Black/disappearing textures? Some bizarre news ...

[tfm 169]

Tim,After some further testing, I am getting some problems returning. I had some successful flights with the MD-11, but then I started getting a black screen after landing and using instant replay. It's not the same flashing graphics issue I was having, but a totally black screen. I tried ALT-ENTER numerous times attempting to restore the screen, but that didn't work and I was done. I then tried the 747 and I did get one or two successful flights before the same issue cropped up. Unfortunately, it appears the problem is not fixed on my setup.How have you been fairing? Any problems at all since your last report? I know you were able to keep the 185.85 driver, maybe that's part of the solution. If you recall, I tried the 185.85s but I was getting some serious stuttering problems that forced me to revert back to the 182.50s.If you come up with anything, please let me know. I'm feeling kinda stuck (again!)...Jay

JayStill working at my end with the 185.85 driver. The only "blip" I've noticed is when I went onto Vatsim with FSInn. This caused crashes until I ran the batch file which tells FSInn to use 64-bit mode.Having installed nHancer earlier on, I could only get back to my working solution by doing a complete spring clean of the drivers. I used the Device manager to "uninstall" the card and chose to delete system files. Then, before rebooting, I ran Driver sweeper (free, from Guru3d) about 5 times (choosing to clean all Aegia and Nvidia files and registry settings). Then I rebooted and let the PC install the 185.85 drivers. Tim

[tfm 169]

Tim,After some further testing, I am getting some problems returning. I had some successful flights with the MD-11, but then I started getting a black screen after landing and using instant replay. It's not the same flashing graphics issue I was having, but a totally black screen. I tried ALT-ENTER numerous times attempting to restore the screen, but that didn't work and I was done. I then tried the 747 and I did get one or two successful flights before the same issue cropped up. Unfortunately, it appears the problem is not fixed on my setup.How have you been fairing? Any problems at all since your last report? I know you were able to keep the 185.85 driver, maybe that's part of the solution. If you recall, I tried the 185.85s but I was getting some serious stuttering problems that forced me to revert back to the 182.50s.If you come up with anything, please let me know. I'm feeling kinda stuck (again!)...Jay

Jay,Having identified that the sounds have something to do with this problem, I've been scratching my head for a sound-related solution which does not necessitate abandoning "proper" anti-aliasing.I think I MAY have found one, but it is very early days.Would you like to give it a go and see what you find?The new trick is this:1. Backup your DLL.XML file (in the same folder as FSX.CFG) in case it all goes wrong.2. Using Notepad, re-order the sequence of the PMDG modules. Make the PMDG Sounds module load BEFORE the other PMDG modules, instead of after them. (Remember, also, that FSCopilot (if you hvae it installed) must load last in the whole file). It is pretty obvious how to do this once you've got the DLL.XML file open in Notepad but I can give more detail if you need.3. Turn off the anti-aliasing in FSX.4. In the Nvidia control panel, choose "Override application settings" for anti-aliasing. Select 8xQ.5. Give it a go.I have only tried this with the FSX.EXE compatibility set to XP SP2 and with the Nvidia multi-display set to Compatibility performance mode, as per earlier posts. Initial results here are promising but, as I said, it is still early days.Tim

[Tabs 2,790]

Guys - another question:Have any of you seen this where the entire flight is in broad daylight or is it always happening right around the day to dusk/night transition or the night to dawn/day transition?

[Charlie Felix 5]

Guys - another question:Have any of you seen this where the entire flight is in broad daylight or is it always happening right around the day to dusk/night transition or the night to dawn/day transition?

I've seen this on my computer at many different daytime hours.Charlie Felix

[Guest SkullxBones]

Since you guys are switching your video drivers so much, keep in mind that you are suppose to reinstall nHancer after each time you install video drivers. Might be adding to your problems if you don't.The HDMI stuff is interesting, I know it causes major headaches to the guys that install home theater systems trying to get HMDI devices to cooperate with each other. Apparently when HDMI devices are connected to each other, some of them misinterpret the video/audio signal and think the other device is trying to bypass the copy protection scheme built into HDMI and tries to shut it down.Jeff P.

