visibility - texture corruption

[Gregory Abbey]

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Example of visibility issue

Hi aGaiN Pete..

After the first post.. I changed the settings per our discussion.. and the corrupt horizon came back.. only this time with a general darkening and corruption of all the ground textures. Below is a before clip when changing weather regions and moments later fixing it by a) setting LOCAL VIS from UNLIM to 50.. and b) jogging DISPLAY max visibility slider a notch.

Could be more serious

I'm thinking now that it could be drivers.. or the video card has only 32MB of memory. It could even be Active Camera or simply pulling the NVidia card out and re-seating. Maybe a reinstall of FS2002 would do it.

Is there a reduced quality mode that it go into if video load is too high?? Lastly.. can someone point me to a GOOD link or doc on manually setting weather? After this gets messed up.. trying to set wind layers in flight is also a pain. Three layers instantly get wiped out to a single one at 100,000 ft and 11 kts. It's being really uncooperative.

-Gregory

[Pete Dowson]

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Example of visibility issue

Looking at those two pictures, what is it you are complaining about? If it is the "jaggies" on the horizon, that is merely because it is supposed to be a straight line and your resolution is too low to show it as a straight line without anti-aliassing switched on. You either need to go to a much higher resolution, or enable AA on your video card.

Neither picture show anything wrong with visibility as such. As I already told you, the "327.27" shown in WeatherSet is an error of representation and was fixed some time ago. If you upgrade to new versions of my programs that won't happen. But it doesn't indicate anything wrong, it just means that the FS weather you are using is set to "unlimited".

No amount of fiddling with visibility or texturing or scenery distace will fix the lack of straight lines at angles -- you need AA. That's what it is for.

All the preceding exchanges are really null and void, having seen your 'problem'. Sorry to have misled you. I was picturing something really awful from what you were saying. This is not 'awful', it is just a normal symptom of low resolution.

Regards,

Pete

[Gregory Abbey]

Hi Pete..

I feel like I'm causing a disturbance in here. The tiny screen caps don't do justice to the issue. I understand the 327 part and am not worried about that. : ) When you say `resolution'.. what do you mean?? because the Sim is on a 21" monitor in 1280 x 1024 with -32 color selected .. and spanned over to another 21" screen for 2D views (PCI slot).

Last night I installed the nVidia 53.03 drivers and will see what it does today. My rather old TNT2 video card cannot do AA so maybe a more advanced one will help.

The reason for a post in your forum was to ask about a 2.975 setting that would limit the range for LOCAL visibility regardless if the `real world' range is unlimited - IOW force a reduced visibility limit!!. I mean.. something is out of control here. If it cannot be mitigated then I'll look into building custom weather sets manually and forego the `real world' thing.

Cutting VIS would be the best way to mask a really bad horizon-earth boundary.. I mean the clouds could at least blend it a bit. Sometimes I can see stuff `underneath' in that aweful boundary region.. like a 2nd exterior view hidden below and leaking through'.

Thank you kindly for taking a look at this one.. if you'd like to see the full 2560 x 1024 dual 21" monitor screen caps.. they are here:

http://www.edwinn.com/flightsim/fsscr209.jpg - (925k)

http://www.edwinn.com/flightsim/fsscr211.jpg - (865k)

Again thank you kindly..

-Gregory

[Pete Dowson]

I feel like I'm causing a disturbance in here.

Not at all, don't worry about it. Of course I would rather you were a paid-up user of FSUIPC 3 :wink: , but it isn't too busy here at the moment, so feel free.

The tiny screen caps don't do justice to the issue. I understand the 327 part and am not worried about that. : ) When you say `resolution'.. what do you mean?? because the Sim is on a 21" monitor in 1280 x 1024 with -32 color selected

Jagged lines which are supposed to be straight come about because the pixels needed to perform a perfectly straight line at that angle don't exist. You'll find that when the horizon is perfectly level it looks fine, and it will look fine at certain other angles too. The higher the resolution the less exagerrated the effect becomes and less critical angles occur. The same improvement can be obtained by moving yourself a lot further away from the screen, of course, until the eye no longer discerns the lack of straightness in the edges.

Anti-aliassing is a way of using pixels of differing intensities along the line to fool the eye into thinking it looks straight. It gets a lot more complicated than that, and there are many different methods of doing it which have different effects and different impacts on performance.

I tend to be quite happy on an 18" screen at 1280x1024 without AA, but I suspect at 21" I would find it more annoying. But even in the old cruder graphics of yester year never would I have found it bad enough to warrant aborting a flight as you say you do!

The reason for a post in your forum was to ask about a 2.975 setting that would limit the range for LOCAL visibility regardless if the `real world' range is unlimited - IOW force a reduced visibility limit!!. I mean.. something is out of control here.

I'm not understanding this again, I'm afraid. How are you setting the weather? Do you have a save flight + WX file which illustrates the lack of FSUIPC's visibility limits taking effect? All I am seeing is the results of FS setting unlimited visibility. If you never want to see the horizon then the imposition of limits in FSUIPC should work.

