Anybody noticed this with "My Gal Sal".

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FAC257
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Anybody noticed this with "My Gal Sal".

Post by FAC257 »

I just did a flight trying out all the different stock P-47s just to see what they looked like. They all look great but an odd thing is that "My Gal Sal" experiences the graphics overload texture loss type thing.

Each time I switch to her and she comes up, the rear textures are blurred out like in this pic.
Image

If I zoom all the way in and then back out it turns back to sharp texture.

It only happens with MGS. I can switch back and forth between any other P-47 and all is well. But at any time in the switching I choose MGS she comes up blurry at first.

One other odd event happened while I was playing with MGS. In the middle of switching views the dreaded FS9 "Sorry We Encountered A Problem...." screen popped up. Instead of letting FS9 restart I moved the
crash pop up menu screen to the other monitor and kept flying to see if I could see anything. Lo and behold the pilot lost all his textures and turned pure white.

FWIW I double checked the texture files to see if I could find any difference in MGS's compared to any other P-47 and nothing looks out of place.

BTW I running all stock P-47 and the new upgrade.

CWD
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Post by CWD »

OK, I don't have the P-47 so I don't know how the textures are mapped...

Is the back half of the fuselage mapped to a different texture file than the rest?

If it is, I'd say that one texture got MipMaps enabled. Solution would be to open the file in DXTBmp and save it without MipMaps.

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FAC257
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Post by FAC257 »

That;s exactly what I thought was going on at first when I saw it. Mipmaps
was one of the things I was looking for when I started checking the individual files. The file that goes blurry is indeed a seperate file than the front portion of the fuselage but unless it's some new MipMap stealth technology the file appears to be okay and has no MMs.

As soon as I get home this afternoon I'm going to try to uninstall and reinstall the P-47 and see if it shows back up. Maybe something happened either during or after I installed the aircraft that goofed up the file.

Spilot69
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Post by Spilot69 »

I too have the same problem with one of the D-25 I think MXE I had problem before update and after, but just his a/c. Did a complete reinstall and still no solution. I have an ATI 9700 pro and fast computer. Any ideas. Tried the video driver also and no improvement.

Adam

-E
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Post by -E »

Try this after any other suggestions in this thread... after making a backup of the offending file, load it and then save it using imagetool. Try it. If that doesn't work, load it and then save it using DXTBMP. Try it. Each saves the exact same format differently. All attributes/properties will be exactly the same when you read the file, and yet it's an anomoly I've not yet figured out, much less why.

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FAC257
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Post by FAC257 »

I think I'm on to something not quite sure what though. It appears that the corruption happens only to MGS after the new patch its installed. I'm in the process of trying the clean P-47 install and then the patch going back and forth between the aircraft in each install version. So far the result has been 100% repeatable. The next step is to grab a brand new copy of the upgrade file her in a moment and see if my original upgrade DL got whacked somehow.

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FAC257
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Post by FAC257 »

Well here's a strange one and a word of caution.

The P-47 uninstall utility in Control Panel Add And Remove Programs
deleted all of my WOP aircraft. That's a bummer.

I couldn't figure out why I FS9 wouldn't restart my saved test flight using one of my B-17s when I went back in to check the last load up of the P-47 upgrade. It couldn't because all my B-17s are gone.

Stay tuned this is getting exciting. :)

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FAC257
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Post by FAC257 »

Well the test runs are finished and as I mentioned before the results are 100% repeatable on this end.

I ran four complete tests on a clean install and then with the 1.1 upgrade. Tests #3 and #4 were run with a brand new DL of the 1.1 upgrade to eliminate the chance of an earlier corrupted DL.

For each test I completely unloaded the P-47 from FS9 and then did a fresh reinstall. Before adding the 1.1 upgrade MGS is perfectly okay. As soon as the 1.1 upgrade is loaded the blurry textures appear.

I can't make the blurry texture thing happen at all in the clean P-47 install and I can't make them not appear after the 1.1 upgrade.

Just FWIW I saved a copy of the working MGS texture folder before installing the 1.1 upgrade on the very last test. After I finished test #4 I copied back over the one texture file that goes blurry from the clean install texture folder. That didn't change it back, they stayed blurry. That leads me to believe it goes a little deeper than the texture file itself.


Spilot69
Your right the effect does appear on the MXE aircraft also. I guess I didn't notice it at first because it's not so noticable. The funny thing about that aircraft is that the effect works in reverse. MXE is blurry befor the 1.1 upgrade but not after. I'm a little less confident about those results because I only noticed it on the last two test runs.


-E
Now here's a really bizarre piece of the puzzle. I mentioned earlier that during one of last night's test runs in the MGS to see what I could see, FS9
had that meltdown while I was switching views around the MGS. When I moved the pop up crash screen out of my way and went back to flying that's when I found that the pilot's textures had disappeared and he turned pure white. This afternoon just after uninstalling the P-47 using the Control Panel A&RP I went back into the file mgr. to clean up loose ends before making a fresh install.

This is the weird thing I found. Now this is after the official P-47 removal and is the same P-47 clean install + 1.1 folder that I was flying when FS9 had it's brain fry last night.

Notice anything really odd. :? And yes this is with all hidden files showing.
Image

The P-47 uninstall process removed everything except the MGS texture folder containing some invisible something.

