P3D v4 Odd Floating Textures that do not blend into background

[Colin Gray]

Evening all,

Wasn't sure if I should post this here or, for that matter, how to describe the issue. I've posted this issue previously on the Orbx forums, though it has shown up in other default and payware scenery. The response I usually get has something to do with turning off my shaders or simply emptying the shader folder - or something to that effect. As far as I know, I have not installed any shaders. Basically I'm getting parts of scenery (usually parts of buildings or ground markings) that seem to float just above the ground and seem to take a higher priority to everything else around it. For example - if I have a plane parked in front of a building, the background texture will make part of the airplane invisible. Probably not describing it very well.

Here is a picture of a default a/c parked at Gate C0 at Aerosoft's KASE. As you can see, part of the scenery and the plane is now hidden by part of the ground texture - evening though that texture is behind the plane

I found the file for ground markings in the scenery folder and opened with MCX. Found the offending texture using Object Hierarchy and deleted the modelpart that seemed to be causing the issue. I exported the scenery and added it to the KASE folder. When I go back to the sim, I see this:

Deleting the one model part seems to have removed other texture that weren't highlighted in red, but the floating texture is now gone. Is there anything I should look at adjusting within Material Editor?

Thank you for your help.

Cheers,

colin

 

[=rk=]

Are you developing something, that you have not described? It seems curious, that you would post on ORBX support forums, about an issue with an Aerosoft airport, especially since editing that airport, apparently, resolved your issue. I feel like there is a giant paragraph missing. You describe your issue and you describe what you did to resolve it, but you did not describe how you identified the issue and what steps were necessary to resolve it. You'll want to be overly specific and you will want to be developing something, everything that is visible in the sim was developed, but there is no compulsion for developers to support the commercial developments of others.

I found the file for ground markings in the scenery folder and opened with MCX. Found the offending texture using Object Hierarchy and deleted the modelpart that seemed to be causing the issue.

Why did you decide to edit ground markings? You deleted part of the Aerosoft airport and then you recompiled it? Do you have any idea how a software product become "broken," had you previously edited it?

 

[Colin Gray]

Are you developing something, that you have not described? It seems curious, that you would post on ORBX support forums, about an issue with an Aerosoft airport, especially since editing that airport, apparently, resolved your issue. I feel like there is a giant paragraph missing. You describe your issue and you describe what you did to resolve it, but you did not describe how you identified the issue and what steps were necessary to resolve it. You'll want to be overly specific and you will want to be developing something, everything that is visible in the sim was developed, but there is no compulsion for developers to support the commercial developments of others.


Why did you decide to edit ground markings? You deleted part of the Aerosoft airport and then you recompiled it? Do you have any idea how a software product become "broken," had you previously edited it?

Hey Rick,

Thank you for replying. Yes, I see your point. Okay, I first started noticing similar effects at a couple ORBX airports. I don’t think it had anything to do with ORBX, I just fly to those airports more often. Some of them were stand alone payware, others were free upgrades to airports that were part of their payware regions (like PNW, etc). That was when I posted on the ORBX forum. I‘d post pictures of what I was seeing on my computer. The developers would post what they had on theirs. It became obvious that it was definitely something on my end. I have checked other forums and nobody else has reported this - which confirmed that its something to do with my sim. As I noted, the solutions offered to me were either remove any shaders or change my texture resolution.

Up until yesterday, I just left the sceneries alone. I ignored what I was seeing as there didn’t seem to be a solution for it. Yesterday was the first time I tried to ‘edit’ a specific scenery file. The one change I did to a small portion of the apron did ’fix’ the problem I was seeing, but it also removed all ground markings to that airport. Why did I select that specific scenery file? Trial and error. I just figured a file named ‘Ground Marking Library’ was a good place to start. It is what looks like of a ground poly of the whole airport.

I’m about 99% sure the problem is on my end and not a specific developer. I‘m running into this issue in both payware and freeware airports. Sometimes it’s terminal building textures, sometimes it’s textures from the apron, and other times it’s the part of the runway textures that do this. The vast majority of airports on my system look exactly as they should. It’s just a handful where I see this happen. It doesn’t always look the greatest, but doesn’t seem to cause the sim to crash. In that way, I can live with it the way it is. Part of me just wants to keep trying to isolate the problem and see if I can fix it.

My only intention here was to tap into this knowledge base to see if anyone else had experienced the same issue. And if they had, what, if anything, were they able to do to fix it.

Cheers,

colin

 

[=rk=]

I am going to guess you use FSX, or possibly P3D and that you do not activate scenery files individually, that you instead place scenery files into a common directory of Scenery and Texture folders. I cannot emphasize enough how thoroughly we need to describe our issues, in order to encourage an equally through solution.

Yesterday was the first time I tried to ‘edit’ a specific scenery file.

Leaves a great deal of room for interpretation, as to file type, edit performed and software used.

I will guess that you are having a file conflict, that the different scenery titles include texture files with the same names, but different compositions. It follows that you would have allowed the offending texture, to overwrite the intended texture and your attempt to undo this by editing the file, created more issues.

 

[Colin Gray]

@=rk= Fair enough. I’m using P3D v4.5. To be honest, my scenery files are kind of all over the place. All my ORBX airport/area/mesh files are installed directly into the same file as P3D. They are activated once they are installed using the ORBX installer. I don’t activate them manually. KASE is installed on a separate SSD in a file with a couple other Aerosoft sceneries. Each one is activated using an xml file in documents\p3d addons.

I probably overstated my abilities to edit scenery files. In this case I open the airport file using ADE. I was looking to see if there was a ground poly there that might be causing the issue. This turned out to be a dead end as only taxi and runway nodes are shown. I then opened the ground marking library file using MCX. I clicked on Object Hierarchy and then clicked on each ‘model part’ until the texture that appeared to be floating turned red. I then clicked on delete and then exported the scenery. That’s about as far as I got. I did keep an unaltered copy of the ground marking library just to be safe. I have since deleted the file that I changed and the original file is back where it belongs. Everything looks as it did before I tried a couple adjustments.