[jaybird1nyc 24]

Guys - another question:Have any of you seen this where the entire flight is in broad daylight or is it always happening right around the day to dusk/night transition or the night to dawn/day transition?

Ryan,I have had this problem almost exclusively in daylight, although I have tried flying at night with the same issue happening. I have a test flight saved, usually KEWR to KIAD, or KJFK to KBOS in daytime summer season with weather set at scattered clouds, 30mi vis. I use these in order to minimize the time involved testing, while maximizing the stress put on the graphics system.Jay

Jay,Having identified that the sounds have something to do with this problem, I've been scratching my head for a sound-related solution which does not necessitate abandoning "proper" anti-aliasing.I think I MAY have found one, but it is very early days.Would you like to give it a go and see what you find?The new trick is this:1. Backup your DLL.XML file (in the same folder as FSX.CFG) in case it all goes wrong.2. Using Notepad, re-order the sequence of the PMDG modules. Make the PMDG Sounds module load BEFORE the other PMDG modules, instead of after them. (Remember, also, that FSCopilot (if you hvae it installed) must load last in the whole file). It is pretty obvious how to do this once you've got the DLL.XML file open in Notepad but I can give more detail if you need.3. Turn off the anti-aliasing in FSX.4. In the Nvidia control panel, choose "Override application settings" for anti-aliasing. Select 8xQ.5. Give it a go.I have only tried this with the FSX.EXE compatibility set to XP SP2 and with the Nvidia multi-display set to Compatibility performance mode, as per earlier posts. Initial results here are promising but, as I said, it is still early days.Tim

Tim,I understand totally. Also, I don't have FSCopilot. Off to give it a go...EDIT: Just tried it out, no go. Happened right after take-off, went into menu and bam... Gonna try with sounds off again, see if that helps, as it did previously.Jay

[jaybird1nyc 24]

Hi all,Great to be back on AVSIM, isn't it!!!This is directed to Tim (tfm), and all who have experienced the various graphics problems mentioned in this thread. Such as, black screen, graphics corruption, transparent textures, etc. These problems usually show up after going into a menu option and then back to the cockpit, or switching to, or from, windowed-full screen using ALT-ENTER, or when using instant replay.I believe I have found a solution. It has worked 100% of the time on my setup. Without it, I have had those problems 100% of the time. I am convinced that this IS the answer.The solution is to reduce the sound quality from the sound driver. Now, before anyone goes 'pfffftttt, yea, sure that works' JUST TRY IT. It'll only take a few minutes, what have you got to lose?Here's how I did mine. I should mention now that my Asus P6T Deluxe has on-board SoundMax HD audio, so the settings and menus will be different if you have a different audio device. Go to Control Panel, Sound, then under the Playback tab, click on Speakers. Then click Properties, then go to the Advanced tab and you will see a drop-down list under Default Format. My default setting was: 16 bit, 44100 HZ (CD Quality) and I changed it to the lowest setting, which was: 16 bit, 8000 HZ (Telephone Quality). That did the trick. Really. Additionally, it made no difference whatsoever in perceived sound quality, at least to me. If you have a different setup, or aren't able to lower your audio quality setting some other way (there *should* be a way to do this on every setup) then I apoligize for getting your hopes up. If anyone tries this, please post your results. As Tim knows, we (and many others, I'm sure) have been at this for quite some time, with very limited success. Actually, Tim kind of stumbled onto this originally when he flew a few times with the audio turned off and he reported no problems. I then tried the same, and I had no problems. Well, flying with absolutely no audio is not a great option, so I started trying things that were sound related, not video related. So, give it go...Best of luck to all, and LONG LIVE AVSIMJay

[Jackie 0]

