[EXPLAINED] YMML Heavy blurries with P-Max ground textures

[Guest Schubido]

Hi there,

I have installed YMML this morning (Germany) and have followed your suggestions regarding the setting. Nvidea 8800 GTX XXX 768 MB.

However, whatever i do with Poly Max eanabled I do have very blurry ground textures even if "texture resolution" is set to 15cm like

advised.

An other experience is that in using the PMDG 747 400 X I get a "OOM" message already 1 minute after just standing at the runway.

Whats wrong ?

Thanks for any hint or tip

Stefan   

[one-proud-aussie]

this happened to me... if you see the runway with no lines on it, and if you see the other end of runways and taxi ways really blury like a 2 year old was drawing them then its as simple as running the installer again, that worked for me

good luck with it

[Guest Schubido]

Thanks

I will try this..

Stefan

[Guest Schubido]

Hi there,

The Re-install hasnt solved the problem...

What I wonder about is that there is no change in the visual appearence if the texture resolution within FSX is set to 1 m or 15cm !

The ground is extremely blurry if I for exmple use the outside view with the Carenado Mooney at the parking position.

I do remember that I had a similar problem with Zürich FSX from Dreamteam in the past. The same heavy blurry texture but that

went back to crisp and normal after they have provided a update.

Its all gone and normal looking if I use the FSX Native mode within the CP but of course the oil spots and everything else is gone

too. Again, I have a Nvidea 8800 GTX XXX with 768 MB Memory using the newest driver. All the settings within FSX have been

carefully adusted following the recommendation of OrbX.

I hope that someone has an idea how to fix the problem if its not me which has overseen something

Thanks in advance

Stefan

 

[Guest Schubido]

The ground textures (heavy blurry ones) on my screen are somehow looking like the last picture you find under..

Community Screenshots / YMML - Awesome / Last pic !!!! The ground on this pic is as blurry as the ones

I get.

Due to my understanding this is never showing a ground texture resolution which is somewhat comparable with

15cm !!

So, whats wrong ?

Thanks

Stefan 

[Heiko Glatthorn]

Hi Stefan,

with the GTX you should have no problem with the 15 cm textures. What is your texture filtering setting within FSX - bilinear, trilinear or anisotropic ? What AF setting do you use in your nVidia control panel ? How's about your FPS at YMML ? And which driver exactly do you use, nVidia whql ?

[triangle]

Its all gone and normal looking if I use the FSX Native mode within the CP but of course the oil spots and everything else is gone

too. Again, I have a Nvidea 8800 GTX XXX with 768 MB Memory using the newest driver. All the settings within FSX have been

carefully adusted following the recommendation of OrbX.

 

Yes, same here ... same card, same experience plus i have tried AA at application and 8xS and always have anisotropic filtering at 16x.  Runs fine with native mode on but very blurry and alot of missing textures with it off.  In addition, if I fly out of YMML and go to an external view and look back at the airport, the entire airport is greyed out and slowly fills in all the textures and models over about 30 seconds.

Andrew

Andrew

[Guest Schubido]

Hi,

I have checked it again...

Card: Nvidea 8800 GTX XXX 768 MB

Driver: WHQ 175.19

FSX: Anitalising (marked, activated) set to Anisotropic

Within the Nvidea Driver: Anisotropic is set to : 8x

Antialising: 4x

I am using AU Blue and Gold all the time being very satisfied. Beside the sceneries I am having several Airports like London Heathrow, of course KayTak

and a few other airports like Zürich from Dreamteam but I dont have such a blurry "Ground Texture" as I actually have with YMML. If I use the Carenado

Mooney and activate the outside view it looks like that the little plane is positioned on a "wadding" texture. Its a optically very disappointing contrast if

the sharp and accurate textures of the tyres are touching something which is simply 20 times more unsharp or softened.

I was very confident that this could not be a problem associated with YMML. However after seeing same pictures which others have taken and published

within the community screenshot section of the forum I have to beleive its not only me which is experiencing this.

Again, I had the same longer time ago at the time Zürich FSX came out from Dreamteam. Exactly the same blurry ground. That all went away after they did a update shortly after the official release and that solved the problem. I just again wanted to mention this.

I am very confident that your guys will be able to localize the problem and provide a solution in the near future because I want to use the G Max Poly Mode.

Thanks in advance

Stefan 

Ps. I forget to check the FPS with the Mooney but will come back with this in a Minute.

 

[Heiko Glatthorn]

I am sure we find out why it's not showing correct on your PC. John will get to you as soon as he is online again. In the meantime it will be helpful to gather as much info as possible. Do you use any tweaks like BufferPools, mipmaps, ect ? What are your PC specs ?

I am using a 8800 GTX as well - at 1920x1200 resolution with the 175.16 driver.

