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Elsmoko

FSX Airborn houses / buildings

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I wasn't sure where to start this thread.
I see several houses suspended about 500' agl northwest of Wellington, NZ. what is the best fix for this. I'd thought about
lowering my autogen scenery setting, but it is not very high (currently set to "Dense"). Any tips or ideas regarding this
will be welcome.
Thank you,
Ken


Ken Boardman

 

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2 possible causes I've heard about that cause this:

 

1. Your sim is overloaded or running low on memory or other resource. Try lower settings or using less demanding addons, or whatever you can do to reduce the load.

 

2. Mesh resolution might be set too high. Try lowering mesh resolution to around 19m to see if it helps.


Barry Friedman

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I have this problem once in a while when FSX has been running a long time and several flights have been started.  Since this happens when I'm testing panels or textures on the ground, I usually ignore it.  My suggestion would be to save your flight and restart FSX.  As fshobby said this is probably due to an overload.  I hope this helps.

Jim Elder

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Thank you Barry and Jim for your tips.  This occurred at the start of the flight (just after takeoff) and VAS available looked very good.  I will have a look at

Mesh Resolution setting.  I use FS Global for mesh and I'm aware that sometimes it can cause "strangeness" so I've sent off an email to FS Global support also.

Best regards,

Ken 


Ken Boardman

 

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Here's a quote from Holger on the Orbx forums:

 

http://www.orbxsystems.com/forum/topic/56722-floating-houses-in-na-blue-southern-alaska-sak/#entry509164

 

 

The floating autogen houses are an unfortunate bug of FSX, or rather a side effect of how it loads terrain mesh and places autogen on it.

While flying in FSX the landscape components at mid to far distances are not loaded in full detail but rather at lower-resolution versions, often referred to as LODs or Level of Detail. Think of it as concentric rings of decreasing detail moving along with your aircraft. It's a common approach in games to keep frame rates at acceptable levels.

These lower-detail versions of data include the terrain mesh. Autogen trees and buildings are placed directly on top of this terrain, again a certain distance from the user aircraft (visible as the "popping-up" effect), and their elevation is fixed once placed. In mountainous terrain, especially in narrow valleys like at Skagway, the lower-detail terrain may have significantly different elevations than the highest-detail version. Thus, if the autogen gets placed while the lower-detail version is still being displayed then the autogen ends up in the air when the higher-detail terrain mesh replaces the lower-detail version. It's much more pronounced for buildings than trees because houses are placed in larger groups.

Unfortunately, there's no known fix for this, though perhaps choosing a LOD_RADIUS= parameter value in the fsx.cfg file may help with loading the higher-detail mesh sooner (I haven't tested this myself). A work-around is to refresh the scenery when you see floating buildings (you can set a key combination for that in the FSX Controls menu) but that is, of course, not a very satisfying solution.

In any case, any location with significant local terrain gradients is likely to suffer from this issue, anywhere on the FSX planet.

Cheers, Holger

 

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Very interesting explanation, so FSX trips over itself trying to optimize, using something like an "average" terrain height from the low-detail mesh to place buildings and then failing to adjust when ground height changes.

 

I suppose using flattens under the buildings would help in very troublesome areas.


Barry Friedman

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I suppose using flattens under the buildings would help in very troublesome areas.

 

I've never thought about it before but yeah, that would probably work really well - a means of loading a defined elevation regardless of distance/mesh LOD. Now that you mention it I've never noticed floating houses near custom airports that utilize large flattens and that's probably why.

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Some outstanding info here. I've never used the scenery "refresh" so I'll try it next time I see this...

Thanks again,

Ken


Ken Boardman

 

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