And Andy all those mismatches of heights of hills and coasts will need to be found and corrected by A.i. because there’s just far to much of it for hand fixes and really it’s not too different to what they do with heights and textures of (some) buildings. Of course better data from Bing would help.
Hi there. Just checking in after the big update… as usual. I know my opinion means about as much as, well, what’s another word for “worthless”.
Regardless here is my 2 cents. Asobo and Microsoft seem to have taken what was once the most promising addition to my favorite hobby and, for lack of a better word, completely “crippled” it!
I have been checking in after every update to see if this “morphing” issue (my biggest gripe) was being repaired. Unfortunately after every update they seemed to not only, not address it, but add additional problems. This update however, takes the cake!! OMG what in the heck is going on?
I see a lot of people saying “you’ve been xboxed” but there has to be more to it than that. Every interview I watch with the developers, they come off as genuine, passionate and intelligent. So what is going on? Did they lie to us directly, did they unintentionally mess it all up, are they understaffed or overworked, is someone higher up the food chain making calls that are simply for profit? I really don’t know.
All I know is that the “morphing” is worse than ever, or at least more noticeable than ever. The newly introduced scenery popping looks like a hot mess using my trackIR. The glowing clouds look atrocious. Yes there have been improvements to performance but at an absurd cost. I could have gotten the same or close to the same gains but turning all my settings down. So silly & unnecessary. I would rather have something look gorgeous (like the pre USA update msfs) and have to upgrade my way to higher settings via new hardware accompanied by small performance updates that do not take away from the originally offered product.
I’ve been living in the DCS world ever since the USA update. Actually there is a heatwave here so honestly I haven’t been inside for over a month. LOL! Prior to the USA update I was happily flying everyday in my little Cessna 152 and admiring the jaw dropping leap in graphical fidelity that was MSFS. Yes the avionics & physics needed some love but I was given a little taste of what’s possible …and I want it back!! SO BAD!! C’mon guys please get your act together or stand up against whoever is making this groundbreaking sim into a profit generating mobile phone game!! I’m seriously rooting for you and I refuse to believe you guys are liars!!
Rant over!
Cheers
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I completely understand how you feel. It’s the biggest problem I have with the simulator right now, and it’s a shame to see this issue is so underrepresented (although probably not as bad as our friend, the mountain seams). I didn’t think that, 9 months later, we’d be in the stage where the developers have still not properly acknowledged the issue, and yet here we are.
I wouldn’t bother checking after every update if I were you. Even though the Feedback Snapshot says this will be fixed in 2021, it’s obviously very outdated with some inaccurate information. If it were being actively investigated, I think they’d at least stop it from becoming worse over time.
I think it’s a combination of all the above. Microsoft probably rushed the Xbox launch, and Asobo had no other choice but to release Sim Update 5 the same day as well. If they did not, the PC community would be outraged with the Xbox getting the new features first. Having participated in the beta, I can tell you that Asobo are working really, really hard, but there’s just so much to do.
About the fact that they claimed there would be no visual degradation, I think they either underestimated the community’s tolerance towards these artifacts, or there is genuinely an unintended side effect (the frame drops and stutters while panning are definitely intended though). We do not know yet, but hopefully we will soon.
Sadly the panning redraw and stutters do seem to be worse for TrackIR and VR users. The glowing clouds look like that because they increased the overall exposure of the title to optimise it for HDR displays, but sadly it causes the SDR rendition to look somewhat washed-out and blown-out. They might offer a slider to tweak the exposure in the future.
Although dumbing down the visuals for the Xbox seems like the obvious explanation, personally I think they went a little too far in trying to break away from the tradition of flight simulators being CPU-bound. Still, this was a great change for users who were performance-conscious and many are delighted with this update, but coming with some noticeable side effects I really think they should have made the culling optional or adjustable. You might be interested in this Wishlist request by the way.
That’s all for now. It will be a while until the next Q&A session takes place and August’s patch will be a World Update, so we cannot expect any changes to the morphing or the culling any time soon. I would suggest checking back again in late September, else you’re in for disappointment. If we come across a positive development in the meantime though, I’ll make sure to page you!
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Thank you, as always, for the thoughtful responses. I always appreciate your feedback, knowledge and input.
I know my post was long and for the most part really negative. I guess we all just have to vent sometimes. I can’t exactly start talking to my girlfriend about the frustration of culling or the morphing terrain!! LOL I’d be dealing with all the same flight sim frustrations except I’d be eating diner alone!! Haha!
I’ll try to stay away for a little longer this time, but I really appreciate your last comment about a page. That would be fantastic. It’s people like yourself that make these forums so great, especially at a time when the game itself is so…!!! …let’s just say Asobo has increased the amount of grey in my hair by a large percentage!!
Cheers
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That’s alright, we all need to vent somewhere. This simulator has been an emotional rollercoaster since launch, and sadly it does not look like we are reaching a good level of stability any time soon, either with the application itself or the visuals. At least now the port to the Xbox is out of the way.
