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Author
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Topic: Blocky Clouds Problem
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Pye
Pilot
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posted 11-03- 04:12 PM
  
Can anyone give some ideas why my clouds might be blocky squares. Fog is ok,, number of planes is low. low textures ie, normal on planes. Had this before at somepoint but can't remember what i did to clear it. IP: Logged |
Jerry
Pilot
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posted 11-03- 04:48 PM
Do you have it in all or most missions or just when Me 109's are in the mission? The only time I get blocky clouds are when Me 109's are present and I have a pretty powerful system.IP: Logged |
7./JG3_Galland
Pilot
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posted 11-03- 06:06 PM
I only have blocky clouds when there are too many planes in the arena. i think it is related with RAM u have. (maybe)-Galland 
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Jerry
Pilot
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posted 11-03- 06:25 PM
I have 512Mb of PC133. Not a ram problem. Only happens with Me109's.IP: Logged |
Dance
Pilot
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posted 11-03- 08:32 PM
I gotta Tbird 1.3DDR 512 Meg DDR (PC2100) Ram G-force2 64 meg ddr and i still get it, it's the code for the prog, you will also notice when u have all the planes available including subversions ( around 170 or so including drivable vehicles) that the text for certain missions or hangar texts will start freaking out. 'Cause the code don't allow for it. Same with the textures it's like it reaches a hardcoded limit, and even if your sys can handle it, you still won't get itIP: Logged |
Nat
JAG
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posted 11-03- 10:42 PM
sorry, nothing to do with the code for the prog, and most people know that already. As we in the know know  It's something to do only with the Me109, the general belief is that this aircraft is using to maney textures on it's own, and possibly even a bad texture ref in there. If you change the Me109 in the mission to something else, the blocky cloads will go away, showing it's not a problem with the program, but the aircraft.As for fixing the problem, that means the 109 needs fixing, or you need to change the aircraft used. IP: Logged |
Steffen
Pilot
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posted 11-04- 05:41 AM
Hi,I do not have this with the 109er. I have this with the B17 (from the first PP on).
Is this also known? Steffen IP: Logged |
Dance
Pilot
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posted 11-04- 09:22 AM
Nat, strange thing is I get it in missions without the 109, answer that one if you can , I have had this prob with 110's and with the Ju388 and as Steffen has mentioned he does NOT get it with the 109 at all! I only theorised there is prog. problem because there must be a limit in the game for things like text, for instance when i had about 170 loadout.ppf's on the go, I was getting corrupted text in game, when i reduced the amount of description text in those files to just a line or two, the text corruption problem dissapeared, so perhaps I have added 2+2 and made 5, but I just wondered if it was the same for textures. It probably is to do with certain aircrafts' textures, but it isn't only the 109. And why are all you 'old ones' so bloody touchy, I may not have been posting on this forum long but I have been reading it for 18 months or more, so am not exactly clueless. If it's Hero worship you all want, then yes your all great and this place wouldn't exist without you, but get off the pedestal for god's sake. I am not very good at sucking up, so perhaps I'd better not post anything anymore as it seems to annoy certain people. IP: Logged |
Pye
Pilot
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posted 11-04- 09:35 AM
I was getting the blocky gun hits when firing
also.
