Terrain and Scenery all Messed Up

[RKillins 1]

I went to fly out of my local airport this evening, CYKF (Kitchener-Waterloo, ON, Canada) and was shocked that the scenery was so wrong. The default FSX was much better than what I had encountered tonight.

 

Here is the terrain directly around CYKF.

There should be a river to the south. There are no roads. There are no urban areas depicted, of which there are metro areas to the south, east and west. What's with the desert look?

 

 

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Here is Waterloo Region

 

 

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And here is southern Ontario ...

Messed up. Brutal great lakes coastlines (if any)

 

 

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Can anyone advise what has went wrong??

[Jim Young 2,356]

It could be a layering problem. I suspect you have an addon called cykf and, if it is sitting below UTX (for instance) you'll have major issues like this. Don't have any idea what you have installed but, if you do have UTX installed, let us know.

 

Best regards,

Jim

[RKillins 1]

Hi Jim .. I have just realized this is not isolated to CYKF. This effect happens at any airport I choose.

 

I am using Ultimate Terrain Canada. I have Orbx sceneries as well, and have set Orbx Central scenery to FSX default.

 

[jalexb88 7]

Hi had a problem like this when I installed SbuilderX which put in a modified terrain.cfg file in the main FSX folder. Do you or an addon modify this file, the Terrain.cfg in the main FSX folder? I had a backup and restored it and everything was fine afterwards.

 

Alex Bart

[RKillins 1]

Hmmm ...

//---------------------------------------------------------------------------
// This is a modified version of the default FSX terrain.cfg !!!
//
// It combines new entries for ORBX's Full Terrain EXperience (FTX) Australia
// -- http://fullterrain.com/ --
//
// with modifications proposed by Richard Ludowise and Luis F�liz-Tirado
// -- http://library.avsim.net/esearch.php?CatID=fsxscen&DLID=93289 --
//
// v1.0, January 2008
//---------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

I have a backed up terrain file but it seems like it might be quite old. Not sure if I use an old backup how it will impact my newly added scenery addons )ie Orbx Australia which I think this modification affects) if at all. Don't want to make things worse.

[jalexb88 7]

Maybe you can back up your newest terrain.cfg, then try the old backup you speak of, if it is worse than you still have the newest one backed up...

 

Alex Bart

[FloG 148]

Try disabling Ultimate Terrain and re-enable it. That seems to do the trick quite often.

 

Flo

[Benjamin J 751]

You obviously have a problem with your coastlines, now tell me: do you have any roads and rivers? Are cars driving over "nothing", so to speak?

 

If yes, then I know this problem because I had it many times, always after installing Horizon's VFR Photographic Scenery. I always solved it by reverting to an older version of my terrain.cfg file, which is the file that tells FSX about coastlines, roads, rivers, what texture to use for what landclass, etc. Something corrupted that file, and as such, I got what you are seeing now. It's a global thing, not related to UTX. If you go back to an older version of the terrain.cfg, everything should return to normal.

[RKillins 1]

It would appear Ultimate Terrain Canada was the culprit in this case. Reverting back to my backed-up terrain.cfg didn't resolve the situation so, I followed Flo's advice and it worked. This leads me to another question (maybe more than 1). I use Active Sky 2012, which allows me to customize scenery textures, which I believe UT does as well. Do the two work together? Or will they conflict? How do I know which application is rendering the scenery? Should I get rid of UT?

 

I had to reposition the different UT modules in my scenery library to get things back to normal, but I still don't have any urban environments, despite such being active in the UT setup dialogue. Where there should be a city, is just trees. I have roads, streams, railways etc ... just no urban areas.

[Jim Young 2,356]

Hi Jim .. I have just realized this is not isolated to CYKF. This effect happens at any airport I choose.

 

It appears you have CYKF in the AddOn Scenery folder and that is sitting way below UTX and all these other Canadian sceneries/mesh/whatever and they are trumping anything in your Addon Scenery folder. You just need to move your AddonScenery up higher.

 

Best regards,

Jim

[RKillins 1]

Hi Jim ... I don't have any CYKF addon scenery. I'll move the addon scenery entry up though in the scenery library. Still no urban terrain anywhere.

[HUSSAR 272]

Have a look at my scenery.cfg referencing UT entries, hopefully it helps:

 

http://forum.avsim.net/topic/385923-some-scenery-questions/page__st__25#entry2495977

[scott967 62]

I'm pretty sure both UTX and Orbx FTX config programs, when you run them, will go through your terrain.cfg and add in any entries that they require. So if you ever have to reset terrain.cfg to default (or install the modded one that SBuilderX offers) you must rerun those configs. The only other one that I recall is some of Holger Sandmann's stuff from before FTX NA also did terrain.cfg mods and I think you would have to do a re-install of his scenery to get those entries back in.

 

scott s.

.

[quantumleap 1]

It is clear from the screenshots that you posted of your FSX Scenery Library that you are manually moving entries around without much understanding of the consequences. The UTX entries are in completely the wrong order and would not have been installed in that relative order. The changes you have manually made in this ordering are causing the majority of the issues you are seeing.

 

There is a section in the UTX Canada manual which was installed with the product which discusses how UTX interacts with the FSX Scenery Library. While you would not need most of this if the relative ordering had not been changed from how the UTX installer placed them, it offers such critical advice as (my emphasis):

 

- "The ‘UT Exclusions For Default Scenery’ layer is critical. This layer contains special scenery files that will exclude the default FSX features that are being replaced by Ultimate Terrain. This layer must always be below every other Ultimate Terrain entry. It must be above the default FSX scenery layers, with the last layer normally being the ‘Addon Scenery’ layer or the “Propeller Objects’ layer.

 

- The three Ultimate Terrain landclass layers must always be in the following order.

· UT Landclass – Custom

· UT Landclass – Urban

· UT Landclass – Vegetation

The Custom landclass layer must be on the top, followed by the urban layer. The vegetation layer must be below the urban and custom layers.

 

The manual also shows screenshots of the correct relative ordering of the UTX layers in the FSX Scenery Library.

 

For more information, head over to the official UTX support forum on SimForums.

 

Jeff

[RKillins 1]

Hi Jeff, thank you for the reply. I continue to still have issues with the corrupted terrain. I've re-ordered the scenery library as suggested to reflect UTX required order, but the terrain and overhead views are still corrupt.

 

 

In an attempt to debug, I have tried disabling "Jim Dhaenen's Scenery Objects", "Edwards_AFB", "Ontario Default Landclass" and "Ontario Custom Farmland Landclass" entries with little change. The problem appears to be within Canada only, however, I've included screenshots of both the US and the UK as I'm not sure if the dark water is normal or part of the corruption.

 

Georgian Bay, Ontario Canada

 

Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada

 

Boston, Massachusetts, USA

 

United Kingdom

 

Is anyone able to help me figure this frustrating situation out? Thank you in advance.