Thanks for the replies. I appreciate that you guys are still keeping a close eye on this.
I don’t know why this is so important to me… but it is!! Nothing breaks the immersion for me more than terrain “morphing”. Well… maybe a framerate below 30 would be worse, but I don’t have that issue and at least I could generally “buy” my way out performance issues with hardware upgrades, etc. There seems to be no “buying” a solution to this issue, apart from those few 3rd party scenery enhancements from orbx (i think?), but I’ll be ■■■■■■ if I’m going to start purchasing the whole earth piece by piece to fix a problem with the base sim. Not happening! haha!
I’ve been reading all about the upcoming improvements with update 5 and I would really like to start using the sim again. Unfortunately, if this “morphing” is still present, this sim is going to continue to collect virtual dust (on its own dedicated ssd for crying out loud!!) lol
Thanks!
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Lot’s of poor quality Bing LOD data is the problem and Blackshirt A.I. are working on a solution, rather than area by area (the world has nearly 60,000,000 square miles of land), to correct all abnomillies universally. It may take a while but it will be worth waiting for.
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Lots of morphing and popping on the new xbox gameplay footage. I doubt Asobo is planning on fixing it soon, got to keep that performance gains no matter what.
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They’ve answered this so many times, it’s mostly because of limited data and places where it is good see much less obvious morphing. Blackshirt are still working on an acceptable A.I. solution.
Nonsense, “Blackshirt” works on autogen buildings. It has nothing to do with this issue.
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Not nonsense … if you’re not tuning by hand you need software that will recognise the problems and come up with new vectors and shading all by itself. That is autogen, the only difference being that they will probably run it on Asobo’s Bing database rather than on our individual computers.
May I ask, where do you have that information from?
That is some of the worst I’ve seen. Not looking promising. 
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Google : I just typed in “world coastlines in length”
or do you mean the bit about hand fixing? because logistically it’s not possible to fix everything by hand and most will come from Bing World updating it’s maps. I imagine hand fixes are principally there just for critical errors, airports and featured places of interest … and maybe perhaps the busiest of routes.
Blackshirt are still working on a solution that will recognise the problems and fix them automatically, you should really be asking them when it will be possible?
I was wondering about the Blackshark bit. I haven‘t read anything about them working on DEM/mesh improvements.
It was one of those “we’re looking at it” remarks by the French guy.
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That looks like Norway. And here I thought my videos looked bad…
I don’t understand how they screwed up the shape retention so bad with the new DEM of the Nordics World Update. Perhaps they were in a rush to complete it, so they compiled the lower levels of detail using a cheap and fast algorithm?
Although the LOD distances must have been tweaked for performance reasons (back in the USA World Update), bad shape retention does not help performance in any way. If the compilation algorithm is improved, the same amount of polygons is used but in a better, more consistent way. And the Orbx mesh shows that morphing can be almost completely eradicated, even with the current state of the LOD rings where they are too close to each other.
The terrain morphing and coastline glitch are still expected to be fixed in 2021 according to the Feedback Snapshot. A potential explanation could be that they have found a new algorithm that takes care of both issues, but it still needs fine-tuning, and then they’ll have to recompile all of the world’s mesh again anyway, so they might as well use a fast, temporary one for now. Or maybe they still have no idea what is going on. Some communication on the matter would help.
Orbx only did little Iceland, I don’t know how much of it was automated but the world is huge.
Actually their first mesh product was for New Zealand, which is payware. It was also added to the Marketplace last week. The Iceland freeware shows that they’re slowly expanding the series.
https://orbxdirect.com/product/nz-mesh-msfs
While the LOD compilation algorithm has to be automated for each mesh file, Orbx claim they are using a proprietary technique to make the LODs consistent and reduce morphing. They haven’t talked about how they achieved this and Asobo avoided answering whether they could license this technique, but now we know it’s possible to fix the morphing without hacking the simulator’s terrain engine.
If Asobo could get hold of this technique, all they would have to do is automate a process to recompile the entire world’s mesh, or at least only every time they add new DEM (as such the entire world should be covered in the next two years). We could say, why haven’t Orbx done that already, the difference is that in order to have their product sell well enough they need to find new DEM that is superior to the default, so it will be a very long while until they cover the entire world, especially with the Bing Maps database becoming more competitive.
We don’t actually know if Asobo/Blackshirt’s solution will be better or worse than Orbx’ once it’s implemented, as my wife once told my daughter “don’t just marry the first guy that comes along”.
The Iceland mesh comparison videos I posted last month were taken with Terrain Level of Detail set to 25, which is equivalent to the Low-End preset, and yet with the Orbx mesh installed any morphing is extremely hard to see (meanwhile with the Asobo mesh even at 200 it’s very obvious). As such, I don’t think there can be a better LOD compilation algorithm than that, at least today.
Eventually you do reach a limit of what can be done at a low polygon count, no matter how good the shape retention algorithm is. Considering that, as of the May Q&A, they had absolutely no idea what caused the morphing and outright refused that the polygon rendering is at fault, I don’t have faith that they’ll be able to find a solution that is good enough any time soon.
If they are still partnered with Orbx (though kind of doubtful because they are not enhancing default airports anymore), I think they should enter a licensing agreement with them and take advantage of this technique as soon as possible. Those who bought NZ Mesh said that the coastlines are looking lovely as well, so it would take care of the awful coastline glitch too without any more effort on their part, freeing up resources for other things.
Software development is a cutthroat world and I wouldn’t expect them to reveal everything they’re working on. And they’re probabably right that it’s the original data that is the main problem, forget not that their water masking fix is only because Bing doesn’t do average world sea levels but just images whatever the tidal conditions were at the time. In this respect I doubt Iceland and New Zealand were too much of a problem to start with.
A bit late into this discussion, but around BIIS (the handcrafted Icelandic airport) there is a small area that has been also included with BIIS as a finer resolution mesh. (Even in the few days before ORBX released their mesh I noticed how great the mesh resolution was around the airport, while the rest of Iceland was not really updated…) When you fly close to BIIS that mesh loads in along with the airport itself, so what you see in this video is the displayed mesh switching from the ORBX mesh to the custom mesh around BIIS (which is default to the sim since the World update along with BIIS). It is a different thing from what is generally described as morphing (visible switch between different LOD levels of the same mesh data), since here we see one different mesh being loaded in a localised area over another mesh without any continuity being foreseen between the two. I assume that if you remove the Nordic World update, then even this area will look perfect with the ORBX mesh (but of course you loose the handcrafted BIIS with it). If you fly the circling approach to the other runway, then the issue us much less visible, I am pretty sure that the other side of the valley is not covered anymore by the mesh patch of BIIS.
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In the Q&As they are generally very open to discussing how the simulator’s engine and computations work (including detailed videos sometimes), and what they plan to do in order to fix issues brought up by the community, so I don’t think they’d try to keep anything related to the terrain engine and data a secret for no apparent reason. They won’t hesitate to talk about more difficult issues like those they have marked as “Not Planned” as well.
Whatever the cause of the morphing is, it can only help if we keep letting them know that it’s still an issue which bothers many. Hopefully they will have done enough investigation by now in order to be able to say more about it next time. I plan to bring up a new question about it after the Xbox and Sim Update 5 hype fades away.
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Thanks, that’s exactly what I expected. I have noticed in area’s with good bing data (French alps, Massif Central etc.) the morphing is much less obvious.
