Ground textures now blurry, way smaller lod radius, buildings suddenly totally unrealistic after update

Airbusfan123 · October 3, 2020, 3:18pm

Hi,

I don’t recognize my sim anymore after the latest update. I have some serious issues now and I’m not able to fix it myself. I read many comments of similar problems after the update, so I am not the only one…

Ground textures are blurry after the update
Buildings have completely changed, they have completely different textures, 1-story tall buildings have 5-10 stories now and appear less detailed
Normal houses look like tall office buildings now
Trees are only loading in a way smaller radius around the aircraft so they only pop out within 500m radius or so
There are buildings now, where in RL are none

It’s absolutely terrible. A friend of mine has the same iusse. I checked all settings and they are the same as before the update. I even set bing maps data to off and turned it on again with no effect.

Anotherr interesting thing is, if I turn off bing maps data, the building textures stay the same! So I suggest, bing maps data is no longer streamed, even if it is set to on. My internet connection has no issue at all! At least, the issue persists in areas, that have no 3D scan textures. That would explain why your New York scenery is looking good.

Here is an example. Bruchsal airfield EDTC which is located in a commercial area with mainly 1-story tall buildings. Picture 1 is before the update, picture 2 is after the update with many tall office buildings. Behind the airport, there are normal 2 story-houses, who now appear as big office buildings, too. On picture 2, I’ve drawn the viewing angle.

What’s going on here?

Before:

After:

MagicMandi · October 4, 2020, 12:10am

Totally agree! Blurry ground textures everywhere

BilingualHarp7 · October 4, 2020, 2:21am

Comparison screen shots have a greater impact if you have the before and after showing the same view.

Before (yours)

After (mine)

I can see the building problem quite clearly in my new 'after" shot. But allowing for slight colour differences between PCs, the textures look identical to me. The tree density is difficult to gauge from the photos but they do seem a bit less dense in the upper left off in the distance, but that might have more to do with my tree settings as I only use ‘high’. The problem of trees popping in and out has been around for some time, but I had only noticed this in very dense urban areas. Try a flight around Chicago and you’ll see what I mean.

I think MSFS gets its building data from OSM which I had also used to create buildings for photo realistic scenery in Aerofly. If you look at the individual buildings in OSM you can see what has happened.

OSM has building outlines for all structures tagged as a building. Then depending on the person who created this data, sometimes has further data advising additional like the height, number of levels, building use etc.

If we take the group of buildings with the problems and look in the data in OSM it becomes clear that the problem lies with those buildings having no OSM data other than 'building = yes" and a building outline. For some reason Asobo decided these buildings should all have 10 floors. Probably works fine in New York, but is a bit of a disaster elsewhere.

Below are a couple of shots of individual building details in OSM.
Shot 1 - OSM data contains number of levels and is correctly rendered in MSFS

Shot 2 - virtually no building information in OSM and is not correctly rendered in MSFS

Shot 3 - OSM data has no level information but height can be assumed by building use ‘commercial’, and is correctly rendered in MSFS.

This OSM screen shot of the same area shows a commercial area. It is very simple to tag all buildings that have no building level information with a generic height range based on the landuse (in this example located in a commercial area) or other identifying feature. Asobo may have done exactly this and assumed all buildings in a commercial area with no level information should have 10 floors. Fine tuning a bit of code to correctly guess building information where none exists in OSM, takes a bit of trial and error. I expect Asobo will get better at this over time.

Lastly very tall buildings (like the monolith in Melbourne) are usually traced to errors in OSM data, which is easily fixed by correcting the source OSM data.

PvtKurtz · October 4, 2020, 2:42am

Not even sure if i gained 1fps by last patch, it was great for me before. Not only smaller Lod Radius but texture of buildings are very low res.

Tokyo’s buildings look uglier than before update and patch.

Airbusfan123 · October 4, 2020, 9:44am

Wow, thank you very much my friend for taking your time to reply and investigate!
I made MS/Asobo aware of your post. Let’s hope they take it serious and I’m sure your post will help. Best wishes.

Christiance5917 · October 4, 2020, 9:52am

@Airbusfan123 Yes, it’s very sad that the game has changed so much

disabled Antialiasing, distance objects textures… etc… changed colors.

is a different game. Looks same game FSX

Crispy1307 · October 4, 2020, 10:31am

Check teredo is not blocked in your xbox network settings test otherwise you wont be receiving any streamed textures

Check if you have an nvidia GPU that nvidia experience has not optimised the game, if so revert

Check that the in game settings have not been reset in graphics settings and in the data tab

QKDallblue · October 4, 2020, 10:34am

This is Las Vegas, wtf is going on with this game? I have ULTRA settings.

