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Heathrow Runway texture changing.


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Hi,

I have a strange problem with the runway textures at Heathrow, they primarily affect the 09 end and 09L is particularly obvious. Depending upon the angle I approach the runway the textures change from one to another and back again if I change angles. This happens not only taxxing but also flying an approach.

I am running:

Sim-wings London Heathrow Professional version 1.10

Prepar3D v4.5.12.30293

Orbx Global (Base, openLC Europe, Vector) and EU England. Global Vector Airport Elevations Corrections has been run and saved. EU England Control Panel has been accessed and I have unticked the FTX England features for 3rd party addon compatability regarding Aerosoft London Heathrow Airport EGLL

GSX Level 2

Ultimate Traffic Live

All versions are the latest available.

A copy of my Scenery library entry is attached and shows Heathrow higher than any other scenery.

I have searched my PC for any other BGL files relating to Heathrow and all of the ones installed by Orbx are Off, the ones that weren’t switched off by Orbx I have done so manually by renaming the extension.

I have done a clean install of Orbx scenery as well as Sim-wings London Heathrow but the problem remains. I'm sure this is an elevation problem somehow but can't work out where the other texture is coming from.

If anyone has any suggestions I would be most grateful.

Thanks,

Steve.

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on the bottom pic there are slightly disorted arrows - I would look for a duplicate AFCAD.

First I'd doublecheck for active EGLL files inside ORBX (even if you set the panel to "compatibilty")

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Hi, 

Yes, you are correct, the markings are distorted as well. 

 

I have previously carried out a manual check of the Orbx scenery folders, ever single BGL file that has EGLL in its name has either been deactivated by the Orbx configuration or by me. There are definitely no active EGLL bgl files in the Orbx folders. 

 

Thanks 

Steve. 

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Hi,

 

Thanks for the help and the link to another thread with a similar problem.

 

I believe I have tracked the problem down to - Ultimate Traffic Live.

 

I followed all the information given in the other thread and then started disabling one add on after another, it was when I disabled Ultimate Traffic Live that the problem stopped. To try and fix the problem I have done a complete re-install of P3D and all my add-ons, as soon as I added Ultimate Traffic Live again the problem re-appeared. I don't understand how though, as that programme as far as I'm aware doesn't add any scenery files?

 

I again searched all of P3D (including all scenery files elsewhere) for any possible active EGLL bgl file that could have been changed by UTL, the only BGL files that I have that are active (i.e. haven't had their extensions changed) are in the Sim-wings London Heathrow Professional\Scenery directory.

 

My scenery files are still as in my first post, I did also try as suggested and disabled the FSDreamTeam Exclude entry but it made no difference.

 

Any additional thoughts on fixing this would be most welcome.

 

Many thanks,

Steve.

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  • Developer

Hi Steve,

 

have never seen such an effect generated by UT Live and I don’t see any technical source for that, as UT has no BGL.

Other AI Addons like Mytraffic adds his own Afcads, this is often a Problem.

 

At the moment I have no idea, why UT Live generate this effect and don’t know how to fix it.

 

Did you try the file I had attached to the other thread to place in Scenery/world/scenery?

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Hi Oliver,

 

Thanks for taking the time to get back to me. I have just tried using the AFX_EGLL_ALT.BGL file from the other forum post you suggested I check. I tried that this morning prior to doing a complete re-install and it didn't work then, unfortunately I just tried again and it didn't work now either. I did check and there were no other EGLL bgl files in the Scenery\World\scenery folder.

 

I have had one thought but I do not know if it is relevant at all.

 

In GSX Level 2 it shows the airfield elevation as 25.298m which equates to 82.99869 feet. In Ultimate Traffic Live it has a information.xml file that details all the airports and in that it has the airport altitude listed as 83 which I assume is feet. Would the slight discrepancy between the 2 have an effect? 

 

Many thanks,

Steve.

