Scenery blurries with megascenery

[Guest kurtj]

I posted and asked for help on the megascenery and no one was avail.Basically the scenery will look clear as you takeoff and fly and then it really degrades and becomes awfully blurry. I had edited my fs9.cfg to the recommendations of the fs2004 tips and trick posted in this forum. I have to keep changing from extended textures to non extended and back to extended. This is really frustrating because the website says if your fs2004 works fine with default scenery it should be fine with megascenery, hence no hardware upgrade. That isn't the case at least for me. It works okay with flying cessnas and other slower aircraft, but with airliners which I fly most of the time it just gets blurry.These are the steps that I tried to make it betterI had edited my fs9.cfg with the following lines.Q) How can I improve the look of the ground textures?A) Open your fs9.cfg file, and modify the following lines:TERRAIN_DEFAULT_RADIUS=9.500000TERRAIN_EXTENDED_RADIUS=4.50000I went into the display menu to make framerates to unlimitedI flew out of Lax to the east towards Palm Springs and the tiles just don't seem to always want to load. I then go into the display and turn off extended textures. It will look okay below my plane but not further away. When I fly over the default scenery it is also blurry with or with extended textures for a little bit and then it clears up for the default textures.As you can see I have tried the most concievable things to try to fix this problem to my knowelge of computers. Perhaps it could be my video card which is a 64MB Geforce 3 ti-500 with 4.4.0.3 drivers dated 5/2/2003. If anyone has this card and same drivers and who has megascenery please tell me if you are or aren't having problems with the scenery. Maybe then I could narrow it down to my system.I really hope there is going to be other photo-realistic vendors out there to put some competition with PC-Avaitors Megascenery. It just seems to be a scam but then again it may not be if others have been successful. However there are others like me that have similar problems on the forum and no one seems to have any answers to fix it.Also I know this is fs2002 scenery but I am really considering putting Matt Fox's California scenery into fs2004 if this megascenery just doesn't pan out until I get I new videocard or resolve the problem. Has anyone tried Matt fox's California scenery in fs2004?I would like some advice on how to fix these problems. When the scenery is sharp it is perfect and it really makes for some wonderful screenshots but it has some problems that should be fixed. If anyone knows of a patch to fix this that would be helpful.Any info would be appreciated.Thank You,

[Guest Mike94]

Kurt,these high-resolution sceneries only work best if flown 'slowly' over it. It is mentioned somewhere in the documentation, that it looks best at around 200-250kts max.I think this is the same with all of these photorealistic sceneries, including the VFR scenery of England. When you fly over it too fast, there is not enogh time for the computer to keep up with the rendering of the scenery and its textures, and this results in a more blurry display. Keep in mind, that the SoCal Megascenery alone consists of approx. 75.000 texture files!!And beside of this, i think that a 64MB Video card is not good enough anymore for this kind of sceneries. It sure would work better for you with 128 or even 256MB (128MB ATI 9700pro here).Cheers,Michael

[SQUAWKIDENT 3]

If it helps I have been using the UK VFR Scenery for over a year now and would suggest you keep your speeds down to between 100-150 kts maximum especially using that video card. Also try not to pan around too much - give the PC time to stabilize a view so it can load all the images properly without blurring.Then time to invest in a new vid card. I recommend either a 2nd hand Nividia Ti4800SE (128MB) or a new FX5600 card. Don't like Radeon cards-too buggy with FS.RegardsAdam Moore

[Guest Mike94]

There is nothing buggy at all with a Radeon card in FS! The only thing was the menu-flickering, but this is resolved now with the new CAT 3.9 drivers. -Michael

[Guest allcott]

The card is old, the drivers below those recommended by MS (and therefore reasonable to asusme were rejected as unuitable for a REASON). And you don't provide the rest of your systenm specs.Hardly think you can, at this stage, make any kind of judgement on the software which is clearly designed for better hardware than you possess. Allcott

[John_Cillis 2,406]

One suggestion--try limiting your vis. if you can--try to keep it between 30-40 miles max. That improves the ability to handle photoreal. I had the same problem with my Phoenix photoreal scenery and an old Voodoo card when I first started w/FS2002. Limiting the vis. kept the textures sharp, helping the poor Voodoo which had only 16 megs of RAM. My 400 sq. mile stretch of photoreal scenery had a 20 meg footprint.There is nothing wrong with Megascenery, other than it is "Mega" on the textures. If you ever fly over wide, open spaces using MS's default scenery, such as over the Sahara desert, you'd notice less liklihood of blurring. Go to a place where the textures are more varied (a good example of this is the stretch between SoCal and SFO), and there's more textures to load into texture memory per any given square mile. Slightly more chance of blurring. But load up something like MegaScenery or the UK VFR scenery, and over a couple of thousand square miles you can have 64 megs of textures or more, all unique. My card isn't much different than yours--it's a GeF 4200 (basically a GE F/3 with 128 megs of RAM). It handles photoreal scenery very well, even at speeds commonly flown by jets.Back to my wide open spaces example--I am able to fly treetop between ABQ and El Paso, in an F16, with virtually no dynamic blurring (unless I switch views or pan around too much). -John

[Guest kurtj]

Thank You for the insight guys. I guess I will try to lower my visiblilty and perhaps keep it at 20,000 ft so when I am taking off or approaching perhaps there will be less chance of blurring. I also will be considering a new videocard that could handle it better. Some say going only 200-250 kts is the best while one person says it can handle jet airspeeds so I gather it is just system to system that it varies upon. I know it sure is a huge program and I did have to rename alot of the textures to get it to show year around as well. I also wonder if naming some of the files with the prefix or suffix (I forgot) Sp, Wi, Fa, if some of the textures only got lower case letters if this could have caused problems to when I was using flash renamer.

[Guest cw1011]

I have the product with a 2. 6 gig p4, 764 megs of memory and a Radeon 9700 Pro running the Cat 9 drivers (no bugs here either - I am a very, very satisfied Radeon customer). I am only moderatly satisfied with this product. I have had to resort to reloading the textures during a flight ( and going downstairs to get a beer while the five minute process chugs along ). I get gradual degradation almost every time I fly, regardless of the plane, location, speed etc. Limiting visibility does help - so does flying slow. But the tiles always degrade somewhat. Turning off extended textures is not an option for me. The abrupt change from high def to blurred texture is just too eye catching to be enjoyable. Not worth buying the product if you can only look straight down.A new video card will help. A 4 gig processor would help more...

[vscimone 16]

Turning on extended textures is suicide for some video cards using Mega Scenery. I always turn it off, and use a weather scenario that limits visibility to less than 20 miles. Looks nicer anyway with a little haze :)Vin