Recently did a coastal flight which was going okay until I decided it might be nice to go down low and fly alongside the cliffs. It wasn’t. It was horrible. The cliffs just couldn’t decide what shape they wanted to be, and were constantly morphing. This was up pretty close, maybe 100-150 yards away.  It was so ridiculous, and immersion killing, that I had to climb back up to get away from them. What setting determines how to calm this down a bit? I’m currently running in VR with a 5950X, and a 3090. Settings are fairly high on the whole.

The issue is there since USA update (December). No idea if / when it will be fixed and there's no setting to improve it. 

It may be connected to the coastline glitch, of which nobody talks about anymore as well 😞

 

1 minute ago, MrFuzzy said:

The issue is there since USA update (December).

Been there way before that. Looks like it was inherited from FSX....

Be careful, complaining about this can get people to start calling you a drama queen.

This morphing issue appeared with the USA World Update, and was further exaggerated with the UK World Update when the coastlines were pushed inside the mesh (workaround for the water creeping up). Unfortunately, the only way you can slightly mitigate the issue, is pushing the Terrain Level of Detail slider to 200, or even higher in the UserCfg.opt file. It won't resolve the morphing, but it will be moved further away from your camera's position making it less noticeable.

Asobo have not officially commented on this issue. I would recommend sending a Zendesk report and upvoting this thread in the official forums:

https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/mountains-and-coastlines-continually-changing-shape-morphing-and-popping-up-and-down-not-terrain-spikes/339453

I was about to post the thread that MrFuzzy appended above as well, it's a good discussion of the issue, however you can see what happens if you talk about it in public.

Edited March 26, 20215 yr by ChaoticBeauty

Another weird issue. I do not see the morphing which was a bane in P3D, or very rarely.  All the more incomprehensible that I have an older hardware. I do not complain, mind you ! But this is strange. I see the creeping water, I see still some spikes not the morphing.

9 minutes ago, Dominique_K said:

Another weird issue. I do not see the morphing which was a bane in P3D, or very rarely.  All the more incomprehensible that I have an older hardware. I do not complain, mind you ! But this is strange. I see the creeping water, I see still some spikes not the morphing.

It's strange because the spikes are 100% fixed apparently... I have flown a lot in Europe and USA lately and couldn't see them anymore.

The morphing terrain instead is very evident. Can you really fly on the Alps, let's say Milan to Innsbruck, and not see it?!

Yep definitely a ton of “cliff/coast terrain LOD morph in front of your eyes”going on. Thought it may have only been a VR render thing..I guess not.

 

Edited March 26, 20215 yr by blueshark747

Definitely an issue since the updates.  I flew around Dover this morning on a flight from Le Touquet to Biggin to have a look at some of the global shipping traffic and it was irritating to say the least 

It's such a shame.  They put loads of texturing work into the White Cliffs of Dover etc., but they move about to such a degree that you don't want to look at them.
I see this constantly on one of my test runs between Sedona and Flagstaff.  The mountains / hills constantly morph about, and not just by a little bit!

I have tried all of the LOD and mesh settings right up to the limits, but nothing really mitigates it.

It has been a feature of a lot of sims, but I think we notice it more in MSFS as the graphics can be so good and sharp at the right settings.
I wonder what causes the morphing and what can be done about it?

27 minutes ago, MrFuzzy said:

It's strange because the spikes are 100% fixed apparently... I have flown a lot in Europe and USA lately and couldn't see them anymore.

The morphing terrain instead is very evident. Can you really fly on the Alps, let's say Milan to Innsbruck, and not see it?!

Most of them are fixed but you can find some piercing through  in mountainous regions, in PNG for instance. 

 I will check in the Alps on this route.

I had Yosemite landmarks rocks popping up at the last moment last night, while trying to fly between one 5 fps black zone and the other

 

12 minutes ago, bobcat999 said:

I wonder what causes the morphing and what can be done about it?

I think they broke the mesh interpolation at lower levels of detail when implementing the higher-quality mesh for the USA World Update. After lots of testing I think it's definitely related to the coastline glitch, because sometimes mountain peaks can acquire the same distinct sawtooth pattern.

While I don't think the morphing can be entirely gone without brute forcing the highest level of detail as far as the eye can see (though of course someday it will be possible), it can be made a lot better. Before the USA World Update, you wouldn't see entire mountains shifting up and down or completely changing shape. In the thread that erick created he posted some good examples of certain terrain features being split in distinct objects (which means the simulator is doing a poor job at interpolating the distance between the mesh points), and my videos showcase the shifting mountains and sawtooth-shaped peaks at different Terrain Level of Detail values. It was not nearly as bad before.

After so many months I'm starting to feel somewhat worried that not much will be done. Asobo have not commented on this at all, and it doesn't help that if you complain about this, you will have deniers saying "the simulator is perfect, you are blind/drama queen/boomer".  I'm just hoping that they will look into this while fixing the coastline glitch, and that the video from the latest Q&A is from a future branch and not from a pre-Alpha build.

22 minutes ago, Dominique_K said:

Most of them are fixed but you can find some piercing through  in mountainous regions, in PNG for instance.

Are you getting the kind of spikes that disappear as you get closer or the more persistent ones? I saw some spikes in the Norwegian fjords the other day. They were very distinct at a distance, as I got closer they completely disappeared, and up close they appeared again but they were flatter, less spikey.

1 hour ago, ChaoticBeauty said:

Be careful, complaining about this can get people to start calling you a drama queen.

This morphing issue appeared with the USA World Update, and was further exaggerated with the UK World Update when the coastlines were pushed inside the mesh (workaround for the water creeping up). Unfortunately, the only way you can slightly mitigate the issue, is pushing the Terrain Level of Detail slider to 200, or even higher in the UserCfg.opt file. It won't resolve the morphing, but it will be moved further away from your camera's position making it less noticeable.

Asobo have not officially commented on this issue. I would recommend sending a Zendesk report and upvoting this thread in the official forums:

https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/mountains-and-coastlines-continually-changing-shape-morphing-and-popping-up-and-down-not-terrain-spikes/339453

I was about to post the thread that MrFuzzy appended above as well, it's a good discussion of the issue, however you can see what happens if you talk about it in public.

Thanks for the link. I’ll definitely go and upvote it. And thanks, everybody, for the input. At least it’ll save me the grief of needless playing around in the settings.

A quick flight out of LOWI toward Samedan, nothing. I do not fly the Alps that are  not very well rendered IMO  : mesh, colors etc. But I do not remember having seen the morphing  in other mountainous/hilly regions either. 

Went to check the Dover Cliffs. Yes there was some ugly morphing there and  MFS also took its sweet time to paint the texture on them.   A lousy job.

10 minutes ago, ChaoticBeauty said:

 

Are you getting the kind of spikes that disappear as you get closer or the more persistent ones? I 

They were like peaks piercing though the mountainous terrain. Only the top was visible but clear anomalies. Persistent.