So I removed to Hires-gunsites, that immediatly made the gun hits textures re-work, clouds are still the same.It was just happening with the default Dover, kenninton mission, so no 109's used. A re-install with a skinny system of basic cockpits and no reflections for the P38J and box standard low graphic details is needed from now on. I think SDOE textures or managment of them maybe has issues. I thought that openGL used texture compression so things should have got better for a while at the expense of some speed. for instance the default texture sixe is 256*256 thats supposed to be compresseddown to half the size in video memory I beleive. Re-install here we come, after the Fox and Rats event of course 
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Commando
Pilot
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posted 11-04- 10:50 AM
The game does have a limit to the number of textures it can handle as well as the limit of your graphics card memory in size of textures, thats why too many textures affects even those of us with 64mb. I have just had the explosions go blocky on a dover mission I play regular, just after installing the fox and rats. However it did not go away after uninstalling so I think it may be due to the Terrainfix that was listed in the same post. Bit more difficult to uninstall that, so I may just live with it as it is ok in Rhineland Winter. IP: Logged |
Himdog
Pilot
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posted 11-04- 11:45 AM
It's what Commando says, and it's a fact. I've had the 109's from the start, never had any problems. But you start installing everything under the sun in SDOE and quess what, you will get blocky graphics. The only fix is to have multi installs for SDOE, this is the only way. If you don't have the disk space, then only install what you like but don't get too happy with the dl's.------------------
7./JG3_Himdog out
www.luftwaffe.net IP: Logged |
Nat
JAG
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posted 11-04- 01:00 PM
sorry if I sounded annoyed, I wasn't at all, but I could have worded my post alot better than I did.IP: Logged |
Jerry
Pilot
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posted 11-04- 01:03 PM
There is no question that the text problem in menus and in the Mission Editor is caused by too many planes/loadouts.There are texture "limits" to the game in the sense that SDOE can run textures which your hardware can't handle. I used to get blocky clouds and explosions all the time until I upgraded. Now it's only with the Me 109's (several at a time), especially when combined with B-17's. I have more of a problem now with sounds cutting out even with a SB Live. Flack sounds especially seems to overload my system. Dance, Nat wasn't being "touchy". You didn't catch the " "? If you have truely been following the board for the last 18 months then you would know that the Me-109 is a major contributor to the blocky cloud problem. Several of them can cause blocky clouds no matter what hardware you have. It is well documented. IP: Logged |
Dance
Pilot
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posted 11-04- 04:16 PM
Sorry for being such an angry S.O.B. , carrying a lot of emotional baggage at the moment, so am a little over defensive :/IP: Logged |
Pye
Pilot
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posted 11-04- 04:48 PM
It must have been the terrain fix, because that does something with dover map.i got the the clouds back, flashing online as normal after removeging some other textures. but a new install is needed. new patch comming out soon, so thats another reason IP: Logged |
Dance
Pilot
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posted 11-04- 04:53 PM
I have read all the posts concerning this effect, desperately trying to find a solution, I've even searched back thru them recently in the vain hope I could find a common cause, but as you can see from this thread, there's something more to it than the 109, I agree the 109 seems to be a common cause, but it's not the only one. Perhaps if everyone who has experienced this effect would like to add there comments to this thread we might have a bit more to go on, it would be great to solve this problem once and for all, for the sake of my sanity at least  Perhaps it's something that could be addressed in the next patch.IP: Logged |
Maury Markowitz
Pilot
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posted 11-05- 08:32 AM
Dance, the game can load 700 textures. When it runs out you get things like the blocky clouds.The reason everyone is saying "109" is that the 109 uses a whole bunch of little textures instead of one big one, and thus is more likely to cause the problem. However there are other planes that do this too, for instance the new Fi 156 uses the same system, as do others. In addition it's possible to simply load so many different things into a mission to cause this as well. Maury IP: Logged |
Harm
Pilot
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posted 11-05- 11:03 AM
The Storch may appear to use lots of little textures...or tifs as I'll refer to them, but this is only because these are "new" or "unique" tifs that aren't common to any par files (planepacks, etc) and because of this, need to be accounted for in the download zip. Most add-on planes (and almost all if not all, stock planes) use "generic" cockpit panel instruments and cockpit/interior/panel textures already present and locked in par files and may appear to (rather misleadingly) use few tifs when somebody browses the aircraft's /textures/ folder.But imo, the best way to tell how many tifs a plane is using is to open its sm file and count the number of texture references it has on the main sm. Just for some comparison, the Typhoon has 30, the Storch has 36, the Fw190 also has 36 and the Ju88 has 39. I've seen some planes go into the 50s and higher even (I won't mention non-stock plane names). Most of the "little tifs" in the Storch folder are for cockpit instruments and cockpit details that other planes also use but the other planes have them in the par files so they aren't normally visible to the average user. Plus the Storch uses a 2 step visual damage model thus requiring two extra tifs for the fuse and wing and tail tifs. I'm not trying to defend anything here, I just thought I should put my bit in regarding the texture count subject. Of course you could argue that a plane using more par file tifs ("generic tifs") as opposed to a plane using its own "unique" tifs is much less likely to exceed the texture RAM/SDOE tif limit when used in a "loaded" mission because most other planes also use these generic par file tifs (especially the stock planes) and they only have to be loaded into the texture memory once and this is true. Edit: -------------
