I know this is a fairly common problem, but can anyone say what the most common causes of this happening with 3rd. party sceneries are?

 

Latest case: I installed a scenery of CYAM. As I explored after installation, all was fine. But flying into CYAM, the ground textures only appear as my a/c moves forward, the 3rd. party ground textures appearing (or disappearing, at a number of other airports) at the same speed as you taxi forwards.. I took some screenshots, but I guess most people will know what I am talking about. I am very far from the first to post about this.

 

I landed at CYAM as dusk was setting in and in front of me was just a large, dark rectangle - the taxiway markings and ground textures from the CYAM scenery were showing up 100ms in front of the plane as I moved forward. Very hard to see where I was going at all...

 

Is this fixable? Why does it only happen on arrival and never on departure? Sometimes creating a flatten for the whole airport helps, if you are lucky.

 

Advice welcome as this error ruins enough flights (a small percentage, but even so) for it to be a bit of a pain now,

 

Thanks,

 

Martin

..a couple of screenshots anyway!...

 

 

 

 

 

 

The most common cause for this problem is a duplicate afcad.

 

Sometimes a previously installed scenery of the airport or area uses an altitude correction file (usually placed in one of the main scenery subfolders) and if not removed if the scenery is deleted or replaced it often conflicts with the default or a newer scenery. 

 

Lastly, some mesh scenery, have been the culprit and a flatten file may help, and sometimes a change to the terrain_max_vertex file in the fs.cfg might be the cause.

Hi I have encountered exactly the same problem at CYAM and I find if I check ground scenery casts shadows box it fixes the issue. I only use this remedy when flying into CYAM. Hope this helps some. Dave

No duplicate AFCAD (and in this case I have had no other CYAM sceneries installed).

 

I have checked 'Ground scenery casts shadows', in case that makes any difference.

 

As for mesh, I have a complete set of FSGenesis mesh. Could that be a problem?

 

Thanks,

 

Martin

Hi,

 

I follow this thread with interest because I have the same problem with some airports, a freeware add-on for UAFM from avsimrus (search for UAFM under FS2004 sceneries there) and a scenery of EDAB (from M. Spenglers East German Airfield collection) as most difficult cases.

 

I have had a certain success in solving the problem for UAFM by adjusting the airport and runway elevetion using Afcad 2.21 resp ADE. "Certain success" means that the effect was eliminated at startup and got slighter when landing.

I recently tried to insert a flatten area (both via ADE as well via an entry in scenery.cfg) for UAFM but now all AI planes sank into the ground. This lets me believe in an elevation mismatch inside the scenery itself or indeed a conflict with a mesh, but it seems to be not curable with a flatten entry as a part of the scenery code itself seems to be adjusted to standard- or even another mesh. (Developers should specifiy which mesh they used.) So that one has to find the "internal elevation" of a certain airport and to adjust afcad and flatten to show it correctly.

 

I had no success at all with EDAB; as soon as I adjusted the afcad at the same height as a flatten entry the ground textures were hidden. Otherwise, if I define no flatten entry, all is fine except AI planes hanging in the air (but my own user aircraft does not!). In this case, I decided to live with the problem as there is no better EDAB out there.

 

But I'm still hoping for a final solution...

 

Regards, Harald

I sometimes remove the bgl file which creates the ground textures - to have the default FS9 texture is better than putting up with this peeling effect. Not always possible though, depending on what was already there.

 

I hope the scenery 'gurus' might have some more input on this..

 

Martin

If an airport has a flatten it should not matter what mesh you are using. the flatten will trump the mesh.

 

As for sinking AI, when you change an airport elevation you need to place a copy of the afcad in ...\Scenery\World\scenery to get AI to respect the change.

 

Rolling custom ground textures are almost always SCASM ground polys that are set to be a hair above the ground so the default ground textures don't bleed through. Getting the airport elevation correct so this doesn't happen is challenging at best. Sometimes close is as good as you can get.

 

I believe this is due to rounding differences in the way that FS calculates elevation. 

 

regards,

Joe

For UAFM I have now set a flatten just 3 ft below the airport elevation as defined within the afcad file. It looks good at startup; will have to fly there to test its appearance at approach.

 

No success with EDAB; if I put the afcad into Scenery\World\scenery, it is overwritten by parking definitions obviously hardcoded within the *.bgl files in the scenery. Afcad 2.2.1 accepts none of them as true afcad file.

 

Testing goes on...

 

Thanks!

Harald

Harald, have you tried removing bgl files in small batches until you find the one that is putting the ground texture on top of the FS9 default textures? As Joe says, they are often written to be so close to the FS9 ground texture elevation that the latter can leak through. If you are familiar with SCASM, it is relatively easy to decompile and then edit the bgl file, in the event that it contains other data that you don't want to lose. You can even set the bgl to have the textures below the default (so they become invisible). For the most part these poly bgl files have nothing else in them though. (Just occasionally this is not possible with photoreal sceneries, as there is no texture beneath the 3rd. party photo at all, but that is a rare exception).

 

If you don't use SCASM and bgl decompilers, and have some time to investigate, it's well worth it. More than half my airport errors wouldn't have been fixed without this resource. I'd be happy to tell you what you need (all freeware), if you are interested. Plenty of info on Google of course. (Or maybe you are an old hand at all this anyway!).

 

As I said, I'd rather lose the 3rd. party ground texture and have the original, rather than have this flashing and peeling back when I land. I have done this to my CYYZ installation (which prompted this post) and managed to keep most ground markings, whilst removing a darkening layer which had been superimposed across the airport aprons.. and all is now fine.

 

Martin

Hi Martin,

 

fine that your CYYZ works again.

 

Unfortunately, I have no knowledge in SCASM and bgl compilers at all. It would be a new dimension for my flightsimming experience.

Momentarily I have to handle some problems related to my recent change WinXP --> Win7, but after this I will investigate further into our problem here.

Especially at EDAB I tried many variants of removing and adding back .bgl files without success. This is a rather simple scenery with just a handful of these files. I have either the incorrect elevations (peeling textures or AI aircraft hanging in the air) or no airport at all. So the problem there must be hardcoded in one of the .bgl files.

 

Harald