Schlotterknie

It seems that there are issues with the PTA activation service what means that PTA is currently unuseable due to its repetitive online activation mechanism. The Simtweaks website is offline as well... Anybody knows anything about this?

You fixed what?

Nobody said that 4GB makes sense. It´s however the minimum requirement following the specs from LM. If I end up with crashes although I´ve got those minimum requirements either those specs are wrong or the program is faulty.

That´s not right. Minimum is 4GB, 8GB is recommended. https://www.prepar3d.com/system-requirements/

@AnkH if you quote me then do it correctly and please stop twisting around the words I write. There are 5 tweaking sections: - Clouds - Lighting - Atmosphere & Fog - Water - HDR & Post-processing Water is still not working what means about 20% of funcionality are inop. If that´s "perfect" for you... fine. To me it´s definetely not.

Yes, seriously. That water tuning is essential so don´t tell me that 2.64 is "perfect". It´s not.

PTA v2.64 doesn´t even work with P3D v4.4 without problems... Su guess how it behaves together with P3D v4.5...

@Sunny Andonov If you want to have a tweaked water surface in P3D 4.4 you have to restore a backup of a 4.3 GPUTerrain shaderfile that has already been tweaked by PTA 2.62 to your liking. If you apply a preset with PTA 2.63 (P3D 4.4) you have to restore the tweaked 4.3 GPUTerrain backup to get your tweaked water surface. Any changes you made in the new 2.63 preset you applied that wrote modifications into the GPUTerrain.fx shader file (which is of course not reduced to water surface tuning only) will then be reverted bakc to what you had in your P3D 4.3 preset as you restored the P3D 4.3 (PTA 2.62) GPUTerrain backup and replaced any changes you made with PTA 2.63. You also have to be aware that you have to restore the P3D 4.3 (PTA 2.62) GPUTerrain shaderfile everytime after you applied a preset with PTA 2.63 (P3D 4.4). The screenshot you provided just shows photoreal surrounding of some airport addon. Not the best of examples in terms of terrain shader tweaking.

You have to restore a shader-file that has already been tweaked by PTA 2.62 under P3D 4.3 after you applied a preset with PTA 2.63. Othwerwise you will overwrite the resored file again.

So far I didn´t notice any problems with the grass. If it´s a shader related problem, a rollback to the GPUTerrain.fx file from 4.3 indeed could help. Could also be that another shader file is affected in that case as the changes in the terrain shaderfile are very small. If you made a 'dirty' update from 4.3 to 4.4 just by reinstalling the client and content package it might be that the content.msi installler replaced some FTX Global textures with standard ones. Reinstalling FTX Global might solve such texture problems.

Those 2 lines have to be changed in the PTA source to make PTA itself compatible with P3D 4.4 again. If you wan´t to tweak the water surface manually without PTA the only way to do is to manually edit GPUTerrain.fx, which is of course more of just 2 lines as mentioned above. Those who made a backup of their modified 4.3 shaders can use the complete GPUTerrain.fx- shader file from there. As far as I tested it´s fully compatible with the 4.4 shaders as Lockheed Martin only made small changes there. Those who don´t have a backup could also reinstall client 4.3, apply their PTA preset with PTA 2.62, backup the generated GPUTerrain.fx file, reinstall client 4.4 apply the preset with PTA 2.63 and then restore GPUTerrain.fx from 4.3 into the 4.4 shaders folder. A bit complicated, I know. But that´s at least a workaround.

Search for "EnvironmentColor.rgb =" in the GPUTerrain.fx file. This is the point where the reflection coefficient is defined. The line below "BaseColor *=" defines the refraction coefficient. Find the definition of the water granularity by searching this: "const float bias =" Search "finalMoonColor =" for specular blend. Serach "reflectionFresnel =" near the area of (or exatcly at) line nr 1218. Home of "Water view angle/darkness factor". If you now what your doing you can do your tweaking manually there, or create a custom tweak with which you can search and replace the parts of the shader codes within a preset file. If you have backups with your tweaked 4.3 shaders it´s much easier to copy the affected shader lines/variable values from there. As you see... not really comfortable doing this by hand. And I repeat: It´s only 2 lines in the new 4.4 shader code that cause the current PTA incompatibility. If I needed several days for fixing 2 code lines and make a new build... I would be fired pretty fast.

It will only take minutes to fix that directly in PTA but it takes maybe an hour or more to write a documentation about how to edit that one shader file separately after a PTA preset with inactive water surface tuning as been applied. Less experienced users might even end up with corrupted shaders if they make anything wrong but I can at least point out the line numbers of the file if I find some time.

I don´t need to wait. I manually edited the 2 lines in the affected shader file. Other customers who don´t know how to do that are still waiting. And as I said before. The effort for fixing that problem is ridiculously low.

