resolved Missing Textures near KMTH (Marathon, FL)

[jabloomf1230]

After installing the client and content updates for P3d V4.2, I noticed one small glitch in that the textures are missing  (they show as black) for a small island SW of KMTH in the Florida Keys. The island is Boot Key and looks like from Google Maps that it is supposed to be some kind of wetland/saltwater marsh. FTX Global Base, FTX Open LC NA and FTX Global Vector are installed and I haven't noticed any other texture problems other than this one. I forced FTX Central to reinstall ORBXLIBS but that had no effect. I thought about forcing FTX Central to reinstall FTX Global Base, but I figured that I'd post first to see if anyone else has seen this. The location of Boot Key from Google Maps:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/nhqr7y3zgh8eixv/KMTH Boot Key FL.jpg?dl=1

 

[jabloomf1230]

Here's some more information. I looked to see what the island's texture entry GUID was and it corresponds to this in terrain.cfg:

 

// ORBX FTXG_V POLY NEWLC205
[Texture.950]
Name=LC205_ORBX_NEWLC
Color=FFC8C8B9
Guid={FBFF89B2-B0F1-4503-A388-8F260A4A5BF6}
Textures=ORBX_NEWLC205
ExcludeAutogen=No
RenderToTexture=Yes
RenderPriority=30000
Water=No

 

[jabloomf1230]

Well, I reinstalled both Open LC NA and Open LC Base and it made no difference. What I am wondering is, since this is a low-lying island that is barely above sea level, is whether the elevation data (which is supplied by PILOTS! FS Global Ultimate, might be the cause. I am investigating further, but in the meantime could someone from ORBX support tell me what the texture file name is that corresponds to the GUID in my previous post? I have  a copy of Holger Sandmann's V3 spreadsheet, but that only lists the default FSX texture file naming vs. landclass.

 

Thanks.

[Holger Sandmann]

Hi there,

 

the openLC NA texture set for our LC205 is named 200b and resides in \ORBX\FTX_OLC\OLC_NA1\Texture. It's actually a Mangrove wetland type.

 

Not seeing any issues myself in P3Dv4.2 with openLC NA and Vector. Are you sure you don't have any other add-on active, at higher display priority, that may contain local landclass placement files?

 

Terrain mesh files don't have any influence on whether landclass textures are displayed or not.

 

Cheers, Holger

[ftxpolo]

Jabloomf

 

Well ... remember that there is a scenery of this airport that is being developed right now ( Payware ) . There is no doubt that this will come to add much detail to this beautiful area.

[jabloomf1230]

18 hours ago, Holger Sandmann said:

Are you sure you don't have any other add-on active, at higher display priority, that may contain local landclass placement files?

Thanks. The 200 series texture files are all in the NA folder and I checked a few of them with Photoshop. None are corrupt. The CVX file for the ORBX freeware KMTH doesn't overlap. The only add-on that's even close to that location is LatinVFR KEYW and a quick check of the CVX files show no overlap with the location of Boot Key. I'll disable the KEYW add-on and see if that helps.

[jabloomf1230]

Turning off both those airports (LatinVFR KEYW and KRSW) made no difference. However, I figured out that it is the same problem as reported here:

 

Boot Key is so small that since its all Mangrove Marsh the night texture looks like pure black, unless one looks closer there is a tiny corner that is not black and must be the wrong texture altogether. I also noticed the same problem as reported in the above thread  in the South Beach area of Miami Beach, FL and an area between the water in KMSY in New Orleans, LA. Those areas have obvious night textures. The problem seems to be confined for me to the SE USA and is not seen that often.

[jabloomf1230]

I've done some more experimenting. I followed Holger's instructions for fixing the "morphing textures" issue and had FTX Central create a brand new  version of terrain.cfg. Now it's apparent that Boot Key is a mess of night and mismatched textures in my installation.

 

[Holger Sandmann]

Hi there,

 

if you compare the landclass distribution of our screenshots it's obvious that there are many differences, like the lack of housing along Hwy1 on mine. It still looks to me that there's another landclass add-on at play otherwise the land use types would be identical. Have you tried temporarily deactivating all add-ons other than openLC NA and Global Vector?

 

Cheers, Holger

[jabloomf1230]

I'll try that next. To my knowledge, I don't have any add-ons that either modify or add landclass (other than openLC Europe). Whether an add-on airport replaces a LC texture or two, I have no idea. And if some of the sim's default LC texture files were overwritten, just disabling the offending add-on wouldn't fix anything.  Those two LVR airports are the only 3rd party sceneries that I have installed  that are within 500 miles of Boot Key. The strange thing is that I was flying from KEYW to KFLL with P3d 4.1 and I never noticed this error. I always fly the same flightplan up the Keys to the NW. 

 

As an aside, would an airport add-on such as LatinVFR KEYW which adds photoreal textures  (but only to Key West proper and the adjacent island Boca Chica Key) somehow cause more widespread changes to LC textures? 

 

 

 

[jabloomf1230]

Holger,

 

Thanks for all your help on the mysterious problem. Removing all the other add-ons as you suggested did not fix the problem, but the night textures on Boot Key were replaced by day grid city textures. So I reinstalled openLC base, openLC NA and openLC Europe again, but this time instead of just deleting the TXT version files and letting FTX Central look for changes, I completely uninstalled and redownloaded all three packages. That approach worked and now Boot Key is all mangrove wetland. The rest of the Florida Keys are also more undeveloped as they should be. Reenabling all the other add-ons did not change that result, so this thread can be marked as solved.

 

Just as an aside, when I was trying to figure out what the mangrove texture was, I ran across your terrain.cfg texture Excel spreadsheet V3. How did you figure out from the FS9 and FSX SDKs what the texture naming convention was (the 3 digit number in the filename), when compared to the LC code? Many aren't they same and for the life of me I couldn't figure out anything from looking at terrain.cfg either. 

 

Jay

[Holger Sandmann]

Hi Jay,

 

good to hear you've got the issue resolved.

 

Indeed, many of the parameters specified by the landclass control file, lclookup.bgl, were never listed in the Terrain SDK, including the class-to-texture-name assignments. Some of us developers who participated in the FSX Beta testing received a complex spreadsheet that included all of those parameters. That's what we later used to make those simplified landclass tables because the original spreadsheet was never released from NDA (i.e., to the public) by ACES/Microsoft.

 

That being said, all of these parameters can be deduced through systematic trial-and-error and my landclass spreadsheet includes basic instructions for generating test areas that make the process much more efficient. Similarly, for each new Orbx Region, we build one of those test areas so that we can check our texture sets and their behavior in specific terrain conditions and combinations; sort of like a test lab for landclass R&D except we don't wear white coats 

 

Cheers, Holger

[jabloomf1230]

Again, thanks for the explanation. I'm eagerly awaiting the first of the ORBX photoreal products for P3d4 though.  Just don't tell my PC's disk storage system.