A.K.A Harman_5 [This message has been edited by Harm (edited 11-05-2001).] IP: Logged |
Pierre Radiateur
Pilot
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posted 11-05- 12:01 PM
If you check the B17.....it is up in the 70's!!!!!One thing I have noticed on some planes I have worked on ... and that is that some of the older do not make best use of textures. I have seen planes that use a 256x256 tif for a part, yet only use a fraction of that tif. Also, there are planes which have unused textures which could be cleaned out. In respect of the 109, I don't actually know why this plane causes a problem. It is no worse a texture hog than some of the stock planes. Perhaps it's the reflective cockpit effect using some larger alpha tifs? Don't know really. 700 textures ..... sounds like quite a lot. Mind you, the terrain uses 400 tif's Also, I recall the total texture memory has an effect. A lot of small tif's compared to one larger one is a question I have asked before. Persoanlly, I tend to build with 2 or 3 large texture tif's for all the plane and cockpit, with seperate tif tiles for some add-on parts like gauges, since if I reference them, that is what I would get anyway. Works for me IP: Logged |
Pye
Pilot
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posted 11-05- 01:23 PM
I done my new fresh install, This I'll backup to a new directory, and use it to re-install after I mess things up.1. SDOE installation CD (no movies)
2. Patch 1.5 (even tho i think this may not be needed first)
3. Then Patch .9
4. Nations v2
5. PP 6.0
6. PP6.1 addon
7. Ground Pack 2
8. Rats ground pack (because it's cool and has a de-installer)
9. Bavaria terrain (its great online) This time i've purposely not installed any Hires cockpits/gunsights/etc. Thats my recovery ONLINE SDOE directory if this if it happens again. Total size 541 Megabytes. Tucked away on as backup recover on hardrive. Now what shall I install AND WHERE TO START! IP: Logged |
Dance
Pilot
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posted 11-05- 09:52 PM
Thanks for that info Maury. I unpacked all my parfiles long ago, and all aircraft and textures are in the aicraft folder. I know that alot of the original tifs are compressed, but I seem to have a helluva lot that aren't, would this have any effect do you think?IP: Logged |
Maury Markowitz
Pilot
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posted 11-06- 08:08 AM
quote:
Originally posted by Dance:
Thanks for that info Maury. I unpacked all my parfiles long ago, and all aircraft and textures are in the aicraft folder. I know that alot of the original tifs are compressed, but I seem to have a helluva lot that aren't, would this have any effect do you think?
Not by itself, the issue is how many get loaded into the game at once. Basically it's going down the list that you see in the startup screen, it loads up the airfield patches, the plane patches, the terrain, etc. By the time the screen comes up it's loaded 700 and there's no room left for the clouds. It's important to understand that it's not the total number in the folder, but the total number it tries to load for any one mission. In or out of the parfiles won't have any effect on that. Maury
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Pierre Radiateur
Pilot
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posted 11-06- 08:53 AM
And don't forget the terrain!!!! A terrain like Ocean that Diego made a while back, which was just a flat sea terrain gave stupendous FR's due to it's total lack of polygons. It also used larger tiles, so fewer textures. I have been thinking about this a lot ......What if we had a simple flattish map, say a desert terrain....textured with fewer tiles, but make the tiles 512 res. to get some of the detail back. Just a thought ------------------
The Cadet formerly known as W.T.G. IP: Logged |
Pye
Pilot
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posted 11-07- 01:41 PM
Damn That setup that I loaded above now has a problem I found trying to make a MINI-WAR (2) missions for ONLINE The mission editor for 1.5 on dover when I make a new mission is fine. So thats my workaraound.
But the mission editor in the X.9 folder gives me a line of text in the map saying
(with a white background) starting at the Star just above the positon of the ticehurst dam "program various types of planes , most commonly a rebuilt Ju88, had their forward fusalage filled with explosives and (**then the star of calais**) in attached fighter towards their targ" somethings buggered but what?
all good fun!
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Jeeves
JAG
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posted 11-07- 02:08 PM
That's the mission editor bug, Pye....usually associated with too many aircraft in the aircraft folder (I think 100 is the limit). Recently however, it seems that lengthy loadout text contributes to the problem as well, which is a shame. Maury has worked hard on getting accurate text for each plane and it is quite impressive, but even when taking out the French, Italian, and German (and Spanish?) text, it still can cause problems. I have been trying....unfortunately unsuccessfully....to put my loadouts into data12.par to see if having them in a par file helps, but I haven't been able to test it as I get a CTD when either entering the game or when trying to make a new mission....if someone knows something about making par files, I could use your help.....------------------
Brought to you by the campaign for a better Dauntless! Jeeves =FC= IP: Logged |
Dance
Pilot
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posted 11-07- 04:28 PM
Thanks for that Jeeves, confirms something I've thought about. I'm looking in to something with compressed tif's at the mo' may not come to anything. Just glad to see some thought goin' on. ------------------
Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition IP: Logged |
Psi
Pilot
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posted 11-07- 06:58 PM
Do you guys know if it's possible to run two or more vid cards at one time???P IP: Logged |
Pye
Pilot
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posted 11-07- 07:08 PM
Thanks for that response Jeeves.