The peak of efficiency would be to test at least the most fundamental function of a product before releasing it. It´s eventually not too efficient to have hundreds or thousands of users running around in the net looking for a solution for such a major bug.

Definetly some softwaredevelopers who claim to be professionals do not test their products for a single second before throwing them out to their customers. I´m actually not a beta or actually alpha tester but a paying customer. Do you wan´t me to appologize for opening a seperated thread regarding this major bug or what? If there was a similar issue with my piece of software that I´m the owner, creator and seller of... the first thing I would do is to actively inform my customers at least with a big fat pinned thread in this forum here, appologize for any inconveniences, inform about the workaround and fix that problem as soon as I can instead of leaning back and writing bored, cheeky comments waiting for my customers to help themselves by searching the net for a solution. I yesterday compared the P3D shaders from 4.3 and 4.4 to fiigure out what the root cause actually is and it´s just 2 lines of code in the affected shader file. Only 2 lines that have to adapted to make everything work again! Fixing this issue is a matter of minutes and not days or weeks. No doctoral research study needed for that.

There is obviously a bug regarding the water surface tuning option. Lockheed Martin reworked parts of the water shader files which I guess has somehow been missed to be respected within the recent PTA update. PTA 2.63 is therefore currently not fully compatible with the new shader files of P3D v4.4. You get an error message even if you try to apply the default preset 'MattDavies_Dec18.ini' which is included in the package... as long as you don´t untick the water surface tuning checkbox. I hope this is gonna be fixed soon... Applying [Water surface tuning] to F:\Prepar3D v4\ShadersHLSL\GPUTerrain.fx ERROR applying tweak [Water surface tuning] Problem with patch #1 - Patched block not found. Applying [Waves size] to F:\Prepar3D v4\ShadersHLSL\GPUTerrain.fx Applying [Water saturation] to F:\Prepar3D v4\ShadersHLSL\GPUTerrain.fx Applying [Rayleigh scattering effect] to F:\Prepar3D v4\ShadersHLSL\FuncLibrary.fxh Applying [Haze effect] to F:\Prepar3D v4\ShadersHLSL\FuncLibrary.fxh Applying [Sky Fog tuning] to F:\Prepar3D v4\ShadersHLSL\FuncLibrary.fxh Applying [Turn off HDR luminance adaptation effect] to F:\Prepar3D v4\ShadersHLSL\PostProcess\HDR.hlsl Applying [Alternate tonemap adjustment] to F:\Prepar3D v4\ShadersHLSL\PostProcess\HDR.hlsl Applying [Contrast tuning] to F:\Prepar3D v4\ShadersHLSL\PostProcess\HDR.hlsl Applying [FXAA quality] to F:\Prepar3D v4\ShadersHLSL\PostProcess\FXAAResolve.hlsl Preset has been applied with errors. See log above

If your backup and your shader folder are both gone the only way to go is to run the P3D client installer. That restores the original shader files.

Screenshots might be helpful...

That exactly is the mistake. A port to x64 would have kept their customers at their product and that could have been done with very little effort and if some manager tells you that they would had to rewrite the whole code just for a naked x86=>x64 port he does that mentioned 'storyteller' part of his job pretty good ;-)

Calm down dude... I´ve now read that the 'new bus' sentence a several times. I got that point if you believe me or not. That new bus is just not what I´m talking about, so maybe it´s you who doesn´t get it. Why AS didn´t make a plain x64 port before making a 'brand new' product? Simple question, isn´t it? I guess that port might not have been the end of all Aerosoft Airbus development but it would have given customers the possibility to fly the AS bus in an oom free x64 environment. Customer tie ist the magic word here. I´m one of those customers who´s gone elsewhere - no matter what that new AS bus will be like.

I personally don´t care about any delays. That can happen... I don´t mind. The difference between the PMDG NG and the Aerosoft Airbus is... PMDG provided free x64 ports for the whole product line. Aerosoft didn´t. If he was not able to tell stories he´d truly be a bad manager ;-) @Nyxx what do you think is the reason for not porting the old Airbus to x64?

Not making a plain x64 port and doing any further development for a new version afterwards simply was a big mistake. That´s just really pretty bad customer retention. Many users meanwhile went on to a well known competitors product. That´s also what I did.

I didn´t question that. Not for a plain x64 port only. Being a programmer by myself I simply don´t believe any story about the need of completely rewritten code just for x64 compatibility. As I said before... I do understand their decision commercially but I don´t think their underlying argumentation is 100% candid.

Changing the FFTF dynamically really is a great idea... but to be honest... I won´t spend 29€ for a little program that´s only able to adjust the fiber time fraction value. Wonderful idea to a greedy price.