Thanks Jay, I just did this and everything went smooth so far. I will test with more flights and see. Jackie

[Guest jaskanFactor]

Hi,I was experiencing the same problem (black + corrupt textures when using the alt button to much) on about avery addon aircraft I have (PMDG MD11, LDS 767, Flight1 ATR, Wilco E-Jet,...). As mentioned in another topic, switching to flying in DirectX10 preview mode solved the problem for me. Downside to this solution was the fact that many of my preferred addons aren't DX10 compatible. I have also imported quit a number of FS9 sceneries into FSX, which work fine unless you fly at night (no night textures are shown). Now this morning I installed the new Nvidia 185.85 videocard drivers, and just out of curiosity (I had already given up hope to find a solution) returned to DX9 mode. I put the wilco E-jet at Orbx Melbourne airport (quite a complex addon aircraft and a heavy airport), enabled ActiveSkyX, PFE and FDC. I was able to complete the whole flight from YMML to YBTL (about a 2h45m flight) without problems. I excessively used the ALT button on purpose, but never failed to return to the normal screen.So I still think the problem is caused by the videocard driver, rather then a soud driver problem. Ofcourse, could be a conflict between the soundcard driver and videocard driver perhaps? Since everything is working fine again on my system, I'm unable to test the "switch sound off" solution mentioned in this topic.Kind regards,Nico :(

Fortunatly i have had same problem as you, vc becoming transparent. BUT ONLY WITH PMDG 747/MD11The key thing you mentioned was that you also use REX.To fix this problemBefore doing this, ensure your default flight is not PMDG aircraft, cause it just causes crashes when sp2 not installed1 - Unintsall sp2, then start fsx free flight , RESTART pc2 - install sp1, start fsx free flight3 - Install sp2, start fsx free flight4 - Finally reinstall your REX textures.This is to fix the problem where VC becomes transparent during approach or descent. Does not solve the other 1000 PMDG screen corruption issues. But generally imptoves the reliability if you dont go around poking at menus during flight. WHAT A RPODUCTIf you want to take things a step further you could use FSX CD to repair current FSX install before step 2 above.

[Guest jaskanFactor]

Tim,Ok, first test flight was a success. Went into various menu items, switched back and forth between VC and 2D cockpit, landed, went to instant replay, ALT-ENTER a few times. I was unable to trigger any corruption after all that. Also, after uninstalling the 185.85s and re-installing the 182.50s I was able to eliminate those stutters and I was back to my previous graphics, image quality, and smoothness. Just to re-cap for anyone else who may be experiencing these issues, I am running the nVidia 182.50 driver and selecting 'Compatabilty Performance Mode' in the nVidia control panel under Manage 3D settings. I also have left it in 'Application-Controlled' for AF and AA and selected 'Vertical Sync - Force On'. Then I have set FSX.exe compatibilty tab to 'Run this program in compatibility mode for: Windows XP (Service Pack 2)', and set in-game filtering to Anisotropic and checked Anti-aliasing. Obviously, by not using nHancer we're losing some IQ, but that's not the critical point here. It's getting these a/c to run as they were designed to under Vista/DX9 for those of us having these graphics corruption/blackscreen/transparent texture issues.Looks good so far, we'll see...Jay

