Scenery Problem with bgl airport add-ons

[Saul]

Hi Kosta I'm gonna merge you this another topic which is basically the same thing. Airports that are using ASM instead of z basis are doing this. I don't know if its a progression and deliberate or just accidental as yet. I'm sure early next week LM will make a comment about it.

[stevefocus]

Have the same problems at UK2000 among other airports

[Kosta]

Ahhh, good thing I am running Veeam Backup every night. Back to 3.2 without a glitch.

[jackts10]

Hello,
I have just upgraded to P3D V3.3 and I loaded into London Gatwick with UK2000 scenery. I then waited for everything to load... but I realised that there was no ground textures and the terminals are not fully loaded ? here is an image

Kind regards
Jack Sparrowhawk

[Saul]

OK Folk's here the whys and whats all about this problem.

Exact replication of the draw order generated by the legacy dx9 rendering system is not possible in the new system. We've done our best to fix specific issues as reported, but there will eventually be cases where fixing one add-on by modifying sort orders will break other add-ons. We posted a couple years back that we were dropping official support for the fs2002 routines for this vary reason, and encourage developers to stop using tools that rely on them.

We made some major performance improvements in 3.2 which relied in part on changes to optimize some draw order sorting routines. These changes caused issues with a few add-ons which had worked in 3.1 and we addressed those issues in 3.3. We also fixed a bug in the sorting routine which made draw order non-deterministic in certain cases. We believe the sort is stable now and would prefer not to modify it again. Please keep reporting these issues, as we do appreciate the feedback, but also understand that we may not be able to investigate and respond.

As you can see fixing one issue with the now standard z-bais ordering of scenery layers has broken something in the older ASM Method. So it's a point in the evolution of P3D that breaks a lot of older addons or even new addons that are compiled in the old way. The best you can hope for is that the developers will eventually update their software to be P3D compliant.

This is nothing new to developers as I'm sure they are aware from v1 days about the transfer of compiling methods. LM have no plans to remedy this now as it will break the fix for their preferred method. Its now up to the Developers if they want to upgrade their now incompatible software.

[edpatino]

This is really very bad
Cheers, Ed

[Saldo]

Quote from Gay Summons ( UK2000 )

"Forgot to add, there is no reason why I cant use modern code for the ground tiles in P3D. Basically the reason why I dont is that it causing flashing issues in FSX, so its a case of me being lazy and wanted to use the same file for both sims.

So I will start to make all P3D ground tiles use modern code now, this will fix the issue for sure"

So good news for the UK2000 fans

[maca11]

Hello, I understand this is related to some missing part of sceneries done by old methods....).
How is it with reported OOMs ? Is it the same issue or it is different reason ?
many thanks
JM

[Lapi]

We made some major performance improvements in 3.2 which relied in part on changes to optimize some draw order sorting routines. These changes caused issues with a few add-ons which had worked in 3.1 and we addressed those issues in 3.3. We also fixed a bug in the sorting routine which made draw order non-deterministic in certain cases. We believe the sort is stable now and would prefer not to modify it again. Please keep reporting these issues, as we do appreciate the feedback, but also understand that we may not be able to investigate and respond.

This is not a good news indeed...
If the change was made because "a few" add-ons had problems in 3.1, by this change we actually ended up making most or all sceneries done by the old method useless.
I think it is not a good ratio and was perhaps not a wise move right now.

Out of the hundreds of sceneries which are rendered useless now, there are many that depict rare locations, or the designer is actually out of business. That means to "build up" a sim with many airports will not be possible now, or we have to wait - perhaps years - to achieve the same quantity of detailed airports that we could have in 3.2

The 2002 methods are really old by now but we shouldn't forget about the fact, that this method was the ONLY method available to make an FSX airport with ground layers.
So when the 2002 method became obsolete, in fact ALL FSX airports were thrown out of the window at the same time.
Thus by this small "fix" we ended up being incompatible with FSX, which should have been done at a major release and not an intermediate one.

Another thing perhaps needs a mention as well, namely that the old and obsolete method still allowed conditional jumps to be present, therefore unless a new scenery has its own dll or uses SODE or a similar 3rd party solution, we have just ended up by sceneries that are unable to change seasons.
LM has provided us (developers) with a proper Z-sorting method for new sceneries, but we are still missing the conditional part, which make it impossible to depict seasons or snow on the airports, etc.

I personally don't consider it to be a wise decision in the middle of the 3.x cycle.
This is a very important change, a drastic change, which perhaps should have been avoided in an intermediate update.

I doubt LM would truly care too much, but this change will also result thousands of users to stay with 3.2

Lapi

[Kosta]

It probably will, including me for now.
But, I think it's the right way to move forward, even if that renders majority of scenery addons unusable.

[ace293]

It would be absolutely fine, and very welcome, to use z-bias...if it worked.

It just doesn't. At least not as good as the ground poly from fs2k technology does. Without even mentioning unreliable rendering, the brief (very brief) description of the z-bias 'tech' in the SDK doesn't even account for the simple things, i.e. earth curvature, which makes placement a nightmare of inaccuracy.

So until LM can give smth as good as fs2k polys, they shouldn't break them. I think that's fair.

[maca11]

All arguments to support going forward and development of new technologies are fine. The problem is that no-one anticipated so big issue and temporary un-usable set-up (until all affected add-ons will be adjusted which can take many months).

Would it be possible to do inventory of all what is not working on new version ?
(from my side it is so far : UK2000scenery as mentioned, Mega Scenery Heathrow (just runway), ASN).

How is it with ORBX ?

thanks
JM

[Saul]

As far as I know all Obrx scenery is not effected.

[maca11]

good!

[downscc]

In my opinion, this evens the playing field with XPlane, which has very few quality (not free stuff but genuine quality) add on airports. Now P3D has suddenly become a platform with very few quality add on airports.

Interesting marketing choice, it actually sounds like an engineering choice with little regard for market.

Well, we just finished the DC-6 and have more to come for XPlane. I guess I need to evaluate my investment strategy.