Chip1

Aloha from Hot Kihei,I have been adding FSX buildings and hangers to various scenery I am developing. The problem is that at certain airports hangers and buildings will hover around two feet above the ground. PHNL is a good example. Using ADE I can add a hanger to one location at PHNL and it is perfect, the base is at ground level. A few hundred feet away the same building floats about two feet above the ground. I guess I can plant trees around the base. :( When using instant scenery 2 the problem does not exist with Generic FSX hangers and buildings at all. What is Instant Scenery doing to correct this problem? I've seen this complaint all over blog sites. I've tried to modify the XML and give it a negative altitude of 2 feet with no luck. The compiler will not run if there is a negative value. There must be a way around this but I have so far not hit the end of the rainbow. I checked the entire world and the same problem exists in many airports. Any IDEAS out there would be appreciated.

Hello from the terrain mesh novice! Learning slowly. The FSX mesh is for all of the Hawaiian Islands and the download is located on Simviation. I found it by accident. Here is the location:http://www.simviatio...terrainmesh.htm I see two people on that page who have created Hawaiian Islands Mesh one is by Raimondo Taburet. 63MB and the other is by Lance Tucker. 34.8MB. I tried out the one made by Lance Tucker and it looks excellent. Both are 10 meter mesh. It fixes my "problem" with Kahoolawe. I also gave FSDreamscapes mesh for Hawaii a tryout. I used the mesh that they created for Kahoolawe and kept FSGenesis for the rest of the islands. This seems to work perfectly and again Kahoolawe is now rendered exactly like the rest of the islands. No more complaints. Thanks to all for lessons on terrain mesh. I have been designing scenery for a year or so for FS9 and I now have the design finished for a FSX version of Lanai and Kahoolawe. It is ready to upload to AVSIM FSX Scenery. Like I say I've never had need to add my own terrain mesh but the day may come. It's only when I run into roadblocks with scenery design that I start reading the technical articles by Microsoft. I am finally doing that now on the design of mesh. Chip

Hello Luis,At last I understand what everyone is saying. I got the Microsoft books out on terrain mesh and now at least understand what to expect. I have tried another 10 meter terrain mesh for Kahoolawe and the island remains the same as FS9's version. I have also tried another 5m mesh and it also works. Only the FSGenesis mesh seems to do this. Yes, Justin has been a friend for years and he thinks some low resolution mesh might be near Kahoolawe causing the problem. So far I have not found anything wrong. All of the other Hawaiian Islands show nothing like this one island. I will use alternative 10 meter mesh for Kahoolawe if necessary. No big problem. Chip

Hello Again,I just tried a download of free terrain mesh for the Hawaiian Islands and activated Maui and Kahoolawe, the problem went away and the island is fully rendered at any distance. It must be something that FSGenesis is doing. I may download FSDreamscapes mesh for Hawaii if there is no other way to solve this minor annoyance. It is only nine bucks.

Hello,I've attached some photos of what I see as I approach Kahoolawe. It may not be autogen at all. Possibly the terrain mesh? I'm using FSGenesis for both FS9 and FSX. As the island is approached you can see change take place. From only a couple of miles away there is basically no island other than a sea level terrain and as the island gets closer the terrain is rendered correctly. I have not seen this effect anywhere before at such a short range. Kahoolawe on FS9 remains a fixed island at all times.On the landclass for Lanai I have been totally changing the island to the way it looks to me. I'm there often. I've changed Lanai City to the correct location and shape and added all of the trails and roads that were missing. It's not photo scenery but at least it looks closer to the real island from my subjective view! It no longer looks like New York City around the airport. I used Google Earth and other aids to get close to reality in areas that I have not visited. I have included all the necessary files so you can change things around to your own liking if you have SBuilderX, EZ-Landclass and Airport Design EditorX. I'm going to upload it to AVSIM in a day or so.If you have some idea about the Kahoolawe scenery after seeing the photos I'm very interested. I hope it is not the terrain mesh. Mahalo,Chip

Aloha from Maui, I have been designing scenery for the Island of Lanai and Kahoolawe and am about ready to upload the finished product to AVSIM. I have have not been happy with the way FSX renders Kahoolawe. The entire island seems to be an autogen object unlike the other islands. From all of the Islands Kahoolawe is clearly visible with its mountain peak but due to the autogen it looks as flat as a pancake even from Maui which is only 8 miles away from Kahoolawe. Question: Is there a way to eliminate the autogen so that the island remains like the rest of the non autogen islands.Any help would be very much appreciated.Chip