In my thread about the culling slider I posted some comparison videos of the redraw/morphing at different Terrain LOD settings, I think they’d be appropriate in here too.
It goes to show how badly the shape retention has regressed with the Norway DEM.
Same problem
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Does anybody know what the actual problem regarding terrain morphing is? How does LOD work in this case?
I noticed that morphing is particularly noticeable in mountainous areas where the DEM has been updated (eg French Alps, Norway, parts of the US). Am I right in assuming that there are different DEMs, one per LOD, and that the morphing is that bad in said regions because the discrepancy between the new high-res DEM (highest LOD) and the other LODs is just way bigger than in areas that use default Bing DEMs? Or am I completely mistaken?
And of course the most important question, how can it be fixed?
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That sounds pretty much bang on to me. However I can’t see a solution except with A.I. as there’s just too much of it. Except maybe for hand fixes around major airports, scenery objects etc. which I think is the current situation but is hardly ideal.
There are two outstanding issues causing the morphing right now:
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What happened with the USA World Update is that the LOD distances were tweaked (reasons unknown), and as a result the LOD rings are very close to each other. This means that we see swapping between the different LODs very frequently, and for some reason this happens a lot more often as the aircraft/camera gets close to the terrain. I presume that the new DEM, which is of higher resolution, has more LODs which means even more aggressive swapping.
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Currently the default mesh suffers from extremely poor shape retention in the lower levels of detail, which is why, as the LODs are getting swapped, we are seeing very large differences in shape, size and height of terrain features, making the morphing even more noticeable. This is an issue that has existed since launch, but the adjustment of the LOD rings greatly exaggerated it. However, it appears that newer DEM like Norway suffers from even worse shape retention as I’ve documented in previous videos, and a potential explanation could be that, for performance reasons, they’re using the index buffer to skip vertices, which essentially cuts through the shape of the original-quality mesh.
Reverting the LOD distances back to what they were before the USA World Update would reduce the frequency of the morphing and move the LOD swapping further away from the camera, however fixing the poor shape retention would be the true solution. The Orbx add-on mesh shows that, if the lower LODs are compiled in a consistent way, even at a very low Terrain Level of Detail setting the morphing is pretty much eliminated. Here is a comparison between default and the Orbx mesh.
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I am pretty sure microsoft/asobo is aware of this and they want orbx to make money on meshes by not fixing it.
LODs now are much easier on the system, either wait for the fix or use the config hack to get past 200
It’s poor quality Bing data, Asobo/Blackshark are working on a solution but ultimately the best fix will come from new data which is probably why there seems to be so little urgency
It is not easier on the connection though. Mine is very slow and it takes a beating when the Terrain LOD slider is set to 100 or above. Before the USA World Update, I was happily flying with the slider set to 25-75 depending on the situation without a lot of morphing. Brute force is not the true solution.
On the contrary, it seems to be getting worse with new data. Plenty of morphing in Mont Blanc, and pretty much the entirety of Norway. If they’re skipping vertices using the index buffers, then it won’t be any good no matter how good the LOD compilation algorithm is.
I hope they realise what they’re doing sooner rather than later. They will not do multiple World Update passes over the entire world, and I don’t want to have to cover the entire planet with Orbx mesh.
That’s not particularly new bing data though (except for a few select villages and objects), the morphing is more likely a side effect of a waterline fix or something similar (Norway has some of the largest tides worldwide).
The patch notes for the Nordics World Update state that the DEM did get updated though.
- Updated aerial imagery in parts of the Nordic countries and French oversea territories (La Réunion, Mayotte, Saint-Barthelemy, Saint-Martin, Martinique, Guadeloupe, Guyane and Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon)
- Updated elevation data for Norway, Denmark, Finland
- Watermasks have been updated at various locations
And Jörg stated in an older Q&A that one of the things he wanted for this update was to make the Norwegian fjords look sharper. The DEM is definitely new.
It will be interesting to see how the simulator handles the free Swisstopo mesh in the DACH World Update. It has already been implemented in Bing Maps (along with the imagery), and the morphing already looks awful with plenty of sawtooth patterns.
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One day it will all look perfect … I just hope I’m still around by then
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Hey guys. Look at my videos, I got it even worse than the first video of this thread. 
I have the feeling it’s part of my bad bandwith. Altough I have a 125k mbits bandwith, the internet in my country is known for being very bad and I have a lot of crashes and buffering when streaming videos. Recorded on a xbox series s
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Just installed the New Zealand mesh of orbx. I thought it would be gone now, but I still have the terrible mountain morphing. Altough it’s not as bad as in the videos I posted. Shouldnt it be completly gone for the orbx mesh?
Thanks for posting here too!
@AndyXPO I see that the thread only has the “pc” tag, can you also add the “xbox” tag since the morphing is affecting both platforms?
On which platform is that? I have not tried the NZ Mesh myself, only the freeware Iceland which is supposed to be using the same LOD compilation technique, and with that one I saw little to no morphing. It might be worth giving it a try as well.
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