Disappointing mountain terrain (in the alps and many other areas)

@EdamllamaB Thank you for the wonderful video! It looks to me that the smoothing effect is most obvious on snow and dirt surface. I know snow and dirt are “smooth”, but I mean more than that. The real surface of snow and dirt is smooth and flat, while the snow and dirt in MSFS look smooth and rounded. So we have two kinds of smoothness here. Excuse for my poor English. I really wish I could express myself better. :grinning:


Big wall over Alps close to LOWI.

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Mountains are even more rounded and featureless since SU5.



Coastine Spain,Almeria to Aguadulce, I think something is wrong with the mountain terrain. & In the second picture there actually was a tunnel earlier in FS,now cars just drive into a flat landscape.
At first I thought “Spain hasn’t had an update yet” but I guess this is a bug or

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Is this because of the lower ground detail because of SU5?

It’s the distant terrain that’s more disappointing since SU5.

The change might be subtle, but when you’re familiar with an area it’s the difference between being immersed and knowing something is off:


Before


SU5

Mesh still helps …

NZ post SU5 Orbx mesh .

What’s up with Pakistan?


I don’t remember this from when I crossed over there on my worldtour (pre SU5). There was no snow back then so perhaps a glitch with the snow?

The snow can be caused by live weather. Did you have that on?
Besides that, these textures look very much like the default standard textures displayed everywhere, where there are no or very bad images in bing maps. If you can recall the exact location, you can check bing maps for the image material.

I was flying there 3 weeks ago. First, check if you are really online. Second, there is really not that much highres textures wehere you took the screenshot.

As you can see, the imagery is not the best in this part, yet. North east is Skarda.

The valley I see atm has no snow, but it looks like a strange patchwork… Isle-of-Man type of error ? faulty terrain textures ? Color should not change that abruptly ! And why does the black shine through the snow, I wonder…

When I put 10cm snow on top (Weather settings) it looks like this :face_with_monocle:

There we are… it’s some kind of vegetation :face_with_monocle:

:yum: soup it up a bit… bottom line… there’s not supposed to be snow there… and the trees should not be in straight lines, in the middle of Pakistan. From a distance, it’s awfull… From nearby…

my altitude is 2500m, except the third picture, that was way up (drone camera)

And @kqfflo I had live weather on, it seems to be something (new?) in how the snow is added. Sure the terrain is not the highest quality, but no giant minecraft type block terrain either


Perhaps those clumps of trees confuse the snow generation algorithms.

That makes sense to me. I think I have seen this as I was flying around in the very northern parts of Russia. And yes, “looks like a broken Minecraft block” :slight_smile:

Well, ladies and gentlemen… here we are. We finally got the alps.
I have not seen everything yet of course, but what I have seen in Switzerland so far is impressive. Very detailed data. Great.
However, there is a catch. And it’s a big one: The morphing. That bloody morphing.
Unfortunatelly to really have the high detailed mountains, you basically have to crash into them. You only get high detailed meshs when you are really (really!) close.
As soon as you fly away from a mountain, it basically starts to “melt” like an ice cream. It morphs like a dough ^^.
Of course also when you fly towards mountains.
This morphing drives me nuts. It’s so immersion breaking. Especially in VR.
We now have this really good terrain data. But the terrain wobbles and morphes like crazy (the new pre-chache setting does not really help here).
I just don’t understand why Asobo can’t come up with a more clever solution.
To have the mountains not morphing. At least not that much.

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I think it is simply a question of bandwith. If you were to bump the range at which the highest resolution data is displayed the memory demands would get ludicrously high.
I totally agree that it is a problem, always has been. One would hope for a more intermittent steps so that the higher resolution comes in smaller increments so that you don’t notice it.

I feel like there is hardly any visual gain in the highest LOD’s being loaded at extreme close distance.
I would much prefer a lower LOD but no constant morphing.

If only there was a setting for Maximum LOD that would let us limit at what distance the sim stops loading higher LOD’s. It would solve a lot of problems imo.

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Asobo can’t possible be happy with that horrible morphing. There must be a better way.
Other big AAA games are also able to have their meshes transforming from low LOD to high LOD rather smoothly. There must be ways.

Guys, you have to admit, that the alps (especially in the Zermatt region) look stunning and so much better than before. Of course the morphing could be improved. But this WU shows, that with good data, mountains can look very nice.

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I’m wondering or I should rather say I’m baffled… I’ve just taken off from Klagenfurt and am heading DTO Stuttgart (LOWK - EDDS) and this is what I see:


So I wonder is this an issue on my side?? Or are the Alps regionally nice but overall… not so?

It is improved for sure. But there is still room for more.
I notice about 2 LOD switches. One at around 15Km distance, one at about 500 meter distance (just eyeball distances)
Above the first LOD switch the mountains are still too round. After the first switch to a higher resolution they get most of their profile, and the second switch just shows more detail.

I would wish for the first LOD distance to be pushed back so that you can see the higher resolution at least 10 km’s earlier.