What I didn't know at this point was that all the files in my other WOP aircraft folders had been wiped out by the P-47 automated uninstall process.

-E
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Post by -E »

I just took a quick look at some P-47 textures and noted they were 32 bit format (without MIPs as you noted and which we all know are the usual cause). Try saving them as DXT3. What _may_ be happening is that the added code in the new model is pushing you slightly over your system's "default limit" (for want of a better term and/or description), and is showing up in that area due to the texture load sequencing. Try the DXT3 and/or DXT1 formats and see if the savings in texture size makes any difference for you. (note: normally you want to stay away from DXT1 if you can, but in the is case there are no alpha channels, so it should work). You could also play with your FS9's FPS lock settings to see if they make any difference as well. But also back to my original suggestion, I had a plane where the aft fuselage was almost always blurry, went through your frustrations and test and found the only thing to solve it was to load it and save it immediately using imagetool. (theoretically, that should not have made any difference, but did... because we all know taht in spite of quality control improvements over the years, there is still some bad juju that gets in our machines at times!)

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FAC257
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Post by FAC257 »

I'm flying as were speaking and already trying out some of those very thoughts. This system is a tanker when it comes to pushing quality graphics but just for kicks I tried cranking everything down to take as much load of the GPU and CPU as possible. Even went as far as 800 X s600 and took FS9 down to a FPS lock of 10. Eeeegak !

Same exact results. In fact even on the lowest graphics load settings I can put in, the portions of the aircraft that were not affected stay pretty much sharp and clear. The back portions that were blurry actually got much blurrier. The two ends of the aircraft are not on the same planet and don't respond to changes in graphics level adjustment the same way.

I'll probably try dissecting the file a little further and doing some graphics
format changes along the lines your talking about in the next few days. I had several old Evergreen international Airbus AC that I used for AI that did this very same thing. I had to monkey around with some of their texture files to get them to stop going blurry.

No biggy and just very odd.

Good thing there's plenty of other P-47s in the batch, not to mention especially since all my other WOP aircraft are temporarily AWOL. :)

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Post by Snuffy »

Not sure this will help much but ...

loading up MGS on my machine does not have any detriment to the paints.
I ran the 47 last night for over 2 hours zoomed in, zoomed out, panned around to the left, panned around to the right ... I do not get the blurring of the graphics at all on this aircraft.

I'm running a P4 1.8 with 1gig and a nVidia FX5500 with 256.
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Snuffy
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Spilot69
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Post by Spilot69 »

http://shockwaveproductions.com/forum/v ... highlight=

Check this one out in the technical help. I notivced my page file was turned off for some reason and when I turned it on to system preference, the blurries were gone. Every time it loads perfectly. I think the p-47 is so complex on paints and VC that it eats a little memmory compared to the other WOP a/c. Try it and hope it helps.

Adam

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FAC257
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Post by FAC257 »

Hey Snuffy

What AA and AF settings are you using on your video card?

I've got a few more ideas to test out this evening. I think I'm zeroing in on the culprit as far as the software end. But I can't be anymore certain until I run the tests.

The texture memory overload doesn't really pan out to well. If that was the case it would show up in more than just this aircraft that I have. Also I'm running on a system that is a tiny bit heavier than yours in the graphic pushing department with a P4 2.6, 2GB and an nvidia 6800GT 256. This would lead me to believe it's not a GPU or CPU oriented problem. Again I don't think processing power is the issue.

-E May have hit on something that I think is the next avenue of checking and that is that the new model file may have upped the ante in some small area in how the texture data is attached to the model file. I've got a test to run on that issue configured also.

It's a real occurance but why it's showing up on only my system is one of those quirky things. Either that or a few others that get it are sitting back going "Hey let that guy look like an idiot first."

I made a back up copy of my original P-47 DL so I have that to work with also. Maybe at some point i might have to see if Scott will let me DL a new one to see if my original file got smoked somehow.

Still all in all it's not a big issue with me other than having fun trying to figure it out. It sort of brings back my days while under NDA beta testing Falcon4.0 years ago.

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Post by Snuffy »

From work at the moment ... I'm thinking I have it set to application controlled. I'll check later.

BTW .. using the latest nVidia drivers too.


And ya know ... "looking like an idiot first" is a tough job but some of us have to do it. :)
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dbr_p
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Post by dbr_p »

The page file is set to "application controlled" by default.
That is the safest setting.
It is not the fastest though.
An application controlled page file has a variable size and can get fragmented very quickly and will slow down performance over time.

For best performance:
Reboot.
Turn page file OFF on all drives.
Reboot.
Defragment all drives.
Install a new page file with FIXED size of at least 2Gig.
A FIXED page file will NEVER get fragmented.
If you have more than 1 hard disk, put the page file not on the same disk as where your software is. That way the computer can read data from one HD, while swapping RAM on the other HD simultaneously.

One more tip for the fortunate few who have 2Gig RAM installed (not me):
Windows seems to always use the page file, even if there is plenty of free RAM left.
That is like parking your car 4 blocks away while there is plenty of room on your driveway.
(Who is the idiot here?)
Try to turn the page file OFF permanently.
It CAN improve performance on some systems and with some software.

You can check how Windows uses RAM and page file by running FS9 in windowed mode and open the Task Manager at the same time (Ctrl+Alt+Delete).
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Last edited by dbr_p on 01 Dec 2005, 15:36, edited 2 times in total.
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