Thought my last clips looked bad? Well, brace yourselves.
The coastlines are morphing even worse than the mountains as expected, but now there is some dark flickering before the terrain morphs into its new shape. So bizarre! And as usual, the morphing in the underlying terrain is causing landmarks to pop up and down (the Preikestolen in this case).
Even though this should have been a scenic area, the morphing, the disrupted coastlines and the mountain seams turned this into a miserable flying experience.
This has got to be some of the worst morphing I’ve ever seen. You can literally see hills and spikes being created out of flatter terrain, or disappearing into thin air. And look at that semi-transparent hill with gaps at 0:08.
What surprised me is that in this area, setting the Terrain Level of Detail slider to 200 did almost nothing to clean up the morphing. Even very close to the aircraft, those artifacts were quite frequent.
So much work they’re putting into these World Updates, going to total waste because of these gnarly mesh issues. It is clear now that the terrain engine requires a total overhaul.
Orbx released their free Iceland Mesh add-on a few days ago, with the same promise that, like NZ Mesh, it greatly reduces morphing compared to the default mesh.
Wonder whether it lives up to its promise? No need, I’m here to show you!
This video was taken with default mesh:
The morphing is not nearly as bad as in Norway, but still pretty bad. You can distinctly see parts of the mountains rising up as the camera approaches.
Now this is with the Orbx mesh:
The morphing is much, much less frequent now, and the swapping between the different levels of detail is a lot more graceful. These two videos were taken with Terrain Level of Detail at 25. At 100 and above, with the Orbx mesh the morphing is nearly invisible. I couldn’t believe my eyes.
Orbx show that it can be done. Too bad they didn’t answer my question regarding licensing this technique in the last Q&A. Let’s hope we won’t have to wait for Orbx to cover the entire planet…
wow, this looks bad indeed. Sadly the high-res mesh introduced with the world updates seem to even intensify the effect. I really really hope (but somehow doubt) that they can fix this before they release the Alps. Like that there‘s no point flying there.
Here’s a bonus video, same area in Norway with that horrible morphing and artifacting, but with Terrain Level of Detail set to 200.
I wonder how much longer some people will be able to deny that terrain morphing exists. Clearly, playing at Ultra settings is nowhere near enough to make it less noticeable anymore.
It begs the question: How do they not see this when they are testing the new scenery areas!?
How does something this BAD go undetected? It really is staggering!
328 votes so far. At least we are now visible on the “leaderboard” of problems.
I have come to the conclusion that Seb, Jorge and Martial must only ever fly low and slow in a totally flat area! I mean if you were the head of a company and you saw something like this ruining your product - surely you would act upon it!
I’m having trouble coming up with an explanation as well. It really is baffling. In the past, one possible explanation could be that they’re doing all their development and testing on bleeding-edge systems at beyond Ultra settings and 4K+ resolution (which is why some things like the pixelated clouds and reflections, glowing outlines and other artifacts might have gone unnoticed). But now, we have proof that no matter how much the LOD radius is brute-forced, the morphing is still there. It’s just that bad.
There are several people in the community who are denying the morphing exists, and this could be because not everyone is equally sensitive to each visual/rendering issue. There are many who think that 1080p looks the same as 1440p or 4K, or do not notice the degraded TAA and water quality. Or maybe they just fly over cities, deserts, or the oceans in the middle of nowhere?
It could be the same case with most of the development team. I thought it was outstanding that they were completely unaware of the morphing in the first Q&A it was brought up, and quickly redirected the answer towards the DEM and the coastline glitch. And then you have Orbx swiftly coming up with a solution that just works, without modifying the base simulator to hack the terrain engine or something.
At least it is encouraging that more and more people seem to be realising the issue, and I hope that Asobo are monitoring this thread with the more recent contributions. On that note, I think the title should be changed to “USA/UK/Nordics World Update”. As much as it pains me to say, there is a clear degradation with the new DEM data that was added with this update.
How anyone can deny morphing exists when your videos demonstrate it perfectly, I just don’t know. Anyway, I’ve updated the title as suggested - good idea.
A concern I have is that if ORBX have a solution to this problem - which they appear to - and they are charging for it as payware - Asobo may be reluctant to fix the problem since it could actually be a good money making opportunity! But then again, I am naturally a pessimist!
You would hope that Asobo and ORBX are communicating about this and working together on a fix… we can but hope… Cheers!
did anyone send this bug to zendesk? If yes y no action. Also i recommend you to also send this issue to zendesk so it will be noticed if many people report this issue. I have done the same
Thanks for editing the title! This could be a possible explanation, but then I don’t think they are partnered with Orbx in the same way they used to be, so I’m not sure what Asobo would have to gain from doing this. Orbx used to make the airport corrections in the earlier World Updates, but nowadays it’s an internal Asobo team according to the latest Q&A, and some people claim that payware Orbx airport quality has fallen sharp lately. Avoiding discussion around their terrain LOD technique in the answer to my question could have to do with this as well.
Sebastian was totally clueless when it came to the morphing (even downright denying it’s in the polygon rendering), although Jörg seems to be more concerned about the overall representation of the scenery, including the morphing (he was well aware of the coastline glitch too). He just let Sebastian do the technical talk. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if this thread skipping ahead of others with more votes to appear on the Feedback Snapshot was his doing. The moderators said he’s personally overseeing the tree draw distance thread, let’s hope he’s keeping an eye on this one too!
Although it was disappointing to see the morphing become worse with the Nordics update, it seems they’ve committed to doing World Updates every two months, so this one was probably getting finalised several months ago. Since they’re probably swamped with the upcoming Xbox release and DirectX 12 update, I’m willing to give them some more time to tackle this, although some more communication on how they plan to do so would help immensely.
Yes, I’ve sent them three reports since Sim Update 2 (wasn’t flying during the USA World Update). I might send one more about the Norway DEM but if I keep doing so they might not take me seriously.
Actually you should. When it comes to visual/cosmetic issues that are not game-breaking, they rely on the amount of reports (by different people) so they can prioritise them accordingly. This is what the support team told us when we were reporting the flickering clouds.
So if anyone’s reading this, do send them a report on Zendesk if you haven’t done so!
Agree with most of it, but It’s not only the DEM quality… In countries with a bad DEM it will be worse. This is imho a distance issue caused by LOD clipping… same as tree distance… we SEE it everywhere now, because the mountain warping happens nearer than it did before. The better your DEM is, the more base quality you get and the smaller these changes will be. But I tested with the 20m DEM for Norway… mountains still warp… and at too short distance ! to solve this with a DEM, you’d need 5 meters or so. 16x the size. That won’t fit on you harddisk.
So, I installed the ORBx mesh freeware for Iceland and had this problem…is it possible that I have some incompatibilities between the nordics update and ORBx mesh ?
That’s just about the worst I’ve seen. I haven’t experienced that kind of morphing myself, only the sort that the previous videos show. I may download the ORBX Iceland mesh later and check it out. Thanks.