Hello Darem,Thanks for all of the information. Hey, I have nothing to loose by trying anything after bashing my head against a wall playing with memory and everything else. I think it has something to do with the graphics memory when it is first being loaded. The video you see is created by loading a saved flight on final approach and that is when the problem is the most obvious. If I start up at any airport and just hit F12 and slew to a high altitude and back and take off from the airport no "flashes" are visible at all. The other method is to slew around the area, at first there are the "flashes" and then they stop and do not return and flying is perfect. At least it is a repeatable fix and it must mean the loading of memory or something else that is not so obvious. I have been using Microsoft Flight Simulator since it was first created. I had a Radio Shack TRS_80 with a 1.78 MHz clock and 16 KB of RAM. Flight Simulator was very slow. I have to admit FSX is amazing but getting it working perfectly really is a big job. I'm almost there.I have tried some of the FSX.CFG fixes above over the past month but not every one mentioned. It can't hurt to experiment. I'll back up the CFG file and play around. It would be nice not to have to slew into space and back before using FSX. There is no problem at all on FS9 or any other program. All graphics and memory tests are positive. I also have the latest graphics drivers which helped slightly. I've used Nicks profiles and they work well.This is the youtube video I mentioned, I forgot that I put it on another forum and not here.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mVzFlceW_IThanks to everyone for all of your help.Aloha,Chip

Hello from PHOG tonight,I have just gone over to the latest drivers (258.96) for the GTX 4 series and love them. nHancer will not work with the new driver and hope there will be an update soon. The good news is Nick has the profiles that do the same thing as nHancer and I'm using NVIDIA Inspector and GeForce 3D Settings Profile Manager which makes setting the new drivers up very easy. Not as easy as nHancer though. I think the same problem still exists but will have to run more tests. If I find an answer before the next century I'll let you know. I'm looking around for another graphics card so I can eliminate the 480 as a cause of the glitches. I've run memory and graphics tests on everything and can find nothing wrong.Chip

Aloha,I have seen Affinity Mask bounced around the blogs. What are your FSX.CFG settings for AffinityMask. I would greatly appreciate any FSX.CFG information that might help the rendering of graphics or other tweaks that you are using at this time since your system is working. How is the AffinityMask set up for six cores? I will let you know if there is any improvement with the new driver update.Chip

Hello from Kihei. I just installed 258.96 and will set it up as Nick did with the nHancer. I'm also using the the NVIDIA Inspector 1.91 and found access to everything that the nHancer was capable of doing. Almost have everything set for FS9 and FSX. No matter what the minor problems with graphics the GTX 480 and i7 980X are a good match. I have never seen such performance before. In case your interested I will be uploading my redesign of the Island of Lanai soon for FSX. It is a huge improvement over the default.Again thanks for the help.Chip

Hello ...A clear sky at PHOGI gave it a try and no change. One important note: If I slew around over a large area there are many "flashes" like you see and they stop totally after I do that. I then can land at the same airport that you see and there are no artifacts at all. It is as if that when the memory is initially being loaded with the textures that the flashes appear and after it is loaded all works well. If I exit FSX and restart and run the landing from the same position the artifacts return. Interesting. If you are using the same mother board what Bios revision are you using? I'm using revision F5.I am still using the older driver 197.55 for the GTX 480. I have held back because I like using the nHancer and I don't think I had the same "flashing" problem with the i7 930. I guess it is time to upgrade to the latest driver. I have it ready and have the driver sweeper ready to clean things up. If that doesn't work I'll remove the GTX 480 and see if the old 5770 ATI card has the same problem. If it does it may be a system problem. Chip

This is my last post on the topic concerning the GTX 480 and i7 980X. Please take a look at the video and if you have had similar problems with graphics and found a solution I would love to have the answer. My next step is to try another GPU and if no luck change the CPU and memory. You can find the video on you tube at the following: Chip

Hi Vic, I'm somewhat glad to hear others have a similar "problem". In my case I get a number of flashes that are repeatable at certain airports without panning. I was glad to find it repeatable at Lanai City Airport on the South Approach. I now at least can work on the system with a glitch that I know will be there every time. I hate problems that are intermittent. I prefer a good total failure! I was ready to change the GTX 480 with a replacement but since you see the same thing on other graphics cards that sounds like a mistake. I may try under clocking the 480 and see what happens. I may try the i7 930 again as I can't recall seeing the same problems when I was using that CPU. I hope I'm wrong.Chip