Aircraft cause blurred scenery

[BaiterOne]

Hi,

I have recently set about populating the USAF, USMC and USN bases around the States with packages from MAIW. It is very time-consuming but great fun. I normally SLEW around the bases afterwards to have a look at all the aircraft there, to make sure that all the different aircraft are present. Having installed the Great Lakes ANG Pt 1 package, I have found that when I pass by any "HTAI C-21A" the scenery pops and then some of the scenery, and some aircraft too, go blurry. Some of the C-21A's go blurred as well - others don't. The problem may have existed before this and I just didn't notice it.

I have currently only four C-21A's but all cause this same problem. I can refresh the scenery and all is ok again until the C-21A comes back in view. I experimented with this and took out the C-21A from the flightplan and replaced it with a standard Learjet 35 - darn! it happened again! I tried it in my own airfield (EIWT) - same thing!

At the moment I experience the C-21A's in USAF Andrews, Langley and Scott. They may be elsewhere too.

I encountered this problem before in civilian airports and asked for help on other forums. Loads of offers but none worked except for deleting the aircraft from the flightplan. I don't particularly want to leave the US bases without their complement of C-21A's.

As a temporary solution I have taken the C-21A's out.

Is there anyone out there found this problem in their sim. Better still, is there anyone out there found this problem in their sim and fixed it?

Thanks

Walter

[Firebird]

I haven't heard of that specific a problem. I have heard about blurry aircraft textures generally which can be cured by altering the TEXTURE_MAX_LOAD parm to 1024 in the fs9.cfg, it defaults to 512, but for one specific model and a small number at that to cause this I have not come across before.

My guess here is that it is something to do with the textures of the models themselves.
Can you confirm that you are using the HTAI Learjet 35 model and can I ask what is the texture size of each.
Lets see if we can find this cause.

[col1948]

I had that not long ago on an aircraft, not the one the op is talking about, I noticed only part of the body was blured but the rest was OK.
Is this the case with your trouble aircraft? I noticed if I zoomed in on it the blur vanished but I never found or looked for a cure, I just put up with it.

[BaiterOne]

Thanks for replying...

I loaded the C-21A from 458th AS, 375th AW, Scott AFB, Illinois. 84-0129 (GLANG P1 V2) into flightplans for my local airfield.

I positioned myself at an intersection where the aircraft was going to pass me by.

This is the scene:



The C-21A comes into view, the scenery flashes or pops and the result is:



Hope that helps...

I never see any of the details of the actual C-21A, it is always blurred.

The scenery stays blurred after the aircraft passes, but can be brought back to its original state by CTRL+B ( in my sim it refreshes the scenery).

Slewing around to catch up with the C-21A causes the scenery to blur again.

These are close-ups:



The ailear35.bmp is 1.33 MB (1,398,170 bytes).

The ailear35_l.bmp is 256 KB (262,218 bytes).

Edit: The pics are hopeless at showing the problem....
The TEXTURE_MAX_LOAD parm is already at 1024

[JohnTenn]

The size of the texture 1.33mb would indicate that there are MipMaps in the texture.

I remove MipMaps with Imagetool for aircraft that give blurred textures.

Open the texture with Imagetool.

Under Image tab, select extract MipMaps (bottom option).

This will create a stack of textures. Click on the close Icon (top right) of the largest texture. Select save.

Now close Imagetool. Select NO on all subsequent save options.

You should now have a texture with a name ending in t_0.bgl.

Delete the original texture. Rename the newly extracted texture by deleting the '_0' from the name.

This is a laborious process.

You can also reduce 2048x2048 textures to 1024x1024 by creating mipmaps. Extract them. Close and save the 1024 size. Close Imagetool as per above.

John

[col1948]

@BaiterOne, Do you have Traffic View Board, I find that a lot better to watch the AI plus you can follow them in flight?

[BaiterOne]

Col1948, no I don't have Traffic View Board, but I will investigate it.

JohnTenn, thanks, and I did as you suggested...

ailear35.bmp is now 1.00 MB (1,048,650 bytes).

I repeated my scenario from above.

The C-21A passed by my position, the scenery popped and went blurry, the C-21A went by sharp and crisp - no blurriness.

So the C-21A caused blurriness around it once it was in my view but your suggestion kept its own textures intact, or un-blurry, to use a more technical term .

[Firebird]

I will look at that specific aircraft in the sim tomorrow to see if I get the same thing.

In the mean time what graphics card do you have, and can you confirm that you are using the latest driver?

[Firebird]

OK I have tested mine at Scott and got no such problems with 200fps and a rapid view rotation.

I have pm'd you my texture for you to test it out. If you get the same result then it is either your fs9.cfg settings or your graphics card.
Let us know what you see.