Theres no Aircraft in the Aircraft folder, it's all Parfile planes. so that counts that side out of the equation I guess.PSI: yes you can get two video cards in the same machine. You need windows 98SE to support them, not sure about mx, nt/2000 .
Or you can get a Matrox with dual vdu connection, Depends what you want to do with them. As the speed slows down with only on processor working two vid cards.
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Jerry
Pilot
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posted 11-07- 07:18 PM
Pye, the planes/loadouts in the par file count towards the ME corruption. When I had just planepack 6.0/6.1 and the new WWI pak plus the ground pak (all parfiles) it only took a small number of additional planes in the Aircraft folder to start the text corruption. I don't know if parfile planes contribute to the problem as much as a stand alone Aircraft Folder plane but they do count. When I set up a seperate install for WWI and removed the WWI pak from my main install, the corruption stopped and allowed me to add a large number of stand alone planes and Jeeves new loadouts to the Aircraft folder before the corruption started again.IP: Logged |
Psi
Pilot
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posted 11-07- 09:52 PM
Thanks Pye, the reason I ask this is because the complexities of flight sims and the prospect that FS is not nor will ever be complete with all that people want to do with it. If I understand you correctly two vid cards could be ran at the same time but the quality would depend on your processor? Or is it the other way around, would the simultaneous cards be bogged down sharing information in one common game? If it were possible for a geek to make some type of accelerator/linker so that the advancing complexities of sims we have and the ones in the future could be handled with multiple cards might simplify the prospect of “getting the best card” Then we wouldn’t have problems like “Blocky clouds” just a thought… P IP: Logged |
Pachy
Pilot
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posted 11-08- 04:26 AM
I never encountered the mission editor bug. I have three SDOE installs: one for online standard, one for betas/development, and one for WWI.IP: Logged |
Pye
Pilot
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posted 11-08- 02:14 PM
psi: The game has to support multiple windows. Like FS2000 , you could have a window for the instruments and the other for views.SDOE couldn't do it is built now. but you would need a very hefft pc and graphics cards.
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Pye
Pilot
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posted 11-08- 02:36 PM
So why is the game registering these textures, and I'm not even using them! I thought that the loading screen shows you that it it loading textures for aircraft, towns,terrains,etc etc for the mission you are using.
is this hardcoded the texture limit the game can register. IP: Logged |
Dance
Pilot
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posted 11-08- 02:38 PM
The Mission Editor bug can be solved if you reduce the amount of 'descText' in your aircrafts loadout.ppf. I have done this with all my aircraft so they are limited to a line or two each. This allows me to have 170 aircraft/drivable vehicles in my aircraft folder and no more bug! It is a shame that some interesting research put in by the plane builders is lost that way, only other solution is to have multiple installs as I think someone already mentioned.IP: Logged |
Maury Markowitz
Pilot
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posted 11-08- 03:51 PM
quote:
Originally posted by Dance:
The Mission Editor bug can be solved if you reduce the amount of 'descText' in your aircrafts loadout.ppf. I have done this with all my aircraft so they are limited to a line or two each.
Sigh. Maury IP: Logged |
Spanky the Mad Dog
Pilot
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posted 11-08- 04:29 PM
If the patch team is fixing stuff why not get them to fix this? Increase that texture limit from 700 and fix what ever causes the limit on the amount of planes?
I sounds like its just a hardcoded limit but not something impossible to increase.
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Dance
Pilot
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posted 11-08- 04:34 PM
Not sure what that sigh was for Maury, I was only refering to the mission editor text bug, not the texture issue.IP: Logged |
Psi
Pilot
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posted 11-08- 07:02 PM
Copy Pye, thanks...P IP: Logged |
Jeeves
JAG
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posted 11-08- 07:51 PM
Dance...Maury has spent an awful lot of time lately writing up extensive text for each plane in the loadout.ppf....complete history, and tactics to use when flying them. Reducing that text to one line or two really doesn't give much room to elaborate....not your fault....just kind of sucks overall that this is the only fix. Maybe someone can figure out an alternate way to fix the problem..... IP: Logged |
Tab
Cadet
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posted 11-08- 08:34 PM
I know maury, and each of you, has put alot of work into the hx and desctext...what i do is cut/paste this info into a separate file that although is not in game it is still available to me and eliminates text bleedover in mission editor.Thanx for the hard work and research..it adds a lot to the game
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