Misty Fjords textures

[brucewtb 247]

I was going to post this on the Misty Fjords forum but it seems my registration application for that forum has vanished into the ether.While overall this addon is a very impressive piece of work I find that if you don't enable water effects the water textures are extremely dark - almost black. I know this is supposed to be deep water but I assume it isn't that dark. Furthermore if you enable water effects the textures are much lighter. Is there some way of fixing this? Enabling water effects on my system nearly halves FPS and oftentimes looks worse.I think if you came to this package having only used default mesh and scenery you would be blown away with it. But if like me you had flown a lot through the area with Raimondo Taburet's freeware 38.2 mesh and extremely dense autogen (which mean lots of trees) enabled the improvement is more subtle. The best features are streambeds that (mostly) flow through the middle of valleys instead of up the sides and rivers that look like rivers. The glaciers are an improvement also.Bruceb

[Guest bobsk8]

You will probably find the answer on the Misty Fjords Forum. I switched my water textures to another called waterzone.zip which you can find on this web site, and the combination of that plus turning on the lowest amount of water effects, made the water perfect. It has something to do with some video cards, and the one on my PC was one of them. You should be able to re-register on the forum very easily. I have been flying flight sims for a couple of decades , and have never seen any scenery as nice as Misty Fjords. It , and my Aerosoft Beaver, have got me back into into really flying again using pilotage and all the skills I learned when getting my license. I even enjoy touch and goes.

[JimmiG 244]

If you set water effects to Low you'll get the reflection map but no bumps. This should have very little impact on your framerate...if you still get low frames something else must be wrong because I got good fps on a 1.6 GHz laptop with 64MB graphics using Low effcts.I think it's a *huge* improvement over anything previously available. It's so much more than just mesh, which is just elevation data and *nothing* more. With the MF addon, lakes, waterways and rivers take on a whole new appearance, the replacement textures are far more realistic, the landclass is a huge improvement etc. It's a complete landscape addon, not just a grid of elevation points.

[Holger 0]

Hi Bruce,the water hue and color visible from the air depends greatly on the time of day and weather conditions as well as the sediment content and depth of the water itself. I tried to make the water colors and their distribution across the landscape as realistic as possible (using real-color satellite imagery as a guide) but FS does have its limitations and tastes differ among users so it's perfectly fine to have different preferences. Here's a link to a thread that provides you with various options for changing water textures in Misty Fjords: http://forums.simflight.com/viewtopic.php?t=34159And, for comparison, here are some photos of the real-world Misty Fjords area: http://www.familyairtours.com/page7_photos.htmAs for the level of improvement: add-on mesh and dense autogen can make a landscape look impressive but, other than the elevation data, it is not any more realistic than the default terrain. That's what all the other features of Misty Fjords are meant to achieve. And those things are the tricky bits because compiling an add-on mesh from readily available data takes way less than one percent of the time it takes to do "the rest" of the landscape ;-)It's always fun to temporarily disable Misty Fjords and fly across the default landscape again - even with a third-party add-on mesh. Cheers, Holger

[brucewtb 247]

Thanks for the links and the family tours photos there are great - one day I will get to this part of the world. I agree the water in real life is dark but lightened with reflections which you only get in FS9 with effects enabled. If you are not using water effects then the overall effect is too dark in FS9 IMHO. Going halfway with low water effects is an option (no FPS impact) but not all that satisfactory without bump mapping. Unfortunately I haven't got any emails back regarding my Misty fjords forum membership and at the moment your link above doesn't work so I can't even get into the forum to browse. Congratulations on this scenery (and the Columbia River Gorge). I guess the point I was making is that finding all the enhancements takes a bit of discovery which of course is part of the charm.Bruceb

[Holger 0]

Hi Bruce,seems like simFlight is down right now. Try again later and if it still doesn't work send me an email or PM and I'll send you a copy of the thread I mentioned.Thanks on the congrats!Cheers, Holger

[brucewtb 247]

Thanks Holger. I now have the email back from simflight with the forum stuff but the link is still down for me at least as at 1120 zulu 5/3/05.Bruceb