TProxy-Blurring Of Textures - Possible reason

[nudata 10]

Some, my self included, have seen ground textures become blurred during a flight using TileProxy. I have tried using SLEW mode and various slow speeds. Some texture continue to become blurred. My "guess" is that sometimes TP is missing the internal texture load request from FSX. So, FSX believes that the texture is loaded and it presents it in its proper resolution. However, TP never loaded it due to missing the request - thus blurred texture. There is no way to recover the texture since FSX believes it to be there and no new requests for it will be issued. You can force a texture reload by going to the scenery library and clicking OK. Takes a long time but cleans up and "missed textures". Restarting the flight and overflying the blurred area will also recover the texture. Those with faster computers and/or dual core, with one core assigned to TP, may only see this on an infrequent basis.Just a theory!!!Regards,Dick BoleyA PC, an LCD, speakers, CH yoke

[Guest cbuchner1]

You are right, once FSX has read a tile at a certain resolution, it will never load a higher resolution on that particular tile. So I have to trick FSX into thinking all tiles have the maximum resolution.Are you using Windows Vista?With Vista sometimes the texture load seems to bypass the tileproxy.sys filter driver. Process Monitor from www.sysinternals.com shows that the tile read does not cover ~790 kb as required but something like a few hundred or thousand bytes only.I suspect Vista has a more extensive disk caching and provides the file from some kind of memory cache. This one may be hard to fix.Christian

[nudata 10]

Fortunately I do not have Vista - XP/SP2, 2ghz, 1gb ram, IDE disks.I am far from an expert on FSxxxx internals but is the philosophy of FSX to load 8 level MIP tiles as you progress across the landscape? Thus no further tile load is needed since the 8 levels of resolution are already cataloged and loaded? To duplicate this you would have to take a single resolution Internet tile (in real-time) and produce the 8 MIP levels and then move on to the next tile. I am just making a logical guess about the FSxxxx processes. They could create additional MIP levels from the basic resolution tile as you approach it thus saving the best resolution, and the other levels, until you pass far enough away to justify tossing it out.The only way I can get high resolution TP tiles seems to be during the initial loading and cataloging of tile when you first start at a site or do an OK from the Scenery Library window.Google is either shaky or clever. Virtual Earth is stable. However, both sources could dry up tomorrow!Regards,Dick BoleyA PC, an LCD, speakers, CH yoke

[Guest cbuchner1]

FSX loads only the required MIP level from the BMP file and it will later re-open the file if it needs a higher MIP level. My TileProxy can only "guess" which level is currently being accessed based on distance from the aircraft etc. So in general I am loading one or two more mips than FSX will actually use.There is no way to tell which MIP inside the tile FSX wants to actually read as it always reads the entire BMP file into a buffer (kind of a braindead implementation on the side of Microsoft, really). I hope that will be addressed in SP1 - hopefully.FSX remembers the highest MIP level found in each BMP tile on disk. That is why TileProxy has to fake 8 MIP levels all the time. Typically the MIP levels that tileProxy hasn't loaded yet are ALL BLACK. If you see black squares appearing in the landscape, FSX actually loaded a higher mip level than TileProxy has obtained from the Internet. But luckily this doesn't happen anymore (in previous versions I had lots of issues with black tiles appearing in the scenery).I could try to upconvert the low mip levels to higher resolutions at runtime, but doing that in realtime on DXT1 compressed data would be really slow. So I chose to provide black squares instead.Christian