Right, so on the back on the euphoria of discovering how great carrier flying is with Dino's amazing jets, last night I came across an issue I don't recall seeing before:

 

I wanted to expand my naval experience to include some of the NAS bases, so to begin with I downloaded NAS Fallon (freeware), installed it, and took a test flight.  Everything looked great, until I did a flyby of the airport... the runway and the apron were flickering like crazy!  So, thinking it was the new addon that was causing it, I turned it off, loaded up my flight and discovered the default scenery was still flickering.

 

I then realized that I hadn't actually strayed out of Orbx land in a long, long time... I started loading up some default airports at random, it turns out I have major flickering at all of them that I've tried so far... :blink:

 

So, I've been racking my brain trying to figure this out and seeing if I could solve, or at least narrow down the problem.  So far, this is what I've determined:

 

a. Default airports flicker regardless of whether Orbx is turned on or off.

b. Orbx airport textures don't flicker.  This means that it shouldn't be a hardware (video card, ram) problem.

c. Flickering occurs with default slow planes (such as the trike) as well as with fast jets.

d. Flickering occurs with completely clear skies, as well as with normal weather.

e. Flickering occurs with fps limited at 20, as well at 30, 45, unlimited, etc. It seems to be occurring regardless of the load placed on FSX.

 

I run DX9, plus quite a few tweaks, plus the shader 3.0 mod, but I have a hard time thinking it's a tweak-caused issue, since as I mentioned, Orbx regions seem to be perfectly fine.  The fact that the Orbx regions are perfect is what's confusing me!

 

Is this a corrupt texture problem? I've searched through the forum + google and really haven't seen anything relevant. Does anyone have any suggestions?

This will happen if you have DX10 Preview turned on. The flickering has actually been fixed for DX10 Preview and you can find out all about it in the DX10 Forum.

 

Best regards,

Jim

Sorry Jim, I appreciate the tip, but I run DX9.  These flickers are different from DX10 flickers as well - it's hard to explain, but it's like a z-order issue but without the regularity in the flashing. Very random and irregular shaped holes showing the background textures.

 

I think I've all but decided on a FSX re-install at this point. :( At least I have FS9 to fly in the meantime to keep me happy!

Did you accidentally turn DX10 Preview on and didn't realize it?  This problem is definitely associated with DX10.

 

Anytime you have an issue like this, don't uninstall FSX then reinstall it.  The first thing you should do is rename the FSX.cfg to fsx.orig, restart FSX and let the config rebuild.  Do some minor mods to your settings and then run fsx and see if this fixes the problem.

 

Best regards,

Jim

firehawk44, on 22 Mar 2013 - 17:22, said:

Did you accidentally turn DX10 Preview on and didn't realize it? This problem is definitely associated with DX10.

No luck there Jim. I can positively verify that dx10 preview is not running. I've since tried a few more things, including rebuilding my fsx.cfg, deleting the shader chache, reverting to the default shaders, reinstalling ground textures, reinstalling runway & apron textures, all with no luck. I have discovered, however, that it doesn't happen everywhere, as I had previously thought, which is strange.

 

At this point, a fresh reinstall is on it's way.

 

Thanks for trying to help though!

Anytime you have an issue like this, don't uninstall FSX then reinstall it.

Well, I agree, if only for a first thing to fix. But when all else fails, a big hammer fixes everything else!

 

I spent most of the morning scrubbing my system clean of anything remaining, reinstalled and it has fixed the issue. It must of been a corrupt texture issue of some sort.

 

Oh, and this prompted me to finally upgrade my cpu & motherboard, which I also did this weekend, so now my new fresh install is really rocking, and I haven't even overclocked it yet!

Hi Jim,

 

I'm glad you finally got it sorted through a reinstall of FSX.  Sorry no one came up with a solution.  I thought this might be an easy fix.  It was over the weekend though and many all of the ones who knew the solution were laying on a beach somewhere enjoying a weekend with the family.  Thanks for letting us know how you resolved it.  Good luck with your new CPU and Motherboard.  I hope it was a Sandy Bridge or similar system.  FSX doesn't like AMD/ATI as they got really upset with Microsoft for upgrading Windows XP to Vista when FSX was released.  It took them a long, long time to come up with drivers for the new OS whereas Nvidia and Intel released updated drivers almost immediately.  I'm sure that ATI/AMD has released very good drivers since those early days they lost a lot of loyal users.

 

Best regards,

Jim

A bit off topic but I purchased FS Dream Team DFW. Unfortunately, when I am flying the RealAir turbine duke, none of the taxiway lines, markings, or lights show up in a few of the virtual cockpit views. Any ideas?

As you stated... off topic.  I would suggest checking with the KDFW FSDT Forum.  This question may have already been answered there.

 

Best regards,

Jim