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vor 17 Stunden , AlphaEcho sagte:

In GSX Level 2 it shows the airfield elevation as 25.298m which equates to 82.99869 feet. In Ultimate Traffic Live it has a information.xml file that details all the airports and in that it has the airport altitude listed as 83 which I assume is feet. Would the slight discrepancy between the 2 have an effect?  

 

 

afaik this information is just for calculating the AI routing (descent, and approach)

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new shot into the dark....

 

did you try to lower your UTL traffic density - at a traffic area  like London maybe UTL somehow "overloads" the P3D engine

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Juergen,

 

You may have something there, I did drop the UTL AI traffic right down and the problem stopped. However, I can't find a sweet spot where I can have the AI set. Sometimes I can have it at 150 aircraft and the runway textures will remain solid, at others, I can drop it to 100 aircraft and the runway textures will still jump backwards and forwards between the two different ones (i.e. Tarmac and Concrete) on the lead into 09L.

 

I am suprised this happens though because my system is a powerful one with a 2080ti card and it can handle elsewhere AI traffic up to much higher levels, the only airport this happens at is EGLL, I do accept that EGLL has always been a bit of a strain on any system due to it's complexity, but saying that others don't appear to have had the same issues unless it was related to a scenery bgl issue, which we have ruled out in my case.

 

I've had this EGLL scenery for quite sometime and the only thing that has changed recently has been the P3D update to 4.5. So i don't know if this could be related.

 

Steve.

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may have something to do with the number of different models/repaints - P3D gives the engine a certain amount of "Time" to render the models / load the textures - if there are to many different ones the slice is to small - if you have 100 AC but 20 models and 50 different paints its more heavy than 15 models and only 20 different paints.

maybe playing with that "FIBER_FRAME_TIME_FRACTION" entry of the Prepar3d.cfg could help.

also some of the used AI-models maybe not optimzed for P3D (V4) and eat up power - I don't know exactly which ones are used by UTL but there are some updates for the TFS ones

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Juergen,

 

I've had a play around with the FIBER_FRAME_TIME_FRACTION settings and took it from 0.05 through to 0.95 in 0.05 increments. None of them made a single bit of difference unfortunately.

 

With regards to AI traffic, I tend not to use many of UTL's own ones and instead run a combination of FSPXAI, TFS, FAIB & AIA. Where needed I use AIG's modifications to make them compatible with P3D. At Heathrow I'd probably say all the models depicted will be my own downloads and not UTL's default ones.

 

Do appreciate your suggestions though.

 

Regards,

Steve.

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I myself use P3D V45 in combination with UT2 and also "own" AI models of various devs - can't reproduce that problem in Heathrow.

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As I don't think that the source of the issue is UT Live, please try the following replacement:

 

Save the EGLL_OBJ.GROUND.BGL and replace it with the file in the following zip, then check the issue again.

 

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Hi,

 

Again guys thanks for all your thoughts, and the new file to try Oliver. Unfortunately it hasn't worked. Just for clarification, I disabled the original EGLL_OBJ-GROUND.BGL file located in Sim-wings London Heathrow Professional\Scenery by changing the extension on it, and replaced it with the new file you put in the zip file here.

 

I tried it with and without the AFX_EGLL_ALT.BGL file left in the scenery\world\scenery folder as I wasn't sure whether to leave it in there or not.

 

It's not the best quality in the world but I did a screen copy video with the new EGLL_OBJ-GROUND.BGL file, I don't know if it's helpful or not. If you taxi in a striaght line it seems not so bad but if you weave slightly it flicks between one and the other.

 

Many thanks once again, I really do appreciate your efforts.

 

Steve.

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Ok, will give  you another test tomorrow, where the ground is lifted up another 2cm.

Looks like you have issue with the seperation  with the P3D ground.

