Looks like your videocard is having trouble loading textures, which is why you're seeing a lot of this stuff.For some reason (at least on my videocard) when FSX Demo tries to load a texture for a surface (say part of that cruise ship) and can't find the texture, it makes that surface transparent. So a lot of us can't usually see the seagulls and other stuff because they are missing textures. (Why this stuff sometimes shows up in black I don't know.)Those "alien" things are actually parts of the trees. And I don't think those radio towers should be looking like that in the demo either, but I'm not entirely sure if the textures for them are included."Let me help you out. You're cleared to taxi any way you can to any runway you see."

No trawler with birds around.No second passenger liner.No triangles and pillars.But: birds around the lighthouse and the cargoship.nVidia GF FX 6800Haraldh F.

I have seen birds round the light house, complete cars and trucks and the cargo ship they are all black with no textures (no trawler or second liner though). However, I have only seen these things once. I refrehed the scenery because i was getting the blurries(using refresh scenery in all events, i've set it too Ctrl + Shift + R) all of a sudden i went back to seeing no birds, no trucks and cars with just wheel bases! Something is deffinately not right. I am using a FX5900SP 128MB, Athlon 2.8Ghz, 1Gb Ram I am really, really struggling with my system, but I can't say I am surprised to be honest.Rhydian

No second passenger liner..? :-) Rgds Jaap

What's your computer specs? What settings are you using?Thanks,Klas

Yep -I have a Dell P4 - 3.4GHZ, 1GB RAM, GeForce 6800 256MB PCI Video.Nvidia indicates this is a Shader 3.0 capable video card.I've set ALL the sliders (for the Scenery, Traffic tabs) to theright (max setting). I've never seen birds. What was strange isthat I __did__ see the black Trawler (off the left shouldertoward the rear) when taking off from the default airport.However, I only saw it the first 1-3 times. Now, I no longersee it.JerryG

So, has anyone of you who see the birds tried to otganize a birdstrike? Just curious if they really do damage to the plane or can cause a engine failure. If not, they may stay out of my sim :-dohRegards, Gerrit

I don't think that those birds will affect your plane, they are surprisingly simple bits of animated scenery. They're not the full "animals" that will be in the full version. They are actually part of various scenery elements. (Like the trawler, the cruise ship, the lighthouse, etc.)I tried giving them plain white 256x256 DXT5 DDS textures, which kinda worked, and discovered that they seem to be just a few flat rectangles put together and animated.Giving them textures made them (and a few other things I tried that with) visible in the sim, but seemed to cause problems loading other textures so I disabled the textures I created. And I found the texture names by examining scenery BGL files. (The Linux/Cygwin program "strings" was useful there, piping the output to a text file and then searching the text file for .dds in Wordpad.)"Let me help you out. You're cleared to taxi any way you can to any runway you see."

>I never seen a bird, and i spend alot of time looking for>them. I have everything almost maxed out, i get a lot of black>airport vehicles, one moment they are there, the next they are>gone.Are we being cheated of something or pushed to buy into some monster computer if we dream of enjoy all that FSX has to offer? Just tell us the max sys requirement and we will stand to the task! I won't be confined to "leftovers" or at a second-class enjoyment stand.

Hi Klas, Well, the second liner would even be visible on a 33MHz Pentium 2 so specs aren't that important. :-) Since you asked, I'll include my specs below. Nothing exciting... As ACES mentioned, a couple of textures are missing. In the case of the liner, a bit of 'creative re-naming' did it. Re settings (FWIW); almost everything is maxxed except for autogen an AI which are @ 0 and terrain complexity which is one or two notches from the top. Cloud draw distance is also at min plus visibility set to 20 miles via the weather menu. Kind regards Jaap 2 FlyTendos: AMD64 3800 & 3700 (single-cores) on nForce chipsets; 2GBs RAM each; Geforce 6800GT & Radeon X800XL

I had never seen the second liner except for the railings and sun-shades. However, I was playing with my graphics card settings and found it (untextured). However, moving the viewpoint slightly caused it to disappear. (I have never seen the birds).Thanks to for free image hosting.

I get no Birds, or ghost ships usually. Every once in a while I get them as black. I do get vehicles with chassis only all the time except for every once in a while. Also, one more thing, has anyone seen the "dirty" aircraft parking spots? I have twice. Usually I get clean concrete. But twice it looked really neat with oil spots etc and parking outlines. What about trucks? I see them every once in a while as black.My System:Dell E1705Intel T2600 2.16GHz Core Duo2GB 667Mhz Dual Channel RamNvidia 256MB 7800 GTX goMy Example:

More Examples:

The fishing boat, the second ocean liner, baggage carts, all kinds of textures are missing. Radio stations? Not there either. 'Ani' files (I guess those are the animals) are missing too, etc, etc. I've never seen those black objects. How do you achieve that? Over here I only see transparent outlines of those black objects. Looks pretty cool! :-) Kind regards Jaap

>The fishing boat, the second ocean liner, baggage carts, all>kinds of textures are missing. Radio stations? Not there>either. 'Ani' files (I guess those are the animals) are>missing too, etc, etc. >>I've never seen those black objects. How do you achieve that?>Over here I only see transparent outlines of those black>objects. Looks pretty cool! :-) >>Kind regards >>Jaap I got all those black objects to appear after restarting FSX over and over they eventually appear, very rare and random though.Usually dont get them.I just loaded the Demo on my slower desktop(celeron d) and it has a Radeon 9250 PCI 256MB card, and I get all the textures to appear, just grey. With my Nvidia card I dont get anywhere near the same thing.One last thought. All the things that appear grey with my Radeon card dont appear with the Nvidia at all, However It may be because they are grey and without textures. All the fully textured items appear using both cards, thus I have concluded that maybe in the final version they will be visible because they will have final actual textures...maybe.. :)