Environment Force Discussion Thread

[Mo45 32]

I am still using the Flight Environment X 2.0 Series for p3d 4.4, works and looks good.

[threexgreen 3,135]

5 minutes ago, Pete Dowson said:

I'm afraid it made no difference for me, except for the 30%+ degradation in frame rates and stuttery performance. Need the P3D4.5 Hotfix for that, I know.

I actually went back to 4.4.

I seems EF can really mess with your sim. Most people seem to be good and enjoying the product but for me it's been the opposite. Instead of three days flying I spent three days trying to get EF to run properly. And I'm still left with half my frame rate when EF is running.

[geolpilot 88]

@Pete Dowson

As I understand it you have;

- Disabled the Rex Entry in the ProgramData dll.xml

- Replaced the original shaders from a back into P3D Root / ShadersHLSL folder (Updating to 4.5 Client should have done that anyhow).

- Cleared the Shader Cache

- do not at the moment have any other shader utilities (PTA / ENVshade active)

When you run P3D now (after a reboot), and you get these dark ground textures / greyish skies, have you checked Options/Graphics/Lighting to see if;

• HDR is ON
• the Brightness/Bloom/Saturation sliders are as you had them before using EF (perhaps you have a saved, custom graphics profile you can reload?). Maybe these have been left set to EF values, giving you the strange lighting effects.
• That moving these sliders is having an effect on your P3D display. I usually test by turning Saturation way down and see if I get a monochrome view, or way up to see if I get vivid colors.

If the sliders no longer work, I am at a loss to assist further then, as it seems that in that case REX is using some other P3D control file (not only the aforementioned dll.xml) to "lock" these HDR lighting settings.

Rob

 

 

 

 

[Pete Dowson 558]

1 minute ago, geolpilot said:

When you run P3D now (after a reboot), and you get these dark ground textures / greyish skies, have you checked Options/Graphics/Lighting to see if;

• HDR is ON
• the Brightness/Bloom/Saturation sliders are as you had them before using EF (perhaps you have a saved, custom graphics profile you can reload?). Maybe these have been left set to EF values, giving you the strange lighting effects.
• That moving these sliders is having an effect on your P3D display. I usually test by turning Saturation way down and see if I get a monochrome view, or way up to see if I get vivid colors.

HDR is on. The sliders do appear to work, to the extent I can get brighter or darker skies. But none of the sliders give me anything but black for ground, white for autogen, and different brightness grays for sky. Clouds are shades of gray to white too, but they pretty much always are.

Something other than what is in the Shaders folders is having an effect, and i've no idea what.

I'm just about to install ENVSHADE to see if that can bring proper colouring back.

Pete

 

[geolpilot 88]

3 minutes ago, Pete Dowson said:

about to install ENVSHADE to see if that can bring proper colouring back.

Hope that does the trick then Pete.

[geolpilot 88]

2 hours ago, Nyxx said:

I totally agree EF should have a rest button. That should return P3D at to pre-EF and it should never persist when you don't even have EF open, to lock out HRD within P3D is just wrong.

I've said this many time. It's just wrong.

Yes indeed. As an addon that was advertised to operate outside of the sim and leave it unaffected by changes made within EF, this should have been a priority. REX support is good so no doubt they will fix it, but they really could have saved themselves a lot of forum activity / replies to problems had such a reset or EF ON/OFF button been present from first release.

[geolpilot 88]

1 hour ago, threegreen said:

EF steals half my frame rate as soon as it's cloudy which is simply unnacceptable

I had this happen in one of my tests to see if ASP4 was controlling cloud morphing / lighting. At Kolkuta, India as Cyclone Fani was passing. FPS when down from 30 to 15 sometimes as low as 10 (P3D Vsynced, unlimited, to my 30Hz 4K screen). I saw a post on the REX forums last night that this is due to setting the "Enable Dense Cirrus Overcast Layer" to ON. Apparently this results in a huge number of cloud model vertices having to be processed, with a dramatic effect on frame rate.

[Nyxx 6,993]

Well, first full test flight done, I will let you decide if it looks good or not.

No FPS problems at all, take off from EHAM was very smooth. I did see really bad bloom so I simply turned EF HDR off in the mini UI and that give P3D HDR Control back. Sorted! REX needs to add full control of bloom so you can set at zero if you wish their sliders don't have enough range. Should be an easy fix.

EHAM to EGGP EZY87BF

Braking through.

Decent

 

Gate 2

Edited May 5, 2019 by Nyxx

[ARCO 245]

2 hours ago, Pete Dowson said:

Enabled SkyForce and ASCA. 

