Okayyyy I believe I have found the what’s causing the world-wide spike artifacts since update 1.12.13 & am on the way to a solution that does not involve manually placing polygons all over the world in the SDK. Not sure if there’s much point implementing as a mod it at this stage. Depends on what Asobo does in the next few days.
Update 1.12.13 added a whole lot of changed files to the fs-base-cgl directory. You can see this by the changed date on the files
All the files changed are of the type vecn*.cgl which store the vector overlays extracted from Openstreetmaps as far as I can tell. I’m guessing someone hit the wrong button or entered the wrong values when processing these files.
Now as it happens I had an earlier version of Flight Simulator on my partially cannibalized PC from before I upgraded to a new PC. I was able to to extract the files and package them into a core mod so that the 1.12.13 vecn*.cgl’s are overwritten by the older versions. And voila, the spikes have disappeared.
Well at least they have disappeared from all the areas previously reported here that I’ve checked so far (without any other mods installed.) It’s possible other places might still have problems because the earlier files I have are from before the USA update and so the vectors may not match with the updated DEMs & OSM data. Anyway I’m still running through & looking for problems & unexpected effects.
The other issue would be that I’m not sure of the legality of issuing my mod since it’s redistributing MSFS files. There is a note with the CGLs saying that they are under an Open Database license. Perhaps someone more knowledgeable in modding law can advise me.
But anyway at least I can understand what Asobo/MS (not sure who actually maintains the cgl’s) need to do to fix this. At the very least they could roll back to the previous versions of these files so things are as they were before the 1.12.13 patch.
My fix can be found here. It drops into your community folder & can simply be deleted if you don’t like the results.
Cool. Ideally though I should use the files current just before the last patch to minimise unexpected effects. It’s a longshot but someone might have backed them up?
This is like this all over the east coast of the united states since the beginning of flight simulator 2020 pennsylvania west Virginia and Virginia is like that for example flying to or from kafj where my home airport is where I always fly there is a lake at runway 27 that looks higher than it should be as you fly over it chunks of it disappears showing the true height of it
I have a full backup of 1.11 and all but 19 of the vecn*.cgl files are dated 18/08/2020. The 19 exceptions are all dated 30/09/2020 so I reckon that as long as your backup is newer than 30/9 then you are GTG.
It is pretty clear those files are under the specified licence. You should be able to redistribute them along with the same license without issue.
Edit: To be on the safe side, I would just make a single place to download it from, which you can disable if they make any legal claims (which they cant, but still).
