Black textures

[nigyoung]

Don't know if anyone can shed any light on this but I keep getting dark box textures around landing lights, runway lights and even areas of ground are blacked out. It only lasts for a few seconds then comes right. Is this an FSX issue or something else? Any ideas appreciated

[tennyson]

I've also had them and still do occassionally.

I seem to remember somewhere else on the forum that this anomoly came up and John said it was something to do with transitioning between FSX and FTX, but I could be wrong.

Wolter or one of the other guru's would probably be able to explain it.

Frank

[Wolter van der Spoel]

Looks like a light effect from a ported over Aircraft from fs9 or also could indicate a missing texture, or does it dissapear after a while ?

if the last is the case it's due to prologued searchtime for that particular texture.

As it seems to have fps set to unlimited do a lil test and set the fps to 20 and see if it repeats.

[nigyoung]

Hi Wolter, no it disappears after a few seconds. It's not a major drama just annoying. I'll try with 20 fps and see if there's any difference

[nigyoung]

Hi Wolter. Did a flight with same aircraft at 20 FPS and the same result so I guess it's the prolonged search time for a certain texture.

[Holy Cheese]

I have the same problem. I was wondering if it has anything to do with having swapped out the halo.bmp a couple of times? I'll try putting the original halo.bmp back in and see if that helps.

Jack

[Wolter van der Spoel]

What also could be a cause is your AV is scanning every file till the last one,

make sure your AV is either turned off completely or set it that it does not scan fsX or reacts to fsx.exe

[Virtualwombat]

I get this too. Seems the system puts a black box where a light should be while it loads the right texture. Why, I don't know. Maybe it's a driver issue?

Cheers,

Noel.

[nigyoung]

I turned off my AV but it made no difference. I was able to catch this other pic of black ground textures. Like the black squares around lights it only lasts for a few seconds.

[Martin Henare]

Its a texture loading issue, and something that can happen anywhere with higher texture loading requirements, often when you change view or slew fast.

It seems to affect effects and land tiles mostly and i think is just an FSX processing issue. A black object like that is a slow loading or missing texture. It is more noticable on lower end systems.

[GaryT22]

I also get this occurring but only around lights, mostly airport landing lights.  I've found it quite annoying as it can persist for some time.  I use TrackerIR so I slew my view around quite often.   Everything else with FTX scenery and YMML is running very well.

My system is E8400@3.14 Ghz, 2G Kingston HyperX 1066 Mhz Memory and Nvidia 8800 GT 512Mb card.  I've also disabled Virus Scanning for FSX.  I thought this was a reasonably speced system.  I've also implemented all Orbx recommended settings but it still occurs.

If it is related to searching for textures why only lights in my case and can anything be done to fix it?  I would really like to get rid of this.  Any ideas would be appreciated.

[nigyoung]

Hi Garry

I've re adjusted all sliders, checked that AV is not operating and basically done everything i can think of to reduce any drag on the system. My system is reasonable and this is a relatively new problem so like you, I'm a bit bewildered.

[John Venema]

The sheer amount of blurring in the last shot tells me that FSX is pulling 2nd or 3rd MIPs from the textures and something is bottlenecking the video card.

[nigyoung]

Hi Guys, here's another shot but this time of 'green' patches. Also get blacked out runways every so often. You'll need to look through rear window to see the green patches

[GaryT22]

Nigyoung and John,

I've got excellent graphics no blurries when flying around Melb.  I have to say it is a thing of beauty flying around Tulla with views to Melbourne, especially the creeks and gullies.  I set my frame rate to unlimited as suggested by Uhu_Fledermaus which gave me a frame rate of 35 to 50 except when I look at Melb Airport where it can drop down to 12 but this doesn't seem to be a problem as when I look at the runway again it goes up to above 20 and I don't notice any stutters.

The black squares around the lights still occur but seemed less often but they did persist annoyingly for Melb and Essendon for many seconds once or twice.  I can understand the theory that it is a swamped graphics card but in my case why only runway lights?  I'm off bushwalking for a couple of days but would like to test any theories that anybody has when I return.  Thank you all for your contributions.

[Chandy]

Hi there,

My FS has developed the black textures around lights and both black squares on land and water textures (the latter far less often and mainly black or dark blue). All last only a few seconds. However I have only developed this problem since installing recently released FTX freeware (unfortuantely I couldn't state which ones).

I have a good system and card with heaps of RAM (4GB). I have also noticed the bright green affect with runways, however not for some time now. I remember having this problem with an old computer and programs like FS2000/FS2002 and some other FS programs years ago - it may have been a driver issue but again I can't remember.

Perhaps someone with this problem might consider back-tracking by uninstalling add-ons one at a time until (hopefully) the problems cease. I am sure we would all like to know if this is the problem...if it isn't then we can all try another tack.

Regards,

PS: Does defragging make any difference?

John g

[Holy Cheese]

John g,

for me this is certainly not a problem which has been caused by FTX, freeware or payware. I had this problem before I ever found out about FTX. It only lasts for a second or so on changing views on my pc, and I reckon I can live with it rather than have to spend hours or days tracking down the cause

Cheers

Jack

[Wolter van der Spoel]

PS: Does defragging make any difference?

YES,

as most people tend to forget about it, unfortunatly fsX is pretty sensitive to fragmantation,

only advice I can give is get a decent defrag proggy like O & O and set your system to defrag before shutdown at the end of the day,

this so when you start up the next day you have a nicely defragged system.

Saves a lot of annoyance and also contributes to the speed of te system to load data and textures,

another thing to watch is the amount of free space on the HD where your fsX install resides, best is to have it on a separate partition or HD,

Windows wil have trouble defragmenting when the free space on a HD gets under 23% of it's total capacity, irrespective of the size of the HD !.

Be selective with what you install on your system, if you have Aircraft that you do not use,

toss 'm or park 'm somewhere where they do not use up system resources, the lesser the amount of unused stuff in your fsX setup the better it wil load and run.

On a regular basis cleaning out the prefetch files is also one of those forgotten things, Windows is almost sickening in collecting every action, page, or thing you did on your system,

all under the banner of "quick access" alas in time it gets counter productive as the Dbase it's searching through gets only bigger and bigger,

hence the regular cleanout, at first the system wil be slightly slower as it has to "collect" data again, but it will increase speed and loading times significantly.

Also running programs are an issue, the less the better.

[nigyoung]

Hi guys. may have 2 separate problems here. Black squares and black props on ai aircraft.

Have defragged with O&O got rid of all junk including the prefetch files etc.

Black squares only seen for a second or less but noticed the ai aircraft with black props.

Any thoughts?

[John Venema]

We know about the AI aircraft props, those are FS9 alpha issues. Rob is working through the FTX AI and a hotfix will be available soon.

[nigyoung]

Thanks John will look forward to it.