active Missing Textures and Missing Objects Alerts

[fltsimguy]

I have just completed reinstalling over 100 Orbx products, payware and freeware.  Its a daughting exercise as anyone who does a reinstall knows.  I have no other developers products installed except UTX.

 

Because of a recent texture issue that I encountered with the install of Squamish CYSE I decided to look into any other anomalies I might find.

 

I added the triggers to my FSX.CFG as below.

// To show alerts or areas, set to = 1
// To hide alerts or areas, set to = 0

// Alert for missing textures
ShowMissingTextureAlert=1

// Alert for missing objects
MissingLibraryAlert=1

// Render Trigger areas as visible boxes
ShowTriggers=1

 

Then I started loading up each Region and each airport to check for any install issues. I wasn't looking for missing textures nor missing objects but rather just checking to see if my install went well.

 

I can report that the great % of my installs went very well, I followed proper installation procedures as recommended by Orbx and ran Global Vector Configure as well and ensured that the latest libraries were always installed last.

 

I found that a number of missing textures sometimes a missing lightmap texture and missing objects kept popping up in my alerts.

One would never know about these missing object calls and textures if the alerts were not turned on.

 

My question is do any of these missing elements have any effect on fsx performance?  Or are they just a nuisance thing that has no effect on the sim. I have not done any investigation beyond just seeing the alerts pop up on my install.

 

cheers

Bryan

[John Dow]

In a nutshell, if your scenery displays correctly then there's no problem.  If you search the forums for the issue there are a few threads explaining the issue.

 

Essentially the function to look for missing objects and textures is for developers for diagnoses and troubleshooting and is not designed to be used by the end user.

[fltsimguy]

Hi John, fair enough...everything seems to be working well as I mentioned. But I did uncover or rediscover the issue with Squamish textures.

 

While an end user of Orbx sceneries I actually have a good knowledge & some backgound in scenery development...given the CYSE texture issue I was doing some diagnosing. I was curious to know if errors of missing stuff might impact sim performance.  It doesn't seem so to me.

 

An example of what shows up is with NA Claresmore Industrial CEJ4, a missing texture CRACKLES.BMP is called from somewhere but all the textures for that scenery are in "dds" format...so its rather irrelevant in the end.

 

cheers

Bryan

[ayrsimming]

Hi

 

If the alerts are solely for the use of developers then it looks like they are not making full use of them.  Just as important,  if not more so,  is the use of these alerts by beta testers which also does not seem to be fully happening either.

How can the scenery be displaying correctly?  The simulator is looking for objects and textures it can't find and they are then not being seen by the customer which effectively means the scenery and the product is incomplete.  Also all the time you are flying in the area containing these missing items the simulator is constantly looking for them which must have some impact on performance surely?

I experienced and reported missing library objects in the EUScotland  product within weeks of it's release and now with all up to date files in place am still seeing missing objects when the relevant alert is active.  The alerts are not just showing at the airport where the missing objects should be ( full details were provided ) but also at two other airfields,  one a reasonable distance away,  so the effect of the problem is not entirely local. 

 

Iain

[Alex Goff]

If you have a missing object or texture to report, please report it with the corresponding information  (GUID/texture name).

 

I would hesitate to call scenery 'incomplete' because a missing texture or object error pops up. The most common scenario that creates missing objects is at one point a test object was added, then removed from a library, but not its corresponding placement file. So usually, the scenery is displaying as intended.

 

We periodically release missing object fixes via the libraries for those that cannot be traced through other means, so again, please report the GUID or texture name.