[BaiterOne]

Steve, thanks for your texture.

I substituted it for the one I had and tried the same scenario - unfortunately with the same result - the aircraft went by, textures in scenery went blurry, aircraft stayed crisp!

I have a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670 Video Card with 2GB Memory.

The drivers are not quite up-to-date (347.52) but pretty close. When I updated 2 months ago some of the older games used by my wife croaked and I was told to restore the working drivers or leave! So I restored... . I was considering leaving them until I had to update to Win 10, when her games probably won't work anyway (another point of contention!).

My problem must be something on my side then...

[Firebird]

That is not that old of a card and it has a good sized amount of ram, I used to have the GTX-670 a good card and I didn't have any problems with it.
It should work fine w/o any tinkering but it might be worth trying to use the Nvidia Inspector proggy to see if my modified FS2004 profile makes any difference.

The sticky note is here http://www.militaryaiworks.com/forums/2 ... ia#p113387. In that post there is a link to another page where you can download the latest version of Inspector. Don't be too worried about the talk there of FSX cfg file stuff.
Just install Inspector and then load my FS2004 profile attached to the post and see if your jaggies have disappeared and whether it makes any difference. You can tell when you look at an aircraft in the selection window when you create a flight.

If you have any problems, just ask.

Of course if you already have NI installed please ignore everything here.

There is one other thing to try to eliminate. Rename your fs9.cfg, just rename not delete, and then start fs9. The cfg file will rebuild. Then go to have a look and see if your problem still exists. If it does that rules out a problem in the fs9.cfg file.
If it fixes it, then copy back from your renamed cfg file bits and pieces you really need, like stick and throttle assignments.

[BaiterOne]

Hi Steve,

I renamed the FS9.cfg file and restarted FS9.

I left it at 800x600 and Bilinear.

The same thing happened - blurriness when that C21A passes.

I set it at 1280x1024x32 and Trilinear (my own defaults) with the same results.

I downloaded nVidia Inspector and loaded up your FS2004 profile.

Still nothing changed on reloading FS and going through the same scenario.

I do have a question about nVidia Inspector though - mainly because I am too lazy to research it. When I load Inspector, import your profile and then apply the changes, is that applied to the card until the next time I run Inspector or do I have to leave Inspector running while in FS2004?

Maybe I will just set it all back the way it was before and ignore the problem - though it is annoying me greatly!!

Thanks

Walter

[Firebird]

Once it is loaded and saved the profile is run automatically when FS9, or any other proggy that there is a profile for. If you get a chance to look further then you will see that that profile is set to load when FS9.exe is run. It is a profile used by the Nvidia graphics driver so you do not need NI to be running. Yes this means that when you load a new driver version it therefore loses and NI profile and you have to reload it again.
Did you notice that the jagged edges that you get to aircraft have disappeared with the profile? That is how you can tell that it is working.
You can use NI to reset to the default parms that Nvidia think should be loaded.

Now what you can now do is delete the new fs9.cfg and rename the original back to fs9.cfg and you will be back to what you originally used.

It does seem that you have a particularly individual issue there as I have never heard of this problem with any individual plane before. I shall keep my eyes open though in case I stumble upon a solution.

[BaiterOne]

Thanks very much to Steve and the others who tried to solve my very 'individual' problem for me.

Probably caused by something I myself did in the heat of the moment and with the best of intentions...

If i ever do find a solution I will post it up here.

In the meantime I have nVidia Inspector and Traffic View Board to play with.

Thanks

Walter

[col1948]

@BaiterOne, there is also Traffic Tools you can view the AI with, with that you can still follow the AI but after they get out of range you end up in limbo but its good to get a list of what's parked up, whats about to push back and whats flying.
You can click on any one on the list and Traffic tools with take you to it.

As for Traffic View Board you may well have already learned you can follow the AI the full journey and also listen to the ATC talking to it and others, so they both serve a purpose, I use both.

[Greg]

@BaiterOne, there is also Traffic Tools you can view the AI with, with that you can still follow the AI but after they get out of range you end up in limbo but its good to get a list of what's parked up, whats about to push back and whats flying.
You can click on any one on the list and Traffic tools with take you to it.

Just to be clear: you're talking about "Traffic Toolbox" from the SDK. "Traffic Tools" is an AI flightplan compiler by Lee Swordy

[col1948]

Yes thanks Greg, I should have been more clear, I did indeed mean Traffic Toolbox, sorry.

[JohnTenn]

Had the same issue today.

Found DXT3 textures in the scenery with no alpha channel. Static aircraft to be precise.

Ran DXT fixer.

All fine now.

John