Coastline glitch - water creeping up coasts/cliffs

because the most important CTD is more “most important”

I hope, too, this gets fixed soon. The balkan bush trip I did early on, what a joy with all those islands! Now I am doing the Alaska one, and this issue constantly keeps breaking immersion.

Please bump this up on the priority list. And yes, happens all over the world. Inland waters and oceans.

The entire terrain morphing happens too close in. They should also give us an option to increase that distance at least to double as much - it is us who take the performance hit, not them. This used to already work/ look better before the Japan update.

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Looks like Asobo is really tweaking the sim hard to improve performance. This seems to me like digital elevation model is oversimplified in the distance (mesh with too few elevation points) to gain some performance so the sim does not have to load all that data, only DEM of the closer area. It probably works quite well on the land, but looks terrible on the coasts.

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These things are so disgusting that I am scared of getting close to the water now – just in case these ulcers come into view and throw up in the cockpit!

I have stopped the Alaska bush trip. There is no point in doing that until they fix this.

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I don’t think the problem is wholly to do with the mesh. I’ve tried rolling back various mesh and vector files to previous versions as I did with my spike fix but the glitch persists. I think the problem lies with the algorithm for dealing with shoreline vectors ie it’s hard coded. If you look at the screenshots below you can clearly see that shorelines are now being abruptly clipped to produce ugly cliffs everywhere. It’s these cliffs that are resulting in the climbing water effect.

The first screenshot shows how the coast used to look in earlier versions of the sim. Looks fairly good and natural:

The second screenshot shows the same coast has now been turned into poorly textured cliffs:

And from a distance the same cliffs produce the climbing water effect:

The only thing you can really do for now to reduce the ugliness is bump up your terrain LOD in UserCfg.opt. Anything above 5.0 though is diminishing returns.

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I see it too now, worse early morning

Not all that visible during the day, but the steep cliffs are there

Thanks a lot for this picture, the best I’ve seen to expose the “crocodile teeth” effect that’s killing almost every coastline of the planet. This should be #1 on the bug priority list.

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I wonder how it could be possible that Asobo believes the coastlines are better this way, it’s so obvious that they just couldn’t allow it to sneak unnoticed to the World Update 2.
Is it some kind of their creative vision? Or some side effect of performance optimization?

Looks like combined effect of lowered mesh resolution (performance optimization?) plus shift of sea level down (maybe to fix the issue with some structures close to shore covered by water?).Or maybe the terrain generation is hard cut with not matching vector based data marking the edge of the water filled area. It’s so ugly, that it’s hard for to imagine any rationale behind introducing such change in the World Update 2 :frowning:

Just waiting for the cliffs of Dover + Scottish shores in the World Update 3 - if this issue will not manifest itself on the British shores (with updated DEM), it will probably hint towards mesh resolution reduction applied with the distance…

Hard to increase the terrain LOD when using VR…

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A thousand thanks for your help. I will try with 2.0 …

Would this value be kept over in-sim configuration changes or restarts?

If you set UserCfg.opt to be read only after editing in the LOD change then yes.

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Flying west of Grand Junction, Colorado, going west down the Colorado River looks god-awful. Everywhere else too, rivers running up the sides of mountains. It’s looks terrible.

Wow, wth did they do? It looked great in the first shot.

There’s a screenshot challenge this week for Island Hopping … just saying.

This screenshot challenge sounds like bad joke considering the ugly coastlines.

Just another example where I really do not understand how something that obvious can slip any beta of an update. Are those guys at Asobo simply blind? Add this to the overdone icing visuals and you have no choice but wonder what the heck those guys do when testing their updates… Certainly not checking the visuals once, otherwise this is not explainable.

Seems like Microsoft with the entire team, resources, money is still capable of breaking things, and not so much fixing (not to mention quality checking preventing the breaking in the first place).
So an individual user must step in and fix it for them:

@mappamundi is the same guy who fixed the terrain spikes, for the spikes it was more like 0/1 binary fix for the entire world, for the shorelines in his own words:
“it’s far from perfect even within the limited area I cover and it’s a bit of sledgehammer type fix but IMO it’s better than the sledgehammer the algorithm change took to the coasts”.
It requires individual treatment for every mile of the shoreline, but @mappamundi is working on this.
Kudos to @mappamundi.
Shame to Microsoft (their status is started/backlog). The issue was introduced months ago with World Update 2 (USA).

Skyscrappers everywhere - broken by MS, fixed by user, only later by MS.
Trees distance issue - broken by MS, fixed by user, no fix from MS yet.
Terrain spikes - broken by MS, fixed by user, MS fix expected with World Update 3 (delayed twice already).
VR optimization settings - guide from user for Reverb G2 and Valve Index, no manual from MS (yet?).
Etc.

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Thanks for the kudos. I certainly don’t intend to do every mile of shoreline on the planet, especially if an official fix may or not be coming this week. But will see what we get. If it takes as long to get a fix as it has to get the spikes resolved then I will look at making it an ongoing project and perhaps take requests for areas to fix. But anyways it’s been a useful learning process for me.

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Big thanks from here too.

@Asobo/microsoft: Imho, you owe this guy (among others) a lot for doing all this work! For free!

I don’t know how difficult is to use your set of tools. Just in case I volunteer to join a project led by you to fix some shores in Scandinavia. I can devote ca. 16 h per month, don’t know how steep the learning curve is…