Are you using Developer Mode or made changes in it?
No
Brief description of the issue:
The 30 St Mary Axe building in London, England looks like it has the correct colours further out but as you get close to it the texture changes to something that has just has a lot of black in it. From photos of the real building I don’t think it’s supposed to look this way. It could be the glass isn’t as translucent as it supposed to be up close?
Provide Screenshot(s)/video(s) of the issue encountered:
Further out it is shiny with hints of blue and other colours as seen in photos:
As you get closer the texture suddenly changes and it looks very dark/black - it does not maintain the hues as expected and looks mainly black & white:
What are your graphics settings at? You may want to try clearing your rolling cache, too, and see if that does anything. I’m at Medium for most things, and this is what it looks like for me:
I’m on Xbox Series X so I don’t have much I can adjust in game. The Xbox’s graphics are set to 1440p, 60Hz refresh, VRR enabled. I deleted the cache and disabled it before testing again. I also set the time to around Noon to help eliminate shadows.
Since you mention “medium” settings I’m guessing you’re on a PC and your screenshots illustrate some interesting differences. First, I noticed your sky has much less haze then mine. Also, it looks like the detailed textures pop in sooner for you. It doesn’t look like you get the in between very dark looking object I’m seeing either. Are you running at 4K instead of 1440p? (I’ve done some 4K experimenting and honestly didn’t see a lot of difference but perhaps that’s the effect of 1440p upscaled to 4K by the XBX vs a real 4K graphics card).
If you look at my first screen shot, you can see from a distance the colours look bright with what I think are a hint of reflections, etc. For the distance that looks good to my eye. As I approach it suddenly turns very dark and with very large black areas where as at about the same distance in your shots I don’t see that. (I’m posting a better screenshot to show about where the transition is for me.)
At extremely close range (i.e.it feels like you’re nearly about to crash into the building) the nicer details re-emerge similar to your screenshots. I hopped out of the Cessna and into the Ultralight to take a couple of comparative screenshots as well. Still not as nice as what you’re showing in my opinion though.
Although slightly less detail or sharpness may be a difference of living with XBox hardware vs a PC hardware, the early transition to a very black object and not seeing decent detail & colour until its effectively too late is a problem with either the textures used for this particular building or a problem with the adjustments for transitions pre-set in the XBox (LOD in PC terms?). Also, it’s concerning I’m seeing much more haze in the sky than you now that I see those comparative shots.
As you can see I’m fairly close here and it still looks terrible:
I hope this is an issue that can be corrected in due course and the haze too if there’s a difference between the PC virtual sky and XBox virtual sky.
Ahh, yes. Unfortunately, I don’t know what settings Xbox users have and don’t have.
Usually when I do testing, I set my weather to Clear Skies. I definitely can see haze in the sim.
I’m at half of 4k. By that I mean, I have an ultrawide monitor which is at 3840x1080. I don’t see the need to go any higher than that because I want the framerate.
I’m wondering if this is the only building that this happens to, and if you see this thing on procedural (autogen) buildings, as well.
I still see the problem in your first and second shots, this specific LOD seems to be missing a specular texture or something. This has been going on for several months, at least since Sim Update 5. I think I’ve reported it to Zendesk but I’ll check again.
Further out the Gherkin looks bright and shiny as it should, until you get closer and it acquires this dark matte look. I’ll try to get some screenshots soon.
At the console level (prior to getting into MSFS) on the XBX you have options to configure your TV/monitor resolution (1080p/1440p/4K & I think 720p) and refresh rate (60Hz/120Hz depending on the resolution and monitor’s abilities). You can choose to allow 4K textures even if your monitor is at a lower resolution.
In the sim there is only 1 graphics option. It’s to enable HDR10 and only available if your monitor supports it & you’ve allowed it at the console level otherwise it’s grayed out.
Ah, OK. It looked less hazy in your shots. I was also set to Clear Skies but noticed in game it’s hazy a lot. (I can’t remember if this is a post SU8 “thing” or not.)
That sounds like a nice setup.
It’s one of the few buildings I’ve noticed which this happens to and looks bad until you’re very close. I guess with it being such a famous land mark I notice it more as I sight see in London. It’s probable on the XBX I need to get closer like that with other 3D buildings but their transition in nicer.
PG and autogen both look fine to me even when flying fairly low. The only time I’ve had trouble with PG is when I believe the servers and/or internet connection are having problems.
I usually keep my settings around the Low preset, however I have experimented with both reflections settings and they do not seem to make a difference in regard to the Gherkin. The reflective hand-made landmarks always use cubemap reflections but I’m not completely sure about screen-space.
For Objects, the slider can be set to any value between 10 and 200 by increments of 5. For Terrain it can go up to 400. Both of these can be boosted further by tweaking the CFG file, but you do need a beefy system to maintain acceptable performance (which I sadly don’t have).
Still, I’ve seen reports by others who have set Objects LOD to like 400 or 800 and more from the CFG and they can still see noticeable pop-in and objects drawing in very late. It is one of the many LOD problems with this simulator, which unfortunately are exaggerated on the Xbox because of memory concerns. But if they can make the Gherkin fully reflective at all LODs then the transition should become much smoother at least.
Something worth pointing out is that in the screenshot shown during the briefing screen of the London discovery flight, which was likely taken during one of the early Sim Update 5 builds, the Gherkin looks very much reflective like in real life. Even at the highest LOD it doesn’t look like that anymore.
Upon reviewing some of my own footage from that time (which I cannot post due to the NDA), I believe they must have accidentally removed the specular texture or something similar when they added more LODs to the model, and kept it only for the lowest one.
LOD1 - The model gains a lot more detail, however it still looks very dark and it is bugged, some textures and the screen-space reflections are constantly flickering. Not good!
LOD0 - The model at its highest detail, looks fairly accurate but its colours are still somewhat off.
Looking at it more closely, we can see that cubemap reflections work properly, unlike LOD3 and LOD2, however they are too dark. The Gherkin is much brighter in real life, like LOD4.
But looking even more closely, we can see that some textures appear to be missing. As a result, we can literally see through the model between the glass windows.
There is definitely a lot of work needed to make the model look accurate to real life and smooth out the LOD transitions. It kind of sticks out like a sore thumb compared to all the other shiny buildings in the area so hopefully they’ll look at it.
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