Pete could this be your problem? I have ASCA, ENVTEX, ENVSHADE and SkyForce, and before running Environment Force for the first time, I asked on the REX support forum if I could run all these texture software jointly so as to take full benefit of REF, the REX support staff asked me to make a choice, either ASCA and ENVTEX, or SkyForce, but avoid running both as it could lead to undesirable results (no further explanation as to what this could mean). I opted to fly my first flight with AS4, SkyForce and Environment Force, and had no problem. However, I made sure to uninstall all textures from ASCA and ENVTEX first and of course did not start them. I also left SkyForce closed as suggested.

Edited May 5, 2019 by Jean-Claude

[Pete Dowson 558]

1 hour ago, geolpilot said:

Hope that does the trick then Pete.

Well, I Imade sure I had the latest ENVSHADE (and ENVTEX whilst I was at it) by re-downloading them from my original purchase account, then installed them. They said they needed an up-to-date ENVDIR! Is that correct?

So I got that and installed it too. But when I run it, nothing happens. it doesn't start!

There appears to the no EXE's for ENVTEX or ENVSHADE that I can run.

😞 I just don't understand what is going on. Giving up till tomorrow ...

Pete

 

[Pete Dowson 558]

10 minutes ago, Jean-Claude said:

Pete could this be your problem? I have ASCA, ENVTEX, ENVSHADE and SkyForce, and before running Environment Force for the first time, I asked on the REX support forum if I could run all these texture software jointly so as to take full benefit of REF, the REX support staff asked me to make a choice, either ASCA and ENVTEX, or SkyFo

11 minutes ago, Jean-Claude said:

However, I made sure to uninstall all textures from ASCA and ENVTEX first and of course did not start them. I also left SkyForce closed as suggested.

rce, but avoid running both as it could lead to undesirable results (no further explanation as to what this could mean).

I was only running ASCA and SKYFORCE before.

12 minutes ago, Jean-Claude said:

I made sure to uninstall all textures from ASCA and ENVTEX first and of course did not start them. I also left SkyForce closed as suggested.

Well, I didn't delete any textures. How would they get loaded without the supporting program running? I don't think i'd know where to look in any case. I wanted to leave ASCA installed but just disabled so I could re-enable it if I didn't like EF (as others here have done). 

As it is going back to what i had before hasn't worked. Only grey and white still, with what i would say was the exact configuration I had before I started with EF!

Pete

 

[mpo910 2,112]

2 hours ago, Pete Dowson said:

HDR is on. The sliders do appear to work, to the extent I can get brighter or darker skies. But none of the sliders give me anything but black for ground, white for autogen, and different brightness grays for sky. Clouds are shades of gray to white too, but they pretty much always are.

Something other than what is in the Shaders folders is having an effect, and i've no idea what.

I'm just about to install ENVSHADE to see if that can bring proper colouring back.

Pete

 

Pete  I  unimstalled the client and also repaired the content after uninstalled and deleted Rex EF AND its leftovers. Only that gave me full control back. Please try and report back. Regards Marcus

Edited May 5, 2019 by mpo910

[Pete Dowson 558]

51 minutes ago, mpo910 said:

Pete  I  unimstalled the client and also repaired the content after uninstalled and deleted Rex EF AND its leftovers. Only that gave me full control back. Please try and report back. Regards Marcus

Ah, I've not tried "repairing" content. Interesting. do you know which content files got 'repaired'?

I don't just want full control, I want some light on the ground and colour in the sky too! 😉

I'm relaxing this evening. will give it all another try in the morning, before making a full report on the Rex forum.

BTW can anyone confirm whether the "Technical updated #1" for EF was the awaited HotFix?  I can't seen to find out. their "awaiting hotfix" support thread is still up but closed.

Pete

 

[kurtb 118]

2 hours ago, geolpilot said:

I had this happen in one of my tests to see if ASP4 was controlling cloud morphing / lighting. At Kolkuta, India as Cyclone Fani was passing. FPS when down from 30 to 15 sometimes as low as 10 (P3D Vsynced, unlimited, to my 30Hz 4K screen). I saw a post on the REX forums last night that this is due to setting the "Enable Dense Cirrus Overcast Layer" to ON. Apparently this results in a huge number of cloud model vertices having to be processed, with a dramatic effect on frame rate.

"Enable Dense Cirrus Overcast Layer" to ON - if I may ask, where do i find this setting?

[Lenny777 299]

2 hours ago, Nyxx said:

I simply turned EF HDR off in the mini UI

Where is that? I don't see it. The bloom for auto is terrible. I just want to turn it off in EF and have P3D control it.

Edited May 5, 2019 by Lenny777