If you'd like to send a saved FLT + WX to me, along with your FSUIPC.INI file, I can try it here (I do have an FS2002 installation still, somewhere here ). Zip them and send them to petedowson@btconnect.com. Of course I will be using FSUIPC 3.129 or later, but the visibility control for FS2002 won't have changed.

If it cannot be mitigated then I'll look into building custom weather sets manually and forego the `real world' thing.

You can use global weather without forsaking "real world" weather settings by using an outside weather control program such as FSMeteo or ActiveSky. These programs improved the weather implementations in FS2000 and FS2002 immensely in my opinion. Only with FS2004 has Microsoft's own weather download facilities caught up. This is only my opinion of course.

http://www.edwinn.com/flightsim/fsscr209.jpg - (925k)

http://www.edwinn.com/flightsim/fsscr211.jpg - (865k)

Well I've looked, and these don't look bad at all to me, I'm afraid, but then I've never been upset by lack of anti-aliassing. I know some folks won't ever fly without it, but I prefer the higher performance I get without. To me it just isn't worth the lost of any frames per second just to smooth a few edges now and then.

Good job we all have different tastes, though, else the world wouldn't be so interesting, eh? :)

Regards,

Pete

[lalex]

Sorry to barge in.

The "black" (or rather brown) horizon etc. usually happens when the memory resources reach their limit. I experinced it in the past, and a PC reboot fixed the issue.

It might also be a driver issue since in my case, I experienced wierd texture behaviour (not drak horizon related) and wildly variable FPS with the latest nVidia drivers (52.16 I believe). All of them were memory-related. Everything came back to normal when I reverted to the older original Prophet Hercules drivers - my card is a Prophet III.

It seems that while allegedly improving performance, nVidia pulled some safeguards that result in weird behaviour in certain situations.

I worked with both the non-registered and currently using the registered FSUIPC and I can safely say that there is no relation between what you and I have experienced and FSUIPC.

Best,

Al

[Gregory Abbey]

The "black" (or rather brown) horizon etc. usually happens when the memory resources reach their limit. I experinced it in the past, and a PC reboot fixed the issue.

I've found that reducing LOCAL weather VIS from `unlimited' to 50 mi (the next lower step) in combination with jogging the DISPLAY properties slider lower will clear up the black areas and horizon boundary `on the fly'.. most of the time that is. On the Fs2k2 box the spec is: 8MB 3D hardware accelerated graphics card. If done right.. I think it can work ok with 32MB 3D accel card.

It might also be a driver issue since in my case, I experienced wierd texture behaviour (not drak horizon related) and wildly variable FPS with the latest nVidia drivers (52.16 I believe). All of them were memory-related. Everything came back to normal when I reverted to the older original Prophet Hercules drivers - my card is a Prophet III.

Nvidia 55.03 just came out.. however that driver would not tolerate the Matrox PCI card in the same mainboard. Went back to 45.xx as per the `Windows Update' webshell.. but that produced strange results.. like see-thru and the smoketrail turning into rotating squares 5/8" in size. Am back to the 44.03 drivers.

I worked with both the non-registered and currently using the registered FSUIPC and I can safely say that there is no relation between what you and I have experienced and FSUIPC.

Pete and I have had a number of offline correspondence on this.. and he has remedied the situation.. at least thus far in Simflight tests. It seem he found that `real world' weather data from MS has changed.. or returns very large VIS numbers.. 100's of miles.. that FS2k2 is not expecting.. maybe to satisfy FS2k4. In any event.. these high numbers were causing FS2k2 to attempt rendering the `outside world' beyond the hard limit set in the DISPLAY properties menu.

December horizon before: 32MB nVidia - 44.03

There was also a problem with the (excellent FS Skyworld) cloud layer.. and I posted on this before in other forums.. but there was no reply.. or we didn't understand what was going on.

December horizon after (120 mi): 32MB nVidia - 44.03

Here's some other scenes with FS2k2 VIS enforced to 150 mi :

http://www.edwinn.com/flightsim/unlim_vis001.jpg

http://www.edwinn.com/flightsim/unlim_vis002.jpg

It's my feeling that limiting VIS sufficiently can reduce graphics RAM requirement.. and obscure issues at infinity. In any case.. I believe Pete has somehow made FSUIPC enforce the maximum DISPLAY limit in FS2k2 of 150 miles. That way It cannot get `messed'. This may not be the exact explaination.. but it's close. Pete can expand on it more if he chooses.

I haven't been a registered user.. going with 2.975 and FS2k2.. but the expertise Pete has shown in solving the problem certainly prompts me to register his new utility. : )

-Gregory

[lalex]

It is a memory issue. Don't expect too much from a 32Mb card. I have a 64Mb but plan to move to a 128 or even more as soon as possible. Considering solely the multi megabyte textures people slap on aircraft, there is no wonder that memory is a problem.

In addition, whenever weather is involved, visibility and memory are totally interdependent. Adding the 3D clouds does not help either.

My advice - go for a 128Mb card as soon as you can and ignore Microsoft's 8Mb minimum spec - unless you can to live with pre-FS2002 graphics :-).

Thanks for the heads up on the new nVidia drivers. I hope they fixed all the FS issues...

Best,

Alex