i NEARLY got banned, and made fun of by some of the admin of Avsim for putting up a post about folks should think twice before buying PMDG.In the end the thread got locked and tucked away where nobody will find it.As a software engineer, THE symptoms of this problem looks like some badly written pointer code that is overwritting other parts of display memory, hence the screen corruption we all getting. I know this cause i have written code that behaves the same way before, and fixed it through testing.PMDG does acknowledge the problem, and thier suggestion is to reinstall FSX, which i tried, and did not change a thing. In fact its a stupid suggestion considering that could take a month for folks with many addons.Since they do have a proposed solution for the problem, it means they know about the problem, but they are always claiming that so few people have the problem, there must be something wroung with anybody that has the screen corruption issues.Apart from the screen corruption issues, i have also found that sometimes, the PMDG a/c pick up the wroung ILS signal at airports where runways share ILS code, i have never seen this in any other aircraft in all my years opf simingConclusion is that, dont trust all the posts you see on Avsim, some of them are not from fellow FSx enthusiats but from folks trying to push a product regardless of the products readyness for market.As a result can we all agree to tone down all the Hype about PMDG so other folks dont fling thier wallet only to find there is a higher price to pay for PMDG than the cash. Cause many of us PMDG customers, have spent too long doing the wotk of PMDG Ltd test engineers.No matter how detailed and nice are the a/c when they work, its no fricking use if you cant fly it , cause its always crashing something!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!SO ENOUGH ABOUT PMDG HYPE ALREADY

[Tabs 2,790]

jaskanFactor, please follow the rules and sign your name to your posts or I'm going to have to remove them,Look, if this was a core programming issue on our end as you theorize, we'd be seeing FAR more reports of these issues than what we're seeing. It is isolated to a small group of users and to make matters even worse, several of us on the PMDG team have nearly identical systems to those having problems and we DON'T see it here ourselves. I have absolutely no reason to lie to you about that, if we were seeing it ourselves we'd admit it and have fixed it ourselves already. I think we may be rapidly approaching the limit of what the FS architecture is capable of - we all know it has major shortcomings as relates to memory management (as evidenced by the OOM error problems etc). We're reasonably confident that whatever is causing this issue for people is system specific and is triggered by a specific situation in the sim - we don't know what those factors are, so we can't even attempt to fix it until we do. We're not some group of hack programmers that just write sketchy code by the way - much of it is written by a guy who's entrusted to do this for real life aviation applications where bugs can have consequences that are much more dire than they are in a simulator.I'm not saying absolutely that this isn't an issue somehow on our end, we obviously have to consider the possibility that it is. What I'm saying is that like with many previous strange isolated issues like this, we are wholly unable to reproduce it ourselves in a testing environment. If we can't see it happen, we can't fix it - you must know that as a programmer yourself. A bug that isn't reproducible at will through a series of steps is VERY hard to track down and ultimately may not end up be "our" bug anyway. It could be FS's memory/framebuffer management issues, it could be another addon or combination of addons conflicting, some of them could be related to GPU heat etc.Please cool it with the overblown attacks on us though please - we're doing our best here to figure out what could cause these issues. There's hundreds of emails on our internal development team list discussing it. There are thousands of customers flying these products just fine without these issues - we never would have allowed the release (and you should know this from our (in)famous reputation for delaying releases to make sure we've fixed everything to the best of our abilities before giving it to you guys.)

[Tabs 2,790]

Apart from the screen corruption issues, i have also found that sometimes, the PMDG a/c pick up the wroung ILS signal at airports where runways share ILS code, i have never seen this in any other aircraft in all my years opf siming

Which specific airports and have you checked the real life NOTAMs for them? In multiple instances of this we've seen through support email, it was actually that the ILS in the other direction is out of service currently in the real world and that's why the plane is tuning the other side of the runway... Please ensure this is not causing your issue before making accusations about bugs.

[rsrandazzo 6,353]

