Simviation Forums

please pros, let me know if you have seen this before, because it's driving me nuts:

i've just installed switzerland professional and found this weird texture problem: at the start of a flight, everything is fine, but when i fly out of the initial loading area, textures are simply not loaded anymore. and if i return to the starting point, downgraded mipmaps do not switch back to their full resolution any more.

the result is, that at the beginning of the flight, everything is fine, but then gets more and more blurred.

i'm running a 2.8Ghz with 1Gig mem and a radeon9700pro that usually has no problems with fs2004. the fps is usually at full speed and no lags whatsoever.

here's three screenshots to graphically show what i mean. texture filtering is turned off deliberately, so you can better see the texture resolution changes. snaps were taken in slew mode and without any hurry. fs should have had plenty of time to fetch the textures (still for more than 3 min).

http://caad.arch.ethz.ch/~patrick/fs2004/s1.gif
http://caad.arch.ethz.ch/~patrick/fs2004/s2.gif
http://caad.arch.ethz.ch/~patrick/fs2004/s3.gif

s1 was taken right above the airport after loading. then s2 after moving down the lake, and s3 after moving back to the airport. compare the textre pixel/block sizes especially in the town in s1/s3 to see what i mean.

please, any hint is appreciated!

Greetings.
Welcome to the world of photographic scenery in Microsoft's Flight Simulator.  
FS9 has a landclass engine that does well at choosing from a relatively small number of different default scenery tiles when it comes to "painting" the ground. Add-ons like Megascenery (which I own) and Switzerland Professional (which I do not) , include thousands of different individual tiles that really tax FS9's ability to choose the correct tile and stick it in the right place. This is all really a bummer to me, too, as I was very much looking forward to Megascenery's release of the S.F. Bay Area, but as things stand, I would much rather have default scenery that loads up fine, than photographic scenery that won't. Kind of destroys the illusion. This is something I'd really like to see Microsoft fix in upcoming versions of their flight sim.
In the meantime, here are some tricks you can use to give FS9 a better chance at keeping up.

http://forums.avsim.net/dcboard.php?az= ... =356&page=

Hope this helps! - Matt D.

thanks for your post.
but at this point i doubt that it's a config issue. i tried the usual tweaks but none of them helped. also, it's really not that i would fly 350kt's on a 1Ghz machine and thus be too fast for the system to fetch the textures, but i can even leave the viewpoint static (slew) for 5 min and the textures would not load.

Well, poop.  ??? In that case, all I can suggest is contacting the makers to see if someone else had the same problem. - Matt D.

... that's under way. will keep you posted. thanks!

okok. i got it. they in fact WERE reloading BUT so