Maybe you can get a screen shot or two ?

edit: btw, when you tick AA in FSX, set app controlled in your CP !

[Wolter van der Spoel]

Maybe a superfluos question, are the "Blurries" directly there or do they appear after a short time ?

[Guest Schubido]

Directly there..

Stefan

Missing info regarding FPS:

FPS: YMML Inside the Carenado Mooney (F10) > 28 / Outside the Monney (F11) 18

Morrabien: Inside 51 / Outside > 73

EDDM Munich: Inside 45 / Outside > 47

[Heiko Glatthorn]

Tweaks ? Specs ?

[Guest Schubido]

Hi Mango,

Believe it or not..

I went away from 175.19 because after loading the PMDG 747 X I experienced a blue screen (Vista Memory Dump). The same happend with the 175.16 and I gave up and installed the 169.25. For whatever reason it works now and the system seems to be stable. I had to get rid of the memory problem

with the driver in order to continue to check the ground texture situation with YMML avoiding a influence from the driver.

That is not an issue anymore with the 169.25 driver even if this is not the newest..

The ground texture looks a bit better now but in my view its far away from what I expected it to be. Specially the taxi lines or other things like white stripes, areas etc. are visually come up very very poor and much to soft at the edges. The oils spots are totally unsharp and very soft looking like clouds. Thats not real at all. In a summary, there is no crisp structure at all.

Thats of course not an issue if you be in the air or lets say you might be at a height of 30 to 100 meters or more. As higher you go as better the ground looks. Yes, thats very nice indeed and I believe looking at the details from that height shows the good job you did but it also shows that even OrbX isnt

magic. I believe Heathrow or Zürich FSX is better. 

I hope you will be able to find a solution that the ground texture at ground level will look as good like viewed from some height. I am sure you will come up with hopefully some improvements soon. Should there be ways to improve the settings any further within FSX I am willing to try what you will

suggest

Now lets go back to the flight performance on my system (not a weak PC) which is unfortunately beoming a big disappointment (frustration) as well:

PMDG 747 400 X: at approach to YMML 5 FPS - thats unacceptable even if its such a complex airport

Carenado Mooney: at approach or flying directly over the YMML buildings 10 FPS - thats also not a pleasing experience

I indeed hope that the problems experienced are related to user flaws or wrong settings etc. If so a few solutions should be found to improve the

overall performance.

Thanks in advance

Stefan

 

[Guest Schubido]

Tweaks FSX  - none that I know

Specs PC again:

Quad 2.4 Ghz / 4 GB Memory / 8800 GTX XXX 768 MB / Resolution (Normally 900 x 1200). Now reduced down following the recommendations

of OrbX.

My general impression is mixed since I dont know if I just have the wrong settings, a PC which is not powerful enough or if things are simply missing

or not implemented

The scenerie / airport looks all great from the far field but it looks very bad and blurry within the near field. Even the top of some of the flat buildings

are looking very blurry.

The night lighting is a very intense yellow light. To intense for my taste and not well fading out. That doesnt look very natural compared with other

known sceneries. I believe the night lighting can be much improved to be more atmospheric also regarding the colors (like Kay Tak). 

I am really missing reflections on all the windows of at least the large buildings. I do miss some fog layers, steam out of a chimney or from air conditions outlets or whatever to create a real busy airport. 

Finally the FPS I am getting at YMML are probably the lowest I ever had to eperience. I understand its a complex scenerie which needs a lot of memory but since I havnt seen many animations, traffic, reflections, smog, moving people etc. even though its activated within the CP I wonder where all the memory is allocated for ?

I hope there is only someting wrong with the settings on my rig ? Eventually AU Blue is not working correctly ? Or its just the Nvidea driver ? If not I would be really disappointed.

Hope to hear from you to figure out

Stefan

[Heiko Glatthorn]

Oh, don't get my signature wrong, i develop freeware airfields like YRED and YHBA, not payware airports like YMML. I am really puzzled that the 175.16 driver doesn't work for you. For me it has the best FSX (and Crysis) performance to date, while 169.25 was quiet bad regarding FPS... Do you use a driver cleaner in save mode before you install a new one ?

Btw - a 2.4 GHz CPU (quad or duo, doesn't matter) isn't exactly da bomb for highly complex FSX addons and high settings.

[Guest Schubido]

Hi

This is what I did now..

I have carefully removed the old driver and installed 177.79 which is a beta because 175.16 and 19 produced unexpected trouble specially when

loading the PMDG 747 X.

Now with that driver I feel that the quality of the ground texture has improved. Additionally I have increased the resolution back to 1900 x 1200

since I had no significant drop in the FPS. I do have about 18 to 20 FPS with the Mooney now and at least 9 to 10 FPS with the PMDG 747 which is

ok.

