noted White square on water at Loch Ness Scotland

[mburkhard]

Dear ORBX,

 

flying through FTX Scotland I discovered that I have a display anomaly at Loch Ness right abeam the Urquhart Castle:

 

 

This is just south of Inverness looking direction South. It is visible from a greater distance even, but as soon as I move closer than shown above to the white square it slowly disappears.

Other than that I do not have any such anomalies anywhere in other FTX regions. At least I haven't spotted any.

 

Any idea what the problem might be? I'm using P3D v3 with FTX Scotland, and also FTX Global, LC Europe and Vector are installed.

 

Thanks,

Markus

[John Dow]

 aye laddie de ye not think that might be the lair o' the wee loch ness monster, and for that ye have tae have a wee castle for the beastie, which is depicted here?  Since no-one knows what the monster looks like there canna be an accurate depiction o the castle, hence the nondescript white square.  Hoots mon, if we find out more we'll let ye know.

[kennethjkerr]

John Dow.... Congrats for getting me laughing hard enough to almost wake the dog from his sleep on the seat beside me! As a former Invernessian now living in Canada, it was nice to see the post, even if concerning a white square. Having said that, I was flying in the area a few days ago, and with FTX and also Global active, I did not see any such anomaly. That might not be too helpful, but just a perspective.

 

- Kenneth Kerr

 

Ps... When I saw something in the Loch, real life in 1979, it was a bit further north! Never saw anything again

[Nick Cooper]

Hello,

It might be a random square of ice, you could try unticking the frozen water option in

the Vector Control panel.

[mburkhard]

John, thanks for that!  Indeed, who knows, the monster might just be a big white square! 

 

Nick, I deactivated all frozen water options. And if it were ice, I think it wouldn't disappear when moving closer.

 

Strange that no one else is seeing this? No fancy add-ons in the vicinity except EGPE by Sim720. However if I deactivate this add-on, the square still remains...

[John Dow]

Just scoured the length and breadth of Loch Ness but no square to be seen.  Seems like you have a rogue file from somewhere.

[mburkhard]

Thanks John I'll do some further troubleshooting. 

[mburkhard]

Ok I've isolated the issue to FTX Scotland. The white square I see is Nessie's playground, the area it swims within. I can clearly see the polygon while the scenery loads.

So for SOME reason this polygon is not transparent when viewed from certain distances/angles.

 

And I did find a similar issue, someone had a dark square instead of a bright one, the issue was never resolved:

 

You know I could live with this issue IF it wasn't located right in the approach path of Inverness Airport.

Something is wrong with the properties of that polygon that causes it to not be transparent with certain settings or other circumstances.

 

Perhaps it is possible to just delete the creature and its playground? Which BGL file would that be? That would be an acceptable solution for me since one has to fly extremely low to see the creature. So it would be easiest to just delete that BGL and be done with it. Is it possible without loosing other features?

 

Thanks,

Markus

[Bermuda425]

I saw the same white square on Hughes Lake after departing from Rwy 30 at Grande Prairie Airport.

[Holger Sandmann]

Hi there,

 

I checked the \ORBX\FTX_EU\FTX_EU_SCO_05_SCENERY\scenery folder and Nessie is placed with the file named FTX_EU_SCO_VFRobjects_OBX.BGL. However, that file also places hundreds of other objects like wind turbines, smoke stacks, power stations, etc. Thus, probably your best bet would be to open that file in Instant Scenery or similar and remove the object placement for "FTX_SCO_Pet_Path". 

 

Apparently, there are service packs in the works for the UK regions and I'll let the developer know of this thread; perhaps there's an option to make the object "platform" fully transparent in P3D as well.

 

Cheers, Holger

[mburkhard]

Thanks Holger for the investigation, world class support!

 

So you can confirm there is a transparency issue with the object in P3D, which is not caused by my settings/system?

 

Good to hear about the upcoming service packs! I do not own the Instant Scenery tool to delete the creature out of this file. Is there a freeware tool available that can accomplish the same? If I don't have to I'd prefer not to spend money to solve this, this money would be better spent in buying more ORBX sceneries 

 

Thanks again!

Cheers,

Markus

[mburkhard]

Could anyone please confirm that the recent update for Scotland was intended to only update the night lighting and nothing else? That white square mentioned above is still present, and unfortunately FTX Central didn't show any change log for the recent update.

 

Thanks,

Markus

[Euphonist]

Yes, today I was flying there and indeed there it was as you can see in the picture.

I checked the option 'Frozen surfaces in winter' and disabled it. That causes the option 'Open water in winter' to be enabled.

Anyway that did not help!

 

Greetings,

Wil

[Nick Cooper]

Here is a slightly newer and more apposite topic:

 

 

[Euphonist]

Thanks Nick