Gents-There seems to be some commentary flying about that PMDG is denying that this is a problem- so let me clarify the issue a bit:We can see darned well that this is a problem- but what we CANNOT see is any concrete, reproducable condition in which the problem can be duplicated.Let me remind a few of you (people like the fellow a few posts above who seems to have more venom than useful commentary) that with every product PMDG has ever released, we've been accused of memory leaks, bufffer ovreruns, OOM errors, kicking the family dog, abusing your girlfriend and a host of other infractions.In all of those cases, we have collected data from you all here in this forum, and we have worked with a select few of you privately in some trouble-shooting modes, and eventually the conclusion always comes out the same: Something UNRELATED to PMDG.I'm not so bold or stupid as to say that this will be the same- but I am going to tell you that thus far, not one of the folks that we've worked with has been able to give us a case that could be reproduced. We have one member of our beta test team who has seen this- but his setup is similar to that of most of the development team and we've been unable to trigger a reproducable case all the same.Ryan has been tasked with collecting/culling data to see if he can identify any particular trends. Thus far the ONLY common thread is that this appears only with our 400X/MD-11X, which tells us very little.So gents, keep reporting what you are finding. All of the data gets into the hopper- and if we can find some reproducable cause- I assure you we will then be able to kill the problem. But everyone also needs to keep an open mind to the fact that this COULD be triggered by hardware/driver issues we do not control, add-on software that we did not write, or a myriad of other issues. Our aircraft require quite a bit of system resources to run, so if anyone is going to be able to trigger bad behavior, it would be us. :-)But speaking of bad behavior- I have instructed Ryan to express no tolerance for chest-puffing explanations that you are a software engineer and thus you claim to have superior knowledge as to what is causing the problem. You don't... If it were that obvious- we'd have found it by now- and the basic laws of statistical error probable and repitition would have come into play already... They haven't- so be a part of the solution- or simply lurk and watch.To you guys who have been really examining your machines and providing feedback here (Tim et al) we appreciate your efforts- and we ARE watching...

[Guest jaskanFactor]

Which specific airports and have you checked the real life NOTAMs for them? In multiple instances of this we've seen through support email, it was actually that the ILS in the other direction is out of service currently in the real world and that's why the plane is tuning the other side of the runway... Please ensure this is not causing your issue before making accusations about bugs.

Just a minute, why should the state of an ILS signal in real world airport have anything to do with FSX airport. In any case, i have already passed full datiails of aiport and runway where i have the issue to PMDG support, but so far no solution.The reason why have been very dissapointed with PMDG is simply this - I have payware aircraft from various companies, and half the time there is an issue of some kind, which some may have on thier system and others dont. BUT NONE OF THOSE ISSUES IS AS SHOW STOPING AS THE AIRCRAFT CRASHING YOUR SYSTEM JUST ABOUT EVERYTIME.So its not that i am not sympathetic to the complexities involved, but i feel people need to be informed what to expect before they pay about $100 for PMDG.I mean, we are lucky to have companies like PMDG that aim high, unlike the nusery school project products from Abacus and the like.But the number of people and magnitude of issues regarding this PMDG corruption bug means this information should be flaged for those looking to buy PMDG. Else folks buy the product things start crashing, and forever loose trust and interest in PMDG products.Those of us having these issues no longer trust PMDG statements.And you keep saying only a small set have this problem, but you are sure to find atleast one post of the same issue on every page of the forum.Give credit where credit is due, the PMDG planes have best cockpit FSX world, but PMDG cant be trusted to be forth coming with infromation relevant to custormers regarding issues with bugs in the product. This may slow down sales, but improves trust in your products, and services in the long term.For example i was hoping to buy all the PMDG products, but after the months of frustration with 747/MD11, think ill keep my peace of mind. Cause if i were to be paid for all the time i spent trying to find work arounds to PMDG a/c bugs, i will be several thousand dollars richer.Now you dont want to release products that make customers feel that way. And if you missed the bug and it found us, then put the information out there alongside all the posts about PMDG Hype. So those looking to buy the product potentially know what to expect. In all honesty if the info about this bug was out there i would have waited for official fix, but will still trust PMDG. But now i will wait few years for others to test your products before i think of buying them.Still When they work, its to a very high standard. Thats why we feel so offended.Jaskan

[JET 1 0]

Just a minute, why should the state of an ILS signal in real world airport have anything to do with FSX airport.

It could, if you're updating your navdata.If the real-world ILS service outage is long-term, the frequency change could be transmitted to the Navdata or procedure files that you install on your aircraft.-kyle