Mount Everest and other mountains pop up and are moving

[Glenn Fitzpatrick 3,799]

It has nothing to do with bandwidth.

One of the ways they achieved the huge memory reduction in SU5 was change how caching worked.

Pre SU 5 on PC  -   if you looked at something and turned away the hi res details were cached so when you look back later you had no pop ins or loading delays. I believe they may have also pre-emptively cached scenery out of your current view to reduce pop-in effects.  Basically all the scenery in all direction was cached, not just the view you were looking at currently. This caused memory issues for people on old machines with only 8GB or less of RAM

Now with SU 5 on both XBox and PC  -   The hi res details of anything you are looking at are NOT cached, caching was disabled to improve performance for people with old systems, so if you look away and then look back again to the same view as before, your game needs to load the hi res details all over again. There is also no pre-emptive caching of scenery you are not actually currently looking at. They also reduced LOD substantially which exasperated the issue.

This change is not conjecture, it was outlined in detail in the developer interview linked here at AVSIM just a few days back.

The hotfix may possibly wind back some of those changes, in the mean time increasing LOD manually to 300 or 400 and resisting the temptation to pan around to look at the scenery will help.

Edited August 7, 2021 by Glenn Fitzpatrick

[TheDuderino 1]

Ok but I have rolling cache with 8 gigs enabled on my xbox series s, does this nothing? Or should I increase the gigabyte ?

I already have the hotfix installed and imo it has become worse. And how do you increase LOD on a Xbox series S? Only option in graphics I have is hdr, which I have greyed out, why I assume my TV cant handle that.

[TheDuderino 1]

And btw did you see the video, ? just want to make sure it works 

[Glenn Fitzpatrick 3,799]

2 hours ago, TheDuderino said:

And btw did you see the video, ? just want to make sure it works 

Video works.

It is similar to what I get flying in the Swiss Alps on a 9900K RTX 3070 with 32GB RAM so it is not just an XBox issue.

Though admittedly I do have the FSDT Switzerland 20 m mesh installed which probably makes the issue worse for me.  I had their 10m mesh but even on my upper mid range machine post SU5  still got stutters occasionally so went back to the 20m.  One unexpected plus side of the pop-ins I suppose is it shows just how inaccurate the default mesh for the alps actually is. It must be 50m or something horrible.

Edited August 7, 2021 by Glenn Fitzpatrick

[TheDuderino 1]

Yeah I watched a streamer with a 150k bandwith and playing on a xbox series x. And he flew in the exactly same area and had maybe 1 or 2 popups. But when I was flying in that area I had always a ton of pop ups and mountain terrain changing. I just cant enjoy scenery like Grand Canyon anymore, when everywhere on the screen is something moving on the mountain or something pops up or a black area appears and disappears on a mountain. So how can it be that he who's playing on a series x does literally have no mountain changing or morphing, and I have it constantly altough I also playing on a console even if it's the series ?. I mean graphic wise you cant control much, so it has to be the bandwith right? Otherwise he would have the same problem or?

[ChaoticBeauty 6,692]

6 hours ago, TheDuderino said:

The mountain morphing is so horrible. What can that be?

It's not a problem with your system(s) or your bandwidth. The terrain morphing has always been a problem, and subsequent updates have greatly exaggerated it.

The reasons this happens is because the LOD distances are too close to the camera (this started with the USA World Update), and the lower terrain levels of detail do not retain shape very well, which is why this pop-in is so noticeable (this is getting worse with newer DEM, like Norway with the Nordics World Update).

The explanation about the scenery caching after Sim Update 5 is correct, but what I'm seeing in your video is the usual morphing even when the camera is not panning around. On PC, you can somewhat mitigate this by increasing the Terrain Level of Detail slider past the maximum setting in the UserCfg.opt file (which will only move the morphing slightly further away from the camera), but on console you're out of luck. The only potential solution is in case the add-on mesh packages by Orbx and FSDT are released on the Xbox, which do not have the shape retention issue, but they do not fix the morphing globally, only in the areas they cover.

Unfortunately the developers have not properly acknowledged the issue and why it happens, so I would urge you to send a Zendesk bug report (including the video you posted here would help), and upvoting this topic in the official forums. In there you can find several videos with the same issue across many parts of the planet.

[Alpine Scenery 1,609]

7 hours ago, Glenn Fitzpatrick said:

It has nothing to do with bandwidth.

One of the ways they achieved the huge memory reduction in SU5 was change how caching worked.

 

Yes, there is a standard morphing of mountains, but if textures are not loading properly, it really highlights the issue more. He hadnt yet posted a video when I commented, so I wasn't sure.

Edited August 7, 2021 by Alpine Scenery

[Alpine Scenery 1,609]

I just watched the video, yes that is minor and that is normal, not sure why he described it as "much worse on his machine". What I have seen though is if bandwidth is slow, you can see not only the morphing but the texture change on the ENTIRE mountain (and sometimes several mtns) when the morphing happens, and it looks much worse than normal. In this case, that is not his issue and he should try a different DEM.

 

Edited August 7, 2021 by Alpine Scenery

[TheDuderino 1]

Ok I made a ticket for zendesk, but dont have an answer yet. But what is DEM? 

If you say it's worse with a slow bandwith, I could imagine it's the slow bandwith, because I often get issues and crashes with that bandwith. I'm in Germany, and the internet here is horrible, and I dont know why. But even with my 125k bandwith, I often got crashes and buffering issues when watching streams for example.

But how does it come that the guy I'm watching on xbox series x has almost zero morphing then, altough he also has the latest update?

[Shack95 2,675]

24 minutes ago, TheDuderino said:

But what is DEM? 

Digital elevation model

[TheDuderino 1]

Just installed the New Zealand mesh of orbx. I thought it would be gone now,  but I still have the terrible mountain morphing. Altough it's not as bad as in the videos I posted. Shouldnt it be completly gone for the orbx mesh?

[TheDuderino 1]

And then look at these mountain textures, what is this? Is this the hardware of my xbox series s? Because I watched a streamer on xbox series x who doesnt have the problem.