cfg files. Is scenery recompiling the only solution? What should I do to up-sampling or down-sampling the scenery resolution? Which software is the more capable (and easier) to do this task?

[scott967 62]

Unless you have access to the source data, i think the best you will do is to follow the advice of Luis above.If you have the SDK installed, at least you can open up the scenery files in the TMFViewer tool, and see what LOD resolutions are provided. In FSX the bitmaps are compressed and included within the bgl file, and once compiled there isn't really anything that can be done to them. If you had the source photo, you could recreate the bgl file using the SDK resample tool, using different LOD values.scott s..

[Guest mao]

hi Scott.I have no source data. Maybe I should ask Frank for help. I get quite paranoid on this one.Thanks for the instruction. I was just beginning to download sbuilder x and the like.mao.

[Guest mao]

I found a partial solution to this headache. I changed the value of "lod radius" in fsx.cfg from 8.5 to 4.5. Now the higher resolution texture won't pop up until I fly much closer.Yet this creats new blurries everywhere. What a perfect world!