Thanks and best regards

Stefan

[Heiko Glatthorn]

Great Stefan ! Up to 20 FPS with the Mooney is not bad at all at such a complex place. Interesting with the new driver - but i am afraid i can't keep up anymore with all those nvidia betas... 

[---]

Same problem.

Tried re-installing. No joy.

E6850  core 2 Duo   2GB RAM

NVIDIA 8800GTS  640MB   8x AA 8x AF

Win XP

FSX Accel

Performance and visual are very nice on my machine BUT below 100ft......

Regardless if the texture is set to 1m or 15cm

Regards

Bernt

[John Venema]

I think I need to reset expectations somewhat.

15cm per pixel is just that - 15cm. That means a taxi line, which is usually about 12cm wide, has less than 1 pixel to be shown across its entire width, and that would need to include the black side and yellow centre. So in reality, 15cm/pixel is not high enough resolution to compete with AFCAD style airports where the number on the runways and the taxi lines, stripes , in fact all the markings at an airport as drawn as objects by the sim using much higher resolution than 15cm.

The purpose of producing a 15cm/pixel gmax poly is not to compete with the multi-layers implementations of some airport designers, where they have a generic base layer of repeating concrete or asphalt textures and then layer textures in high resolution on top for oil stains and other components. Finally, they add taxilines and other details; again using high resolution .dds images usually.

No, we intended to simply provide an environment which shows YMML's runways, aprons, taxiways as they actually appear today, in real life, without any repetition or fakery. 15cm is the higher resolution we could get data for, and probably the largest amount of data we'd ship with the product anyway.

If you want the super-crisp numbered runways and taxilines etc, use FSX Native Mode which provides all that and more.

[Martin Henare]

The night lighting is a very intense yellow light. To intense for my taste and not well fading out. That doesnt look very natural compared with other

known sceneries. I believe the night lighting can be much improved to be more atmospheric also regarding the colors (like Kay Tak). 

I am really missing reflections on all the windows of at least the large buildings. I do miss some fog layers, steam out of a chimney or from air conditions outlets or whatever to create a real busy airport. 

Finally the FPS I am getting at YMML are probably the lowest I ever had to eperience. I understand its a complex scenerie which needs a lot of memory but since I havnt seen many animations, traffic, reflections, smog, moving people etc. even though its activated within the CP I wonder where all the memory is allocated for ?

Stefan

Thank you for your comments, and i take them on board for improvments for future fixes and updates.e w

A couple of things to point out to clarify why and why not a few things are there or not.

The Night lighiting is based on two key resources one are photos taken at night from various places, the other is my personal experience of working at YMML for the past 5 years. John and i have really tried to capture the real lighing effect and not add our own artisitc impression of what we think it should look like. Many would be surprised how bright an apron area is illuminated at night. Very few other sceneries i have seen or used have truely realistc apron lighting based on the actual lighting profile at the airport.

Most buildings have reflections though i have made them subtle until we develop our own relfection map as the default ones can be a little odd trowing mountains in the windows which if you've ever been to Melbourne.... its pretty flat.

Things like steam etc are largely non existent  at YMML except on the coldest mornings.

There are however uniquely designed and animated Jetways that match and move like their real world counterparts.

What this space as we continue to develop the scenery further to hopefully improve performance further or atleast keep it steady while we implement other features we wanted to add.

Thanks again Stefan

[---]

AHHH, ok. That makes sense.

Anyway, I immediately placed my plane at flytampas VHHH and to my surprise the 'resolution' doesn't seem to be any better. The color difference between the surface and e.g. numbers is much less pronounced that's why it 'seems' to be crisper initially.

BUT, what DID surprise me is the fact that, maybe due to the higher contrast and this absolut photorealistic textures, flaring at the correct height is much easier at YMML

Just tried a few landings with my aussie hawk just to make sure.....

CONGRATULATIONS to the whole team!!!!

There might be nice building and street details as well but as a pilot (and this beeing a FLIGHT and not a driving sim) I'm only interested in the best depiction of the runways and its close surroundings.

John, just let me mention this; Landing a virtual plane on your magnificent virtual YMML aiport is the most realistic landing experience I ever had in any sim!

Yes even below 100ft ;-)   (above that this scenery is second to none and breathtaking anyway!)

[Martin Henare]

Just for fun i challenge you to fly approaching from the north and land on the car ramp. I can land the cessna flying under the road sign and stop just short of the terminal turn around and take off again.

I have been tryin to do it in the F18 but no real success... yet.

[John Venema]

Thanks for the feedback, it's appreciated!  I might put a sticky post up about 15cm to set people's expectations. My choice? I'd always go for gmax polys with slightly less crisp details, versus a fake AFCAD which does not look like the real thing at all.