 

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Thanks for the new file Oliver, and your kind words Mathijs,

 

Now the bad news, unfortunately the new file from Oliver hasn't changed things. Rather than you guys doing all the work I have gone back to what I thought possibly could have been a problem that I mentioned before and that is Ultimate Traffic Live - I don't know how, but when I disable that the problem goes away. So what I have done so far is:

 

1) Gone back to the original files with EGLL (latest version)

2) Uninstalled UTL

3) Reinstalled UTL default version

4) Installed UTL update to latest version

 

All of these have been just pure vanilla installs and I have checked P3D and EGLL at every stage - so far, no problems.

 

Now I am starting to reinstall all of my AI repaints for UTL.

 

I plan on installing them by designer, i.e. AIA, AIG, FAIB, FSPXAI, OSP, TFS & UTT all of my files for these repaints are P3Dv4 friendly, but I'm going to drop them back in one group at a time and see what happens.

 

I will let you know how I get on. I'm convinced the problem is somehow my end, otherwise others who were running P3Dv4 with your EGLL software would also have the problem I am experiencing and no one else seems to.

 

Regards,

 

Steve.

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I like your bug-tracking procedure 😉

NIce way not simply blaming the scenerey (designer) but trying to find the problem "on your side"

 

hope you find that bugger and share it with us

 

P.S. also Thanks to Oliver for his constant efforts!!

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Oliver, Juergen & Mathijs

 

Thankfully I have now tracked the problem down, after a few hours of testing and dropping various AI designers models back into UTL one at a time I was able to re-create the problem with just one model. That was the FSPXAI Boeing 777-300 / 300ER.

 

At first, I thought it was going to be a livery issue but as a matter of course I decided to re-download the base files from simMarket just in case, after installing the newly downloaded files and dropping it all back into UTL I couldn't re-create the problem.

 

I then checked the new downloads against my old installation and discovered there was a change to the FSPX_B777-300ER.mdl file. After that I tried with the old mdl file and the problem appeared, changed to the newest version and the problem disappeared. For some reason I didn't get an e-mail from simMarket telling me of the change which normally happens, so mine hadn't been updated.

 

After looking to see when the updated model came out, I came across the following on the FSPXAI facebook page, which whilst not appearing to be specifically B777 related seems to cover the situation I was having:

 

"P3Dv1v2v3 model can solve apron surface flickering problem.

Those who are encountering apron surface flickering problem with P3Dv4 add-on airport scenery recently released may choose P3Dv1v2v3 models for quick solution.

This problem was detected when after Flightbeam KSFO released and confirmed that the cause is z-bias conflict between ground polygon bgl and my P3Dv4 mdl. Fortunately I solved by editing z-bias number -4 to -2 for KSFO, but possibly, this treat won't work well for other developer's scenery due to difference of how to make their bgl. 

Since it is impossible for me to correcpond to every add-on sceneries, current solution is to use P3Dv1v2v3 models because no z-bias in the v1v2v3 MDL."

 

FSPXAI Facebook page post - along with video of flickering scenery

 

So, my thanks to everyone who has helped me with suggestions and their time sorting this (including the updated files that were created for me) - we got there in the end. I hope the post from the FSPXAI facebook maybe handy to the developers, doesn't mean much to me but at least you know that the EGLL scenery was definitely not at fault.

 

Regards,

Steve

 

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  • Deputy Sheriffs

Steve, it's great news to hear you found the issue and the problem is gone. Thank you for this great example of collaboration between a customer and Aerosoft support. Your error reports were concise and helpful, you documented troubleshooting you'd done, and most important of all, you kept a positive attitude throughout. Thanks also for calling out Oliver's extra efforts to make this work.

 

Also, thanks so much for sharing what you learned on the FSPXAI Facebook site. I for one appreciate you pasting the text into your message, since some (including me) choose not to have a Facebook account and members don't always think to allow access to non-members.

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  • Deputy Sheriffs

Because we believe this topic has been answered we have closed it. If you have any more questions feel free to open a new topic.

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