Where did my textures go?

[starseed419]

I have been flying FS9 for awhile now and have only recently started having this problem. On some, not all, of my addon aircraft, I will be flying along, and after switching views a few times, I will go back to the spot view outside and my fuselage textures will be gone. The tail and wings are ok, this just happens to the fuselage. A few examples are the 7E7 and the Dassault Falcon. I have tried deleting and reinstalling the aircraft, and even reinstalled FS9, to no avail. The textures will be there for awhile, then theyre gone. I will restart FS9, and even on the menu screen when you pick the aircraft, it shows up with blank fuselage textures. What gives?

[Politically Incorrect]

ODD,  ???

Assuming these are downloaded aircraft you might have a corrupt download.
Or it could be possible your running out of memory?
Is it only add-ons that do this or the defaults also?
Are they aircraft that are compatiable with FS9? I have downloaded a few 2002 aircraft that failed to work with FS9, but just about any 2002 aircraft will work fine.
Got me wondering now, so I'll wait for another to come along with some possible answers!

[chomp_rock]

It could be your graphics card, what kind do you have?

[Stormtropper]

I used to have this same problem sometimes, but its your graphics card, it doesn't have enough memory. sometimes pressing "Alt" or the window button helps, but not always. My suggestion is go out and get a new card, after I swapped from 64mb to 128mb, I haven't seen that problem.

Hope that helped
Jeff

[chomp_rock]

That sounds right, 64Mb certainly won't suffice in FS9 unless you have the settings really low. If you don't already have one I would reccomend moving up to a 128 or 256mb card, The GeForce FX6800 and FX5700 are good ones to look at as well as Radeon cards of equivilant preformance like the 9700 and 9800. If you are on a low budget the GeForce FX5200 would be a good one to consider, I'm quite satisfied with mine.

[starseed419]

Thanks all for the tips. I apologize, as I probably should've posted my system specs in my first thread. Here we go:
AMD athalon XP 2800+
1 Gb PC2700 DDR
Radeon 9700 Pro 128 mb

With that being said, I really don't think that memory is the issue. It only happens on downloaded aircraft, some of which I have been using for months without ever seeing this issue. If I delete and reinstall only the texture folder, that fixes the problem for awhile, but it still comes back. And as I said before, it doesn't happen on all my downloaded aircraft. The learfan, for instance, was unaffected, but every livery of 7E7 aircraft I had lost the fuselage textures. Go fig...

[Graycat8524]

Heya Starseed,

I have a question.  Are you using any environment add-ons like Waterzone by Pete Drazzof or the new cloud texture package by Mike Woolsey?

The reason that I ask is because I had the same exact issue which occurred randomly during the game.  My computer specs are much like yours.  I would be flying along and switch to outside view and the fuselage textures for my aircraft would disappear.  Sometimes the ground textures for water would also turn this awful-looking bright purple and blue color.  Weird.

In FS 2004 I have the keys Ctrl + Alt + R combination assigned to "Refresh Player Aircraft" and by using these keys it would restore my fuselage textures, however, it didn't cure the problem of the textures disappearing in the first place.

What I did to cure this issue was to restore the default FS water textures (I backup everything) then re-started FS 2004 and let it rebuild the scenery database.  I then exited FS 2004 and re-installed the Waterzone textures.   I haven't had this issue happen since (knock on wood).

The reason why I asked about the new cloud texture package by Mike Woolsey was that this issue with scenery and fuselage textures (at least for me) began occurring after I installed the new cloud textures over Waterzone.  Why this would happen?  I don't have a clue since none of the textures from either download are the same.  But this fix worked for me.  Go figure.

You may not have these extra textures.  Maybe we need to look elsewhere.

[alrot]

I bet is a corrupt download  8)

[starseed419]

I had a few scenery add-ons with my previous installation of FS9. I had FSGensis west coast and rocky mt sceneries, Ultimate Traffic, USA Rds, as well as numerous add-on aircraft. Last night after becoming quite frustrated with the problem, I deleted FS9 and did a fresh install. Before adding any of my previous sceneries back on, I loaded the America West 7E7 and the Dassault Falcon. Started flying the 7E7, and everything was good for about ten minutes. After a few minutes in the 2d cockpit view, I went back outside, and the textures were gone again. I got to thinking, and I recently added a stick of Kingston 512 DDR. Since then I have seen the scenery flash, all the extures disappear and reappear, so maybe I have some bad RAM or something. Who knows. ANd as far as corrupt downloads are concerned, I had been using these addons for months before this started happening.

[starseed419]

Update:
Redownloaded the Dassault and America West 7E7. This time, as soon as I loaded the game, the textures were gone...grrrrr

[Graycat8524]

Heya Starseed,

I doubt that it's a memory issue.  First off, if it was a bad memory chip your PC would crash and on re-boot you would get the MS Windows XP blue screen of death saying that the memory image could not be loaded.  Secondly (from what I'm gathering from your original post) this issue is only affecting your FS 2004 program.  If it was a bad memory issue then all of your programs would be similarly affected.  

I'm beginning to think that ALROT may be right.  Delete all Add-on Aircraft and just fly around with the default aircraft for a while.  See if this issue occurs again.  If not there may be something in either the America West 7E7 or the Dassault Falcon that you're using which causes this issue.

Although I don't have the America West 7E7 that you mentioned, I do have Mike Stone's excellent Dassault Falcon 2000 available here on SimV (FS 2002 version) or his website (FS 2004 version Uploaded:  2004-04-24):

http://www.pmstone.com

I have never had any issues with Mike Stone's Falcon.  You may wish to download it and see how it works.

[starseed419]

I was only using those aircraft as examples. It has happened to a few other add-ons. All of the default aircraft seem to be fine. And some of the addons work as advertised. I used the grand canyon and scenic airlines twin otters quite often, and they never have any problems. I rolled my system back to directx 9.0b ( I had installed 9.0c a couple of weeks ago), as this was right around the time the issues started. I am reinstalling FS9 now, and will give an update hopefully within the next hour or so.

[SaVas]

I have that issue occasionally with my ATI card, or did until I added more RAM and use FSAutoStart which stops most of the RAM hoggers. Seems by PC was getting bogged down and for some reason as affecting my graphics card. Now I don't have the issue.

Could possibly be overheating as well.

[starseed419]

Rolled the system back successfully to DirectX 9.0b, problem solved. YEA!!!