Author Topic: Chaseplane and Flickering Textures  (Read 2703 times)

airbumps

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Chaseplane and Flickering Textures
« on: December 03, 2018, 12:08:49 pm »
Hi All,

I was hoping Umberto might be able to comment on something Keven from OldProp (Chaseplane) has said about scenery developers and how they design their scenery. Link to his comments is here;

https://www.avsim.com/forums/topic/540286-weird-graphical-glitches-on-some-airports-with-chasepl/?tab=comments#comment-3883257

I have been having a horrible time with flickering textures at a couple of Airports, both FSDT and a couple of others. I'm on a fresh install of P3D v4.4 with just a handful of airports and Chaseplane added. KMEM and KLAX are the worst, but I've also got it at Aerosofts LSZH too. Essentially buildings flicker when viewed at from a distance using Chaseplanes versions of spot mode. Note, that this does not happen in the default P3D spot mode so I'm in no way suggesting its exclusively an FSDT problem and acknowledge that it's an issue with the way Chaseplane uses "clipping"

That said, Keven seems to indicate there is something that scenery developers can do about it. Umberto, is this your understanding?


virtuali

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Re: Chaseplane and Flickering Textures
« Reply #1 on: December 05, 2018, 03:03:59 pm »
The part that explains this is caused by the Clipmode parameter is correct, since this is clearly what it's causing the problem.

The part the says scenery developers can always do something about, is not very correct, because it's suggesting every scenery could be "fixed", if the developer could just do things better, which is not always the case and surely it's not the case with KLAX and KMEM.

The reason why KLAX and KMEM will always flicker with nonstandard ClipModes (we obviously test them to work correctly with the standard cameras, and they surely do), is they use special ways of additional polygons over the buildings facades to add pre-backed Ambient Occlusion at day, which gives the scenery a much better depth, and pre-baked lights at night, which gives the scenery a complete global illumination at zero fps cost, since it's baked in the texture, but it requires additional polygons, otherwise it would look totally blurred from up close, so every building has a combination of high and low details polygons stacked on top of each other, to be detailed at close range, and not flat and with baked lights at night in the distance.

I'm sure other developers use the same methods, that's why you cannot generally say it could always be fixed, not by remaking the whole scenery from scratch, which of course is not feasible just to accomodate one 3rd party utility that has set cameras with a different ClipMode, because the scenery was of course designed (and sold) to be compatible with FSX and P3D.

Yes, when doing a 100% native P3D4 scenery, things might be made differently, since the new SDK allows to overlay two textures on the same polygon (and guess who suggested it to LM...), but still the ClipMode issue and the possibly flickering won't be entirely be solved in every possible situation, since it's an inherent limitation of the precision of the graphic card Z-buffer used by the program (that's why a ClipMode settings exists to begin with), and current hardware is made taking into account no application has a requirement of being able to see things *very* close and *very* far at the SAME time, no game out there requires that, only flight simulators...

airbumps

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Re: Chaseplane and Flickering Textures
« Reply #2 on: December 06, 2018, 02:50:02 pm »
Thanks Umberto - Appreciate your comments and feedback.