I have been using the ground polys (VTP2) in ground2k4 for taxiways at Grass fields. For most people this is ok... Some however are complaining about errors and lockups with the *_5.bgl's. How can I prevent this and Whats causing this? The texture I am using with this poly is the taxi_dirt.bmp that is default in FS9 and resides in the FS9texture folder. It works fine in mine and the 2 testers that I use, but after every release there are allways 1 or 2 emails about this.Thanks for your helpJoe W.

Maybe it's just a coincidence? Sometimes peoples computers crash, so they find something to blame. Do the computers lock up every time, or is it just occaisionally? Have you tried isolating the problem by getting those users to install only the _5.bgl files? It seems strange that something so basic as a VTP2 poly would crash a computer. - Martin

Martin..... This has never happened to me or my testers so I don't know. It's not lockingup, it's bouncing back to desktop. They say that they disable the *_5.bgl and all is well. Which leads me to believe that they are installing it in FS2002, the texture is not in that sim. I can't get anyone to reply to the question, " what sim are you installing to?"I'm still looking at this.Joe W.

After a long pause...I released my updated Bangkok scenery a few weeks ago. This scenery was throughly tested by dozens of people who gave me frequent feedback (mostly about extra stuff they wanted to see). During this time, over 1000 other people downloaded the scenery without giving me any feedback at all.So, after I released the scenery, I figured that there would be no bugs. Well, it looks like I'm wrong. I've had one person write me to tell me that the scenery was crashing FS during the day, but it worked at night for some reason.The user had some guesses about what he thought he could delete from the scenery, but I figured that if it were anything, then it might be the VTP lines. So I told him to try deleting the _3, _5 etc. BGL files, and sure enough, that fixed his problem. Of course, now his airport and coastlines must look like a mess, but whatever...This makes me think that no matter how much I test the scenery, there will always be one guy out there with some oddball situation that I can't possibly prepare for. I had a similar problem before, where some people reported some of my textures showing up blank. I was completely unable to duplicate the problem on my machine, and the number of people reporting it was very low, so it never came up during testing. Eventually I was able to fix that problem.BTW, none of these people would tell me what version of FS they had, or their video card, or anything else that I could narrow it down with. Maybe one person bothered to send a screenshot. Oh well...So, I guess the "short-winded" answer to your original post is "don't worry to much about it". Although we like to help, we can't always fix everything.- Martin

Hi Guys,Don't know if this fits or not. But I recently have been teaching myself Ground2k, concentrating on VTP1 ground polys for CFS2. I have had great success using 8-bit formatted bmps with alphachannel masks and 9 mips (except for a angle altitude dependent linear artifact that is driving me nuts).But I have been experitmanting with other formats, particularly DXT1 with alpha- just to see what would happen.I have an Nvidia(sp?) video card.The first thing that happened was that almost everytime I tried to create a DXT1 Bmp using Martins DXTBmp (which I have been using forever to create DXT3 bmps with alpha channel masks for textpolys) I would crash DXTBmp! Hmmmm. Anyway, a couple of times after restarting my rig, I was able to get a DXT1 bmp made. Problem was that everytime I tried to load said bmp in CFS2, it took me back to desktop. I have never ever had that happen to me.Anyway, I figured maybe I need a dll update and a newer version of Martins DXTBmp so I went and upgraded everything. Now everything works fine- no crashes in the game or in DXTBmp when making or using the dxt1 bmps (the dxt1 bmps with alpha masks don't work in the game, but that is a different matter- at least it doesn't turn itself off anymore!).I noticed at Martins site when I was retrieving the latest DXTBmp that the last bug fix was a nvidia crash bug.Don't know if this helps- but it might. Worked for me.Cheers,Chris

This is pretty interesting, but in my case, I am not using any custom textures for the VTP2 polys (VTP1 is gone in FS2004). I was most suspicious of the VTP2 lines, but the user reported that deleting the VTP2 polys, LWM polys, and the VTP exclude BGL. This doesn't make much sense to me, but maybe it has to do with the ability of this particular computer to handle this much detail in a VTP2 line. It's just a guess, since I have been unable to duplicate the problem.Maybe when the SDK comes out, we will have a better understanding of this. I know that there are smarter people than I working on decoding the mysteries of FS9 LWM/VTP right now, and I can't pretend to understand half of what they are doing.The earlier problem I had with textures not showing up had nothing to do with VTP. I had placed some polygons on the ground using AFW 2.6 (this is a couple years ago). Three people emailed me to report a "bug" where the texture appeared white on their screen. No one else appeared to have this problem, and it turned out to be because of the naming convention used - I didn't use the standard 8.3 name on the texture, and although it didn't cause a problem on most computers, on some others it did. Even more bizarre is the fact that if I took the same texture and placed it on any object that wasn't a AFW polygon, then it appeared correctly. Weird.- Martin

Well...... Sure is great to find that I'm not the only one. I will keep doing VTP2 polys in my sceneries.Joe W.