[stefaandk]

I'm also experiencing very heavy blurries with YMML, not just on the scenery but on everything.  Even the plane's 3D cockpit goes all blurry, it actually seems to reset itself to low texture values.

I have this pretty much instantly when starting at YMML, if I approach YMML from elsewhere when the airport starts loading up the blurries appear as well, it's both in native and non native mode I'm having this.  Resolution doesn't seem to make any difference either.

If I hit ESC and then choose continue flight things will reset back to normal for a few seconds and then the blurries hit again.  I've got quite a few addons for FSX scenery wise but I can't say I've ever seen this.

I'm using the airport in the Blue FTX scenery which works fine.

My System is running FSX in XP as it's too unstable in Vista, an e8500 Core Duo, 4 gig of ram and a 9800GX2 card. 

Also forgot to mention that even the menu links themselves go totally blurry like they've been smudged.

[Wolter van der Spoel]

Hallo stefaandk,

Try and Lower your settings first and than gradually move the sliders up to find the best setting, you cannot run YMML straight out of the box all sliders maxed out.

Another option is to have a look at you Vidcard Drivers, I have installed the 177.39 Beta set and that "cured" a lot of "Blurries" for me

[Guest Schubido]

Hi Wolter,

Its good to hear that the 177.39 beta driver has made a positive impact. I have made the same experience and I am happy now with YMML. Nothing is perfect at the beginning but after I have been able to listen to some explanations regarding the texture quality issues in general I understand better why OrbX has done it like that.

That is convincing me now that the OrbX team will sure be able to improve the optical appearence and the performance (FPS) in the near future. 

Thanks for listening

Stefan 

 

[Guest Schubido]

Dear Marty,

Thanks for commenting the lighting issue, sorry for the late answer..

I like the lighting in general but I might explained it wrong. The thing I dont like is the appearence of the yellow light at the head (output) of the floodlights. I agree that it might look like this in real but due to my taste or at least on my rig its just a "solid yellow" where it might should contain different colors or at least a yellow which fades very smoothly in color saturation. I dont mean the light illumination at the apron area which is OK.

Regarding the reflections I just wanted to see some for example at the big building with the blue glassfront. I believe that due to the missing reflections the buildings (at least the major ones) dont separate well from the others. If you stay with the plane at the runway for example and look at the airport (from the plane) there isnt much to see from the buildings since there are no or to subtile reflections or to less of a contrast. 

You are right regarding the steam etc. If this is not there at YMML why should you implement it. However I am sure that some steam or fog (mist) would improve the scenery as well as some moving lightbeams or a little power plant etc. It would be nice if in the near future some small building places with a few animated building cranes etc. could be implemented since there is always something going on at all the airports.

I strongly believe that OrbX is able to do that because you have all the knowledge and the experience left over from the development of AU Blue and Gold. I do like these sceneries very much and I am very impressed with YMML as well believing that there is still room for improvement. Of course I fully understand that you have to find the balance in between the FPS performance and the optical appearence but I am sure that you will work out something within time.

Lets keep the good work going   

Best regards

Stefan

     

[Martin Henare]

Thanks Stefan for having confidence in us, it's great compliment and a great motivator.

The Ramp lights at this stage use the same effect ast the FTX street lights so using the FTX lights tweaker will atleast change the size and halo map. Something we want to implement is the FTX lights tweaker for use with the rest of the airport effects such as runway, approach and taxiway lights. It is quite resonable to expect a different Ramp light effect will be created to improve mostly the colour as you have pointed out.

Not sure when we will get this implemented but watch this space.

[stefaandk]

I'm having no luck with this one at all I'm afraid.

No matter what I though things blurry pretty much instantly and the menu options go smudged.

I tried different resolutions, I even lowered my settings to the point where I almost get 20 FPS solid panning around YMML using the Level D 767.

Still blurries.

Remove almost every single option from the YMML config so the only thing that pretty much remains are the buildings, still blurries.

Go to a basic P51 plane, still blurries, the only thing I haven't tried is different drivers but this one is the latest official nvidia one and my experience with beta drivers makes me reluctant to go down that road.

I don't know what it is but there is something different to this airport design then all the other ones I have  \

Not pointing any fingers here at all as it does look like a top notch job but I'm out of ideas to get it working.

[Wolter van der Spoel]

as mentioned previously the 177.39 showed a great improvement on this end in respect to the "Blurries" as the 175.16 where an absolute disaster

[Rainey]

I have the same thing but I put it down to simply the anisotrophic settings, if I bump it up to 16x in the nVidia control panel I get pretty good results down low. Try this if you haven't already because it sorted out my 'runway smudge'. 

[Rainey]

Here is a quick comparison I did for you, seems pretty conclusive to me!