KDAL north end still broken with PG enable

[ToriDadriel]

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Are you using Developer Mode or made changes in it?

Nope

Have you disabled/removed all your mods and addons?

not today, but this bug has been there forever and persisted without mods when I tested it a while ago it’s clear that it is not caused by any addon

Brief description of the issue:

The terrain tile at the northern end of the KDAL airport is broken, when PG is enable in the sim. It displays only low res textures and caused terraforming issues with neighbouring tiles, which causes a huge cliff to appear in the runway of the KDAL airport which is right next to it.

It first appeared together with the terrain issues at KDFW, so I checked it again today after the dev stream since Jörg mentioned that KDFW was fixed. Unfortunately this issue still persists and is even worse than before, since I can’t be fixed anymore by just uninstalling WU10 PG, but only by totally disabling PG in the sim.

Provide Screenshot(s)/video(s) of the issue encountered:

Only difference is PG disable in the setting between these two screenshots.

ICAO or coordinates (DevMode > Debug > Display position)

KDAL airport, north end

Detailed steps to reproduce the issue encountered:

Go to KDAL and then look at the approach end of runway 13L, the issue is immediately visible on the runway and in the adjacent river

PC specs and/or peripheral set up if relevant:

RTX 4090, AMD 5800X3D, 32GB RAM

Are you using DX11 or DX12?

DX12

Are you using DLSS?

no

Would be really nice if this finally could be fixed, since this bug makes it quite abit of a hassle to use my KDAL scenery. And I would very much like to fly there, since it is a SWA hub

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Do you have the same issue if you follow the OP’s steps to reproduce it?

Provide extra information to complete the original description of the issue:

If relevant, provide additional screenshots/video:

[CasualClick]

Already solved through other means. The user had to uninstall and reinstall both USA World Updates.

But note the number of users who could not reproduce it.

KDAL textures/terrain issue

Thank you for using the Bug section, using templates provided will greatly help the team reproducing the issue and ease the process of fixing it. Are you using Developer Mode or made changes in it? No Have you disabled/removed all your mods and addons? If the issue still occurs with no mods and add-ons, please continue to report your issue. If not, please move this post to the Community Support section. I removed iBlue Yonder KDAL and SamScene3d and still have the issue Brief des…

[ToriDadriel]

This is not solved for me. Still shows up for me even after reinstalling both USA world updates when photogrammetry is enabled.

This is with a blank sim with an empty community folder. I now spend two hours testing if some certain packet in these world updates was causing this issue, but in the end I still came to very same conclusion as before. As long as PG is enabled and the USA world updates enabled, this tile is broken with these issues.

[Darewell]

Uninstalling and reinstalling both USA world update did not fix anything for me…

The issue is gone since I recently reinstalled Windows. I still don’t know why it happened and I hope it won’t happen again.

[CasualClick]

And again, we’ve had a lot of users report they can’t repro. It’s troubling to be sure, but if it’s not happening for a majority of users, how does one troubleshoot if it can’t be recreated on the support side? I’m just an end user like everyone else in this regard, but that’s the basic premise of technical support in the sim - being able to establish the scenario or conditions that consistently allow someone else to recreate the issue.

[ToriDadriel]

Well, I DO have a 100% percent reproducable scenario here. As long as I have the WU 10 PG cities package installed the issue appears in my sim.

I now even went so far as to reinstall the whole sim and tried it with nothing installed except the base packages and this one extra package and it still showed up. Nothing else that I tried except this package made one bit of difference, not changing my IP settings, not using a VPN. I even tried nuking all my settings in the appdata folder and then restarted the sim, still no difference.

It can’t even be an issue with the MS account environment, since I’m not in that since I use the Steam version. In the end it all points to an issue with the data that my sim receives from the server in the PG data stream.

And yes, I know it only affects some users, I have one friend that is affected and another I asked is not. But short of reinstalling my whole system I’m not sure what else I can do to troubleshoot. And even that might be just some coincidence, that is fixed the issue for the other user.

P.S.: I even tried if making a manual cache of the area would help, but that also did not fix the issue. It made it look a bit different, but still broken.

[ToriDadriel]

So after playing around some more and even comparing my package with a package from my friend that is not affected by the issue (no difference acutally) I think I boiled this whole thing down to it’s root cause with the dev mode debug options.

When I enable the tile debug and look at the affected area it becomes quite clear, that the issue at hand here is that the blurry area is “just” a huge low zoom level tile that never is able to be streamed at the highest levels.

In this first picture you can see the details for a working tile right next to the affected area. In the Tile ID the last number is the used zoom level of that tile. Here it is 18, but if I zoom in further I can get it all the way to 20.

In this second picture you can see what happens if manually select the tile to the west of the tile in the first picture. It just say that this tile was never streamed to my machine. This is with a full manual cache for this area enabled! Even then I never get the required solution from the server for homogenous terrain.

This third picture shows what happens if I manually put the cursor roughly in same position as in the second picture showing that the tile available there is zoom level 13.

And I’m even wondering why this tile even thinks that it should be PG enabled here. From what I can gather the closest PG area is Fort Worth and this tile is not in that coverage area.

[ToriDadriel]

I now managed to fix this for me on my end and this shows that it is definitely an issue on the server side, that only affects some of the servers. To get a proper fix for this area I connected to another region instead of my usual northern Germany via VPN. There (Japan in this case) it showed up correctly after clearing all my caches and loading into the airport.

I did then proceed to add this area to a manual cache from the japanese server to be able to use it without the VPN and this worked as expected. With this cache I now have the proper tile resolution in Dallas and no more issues with the airport. Interessting side note with the cache is that it’s size after the download from Japan is much bigger than what I got for rougly the same area in Germany. At home it was about 40Mb in total while from Japan I got around 900Mb.

So now that the root cause here is known I think that it still would be something that the dev team should look into. Because basicly there is corrupted data on my home server that has been there since at least June last year. Which begs the question if there are actually more corrupted areas that just don’t get noticed since they are not right next to a major airport.