Christiance5917 · October 4, 2020, 10:36am

+1 its a game different…

omarliew · October 4, 2020, 11:30am

I’ve had this also couple of days ago, no streaming data was received and sim couldnt connect to a server. Solution was to close the sim. Log out from xbox compagnion and log back in. Start the sim. Should work again

BilingualHarp7 · October 4, 2020, 11:34am

The answer is simple, you are operating in offline mode. That is, your MSFS is only using what has been installed on your PC, and nothing is being streamed from Microsoft’s servers.

After I disabled all online options Las Vegas looked just like yours.

The same scene with all online options enabled

For whatever reason your MSFS installation is not accessing any online content. It may just have been disabled in your settings. Check → Options → General → Data and make sure all settings under the the Data Connection setting are set to ON. I only have multi player disabled here.

In the same location check that your setting under heading ‘Data bandwidth usage limit’ is set to “Unlimited”.

If these settings are OK and you still have a problem then you might want to check your XBox settings in Windows config. Some people reported that this interferred with scenery streaming, although I found it made no difference. In Windows select → Start → Settings → Gaming → Xbox networking. It should look something like this.

Any teredo errors might be fixed by clicking the ‘Fix’ button, or you might find a solution here. https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/xbox-networking-teredo-server-connectivity-blocked-im-lost/277360/11?u=bilingualharp7 I tried the solution in the link and it got rid of the Teredo error.

HalberQuacky · October 4, 2020, 3:28pm

All of the streamed scenery is delivered from servers running IPV4 end-to-end. Teredo is not used or needed.

QKDallblue · October 4, 2020, 5:29pm

Ops, sorry, I’m a ■■■■. What a stupid mistake by myself. Sorry, and thank you.

Crispy1307 · October 4, 2020, 6:07pm

So then why when teredo is blocked do you receive no streamed textures? My game was awful until it was unblocked and there is tons of other people that were in the same boat so it definitely works for some

benson29977 · October 4, 2020, 8:32pm

My Xbox Network looks equal. Only NAT Type says “medium”
That means is open?
I have no long enough etherneth cable and i don’t want it to lay it through my flat.
So i have wifi with an usb wifi stick in my pc.

HalberQuacky · October 4, 2020, 9:32pm

I have had Teredo completely turned off (in the registry) as long as I have had Windows 10, and have never had any problem streaming textures. Until recently, I had IPV6 turned off in my Ethernet card as well, and it has not prevented downloads or streaming in any way with MSFS.

Teredo is not some kind of “magic bullet”. It was designed years ago as a temporary workaround to allow clients connected to networks or routers that do not pass IPV6 packets to embed IPV6 inside of IPV4. Microsoft has been trying to end Teredo support since 2014 - it was never supposed to be a long-term service, as virtually all ISPs that offer broadband internet now support IPV6, as do most home routers made in the last 5 or 6 years.

From what I have seen while running a TCP/IP analyzer while MSFS is running, all of the internet connections that MSFS makes are IPV4, so Teredo or direct IPV6 should not have any effect at all. Perhaps there are some X-Box games that require IPV6, but MSFS does not appear to be one of them. Perhaps the situation might be different depending on where you are in the world, and which servers MSFS connects to from your location, but from the US east coast, MSFS uses only IPV4.

benson29977 · October 4, 2020, 9:50pm

I think here in Germany is ipv4 too.
But i don’t know it exactly.

But most of my flights i get the message “poor internet bandwith and Bing Data is switched to off mode” in the “click for Flight” screen.
Then i switched it back to “on” in the settings.
And after the flight i see in Data options that FS streamed ~22gb of data.

But i only have a 25k internet stream and my wife and daughter are 24/7 in youtube/PS4 Fortnite.
I think that is my problem…

UptokingEnt · October 5, 2020, 12:29am

I was flying over Norfolk VA earlier and all the bridges were half broken or the buildings would render as broken structures. The new update is trash

choppinbladz · October 5, 2020, 1:25am

I had this same problem. Its a bug. After the update it is not actually using the settings you have set in the graphics menu. So even though it is set to ultra the update borked it. You have to change to medium or low, apply, then change everything back to ultra and apply again. Now it should look ultra again. I have noticed a lot of people having this problem. I opened a zendesk ticket. Try this out and confirm it is your problem and if so report it as well. We may need to have a whole separate post just for the graphics issue to separate it from the other tall building issue.

cooldog4444 · October 5, 2020, 1:32am

I think you are right, After comparing low-end and ultra the textures look about the same. I think it is only using the lowest settings. I’ll attach screen shots.
Low end-