Reference is made to this subject: “After Today update, i get Spikes on Terrain and and Mesh Problems not only at EDDL”
And to: “X-Plane 11.50 Beta 5 Temporarily Recalled For Being Stupid”
What do you think Asobo and Microsoft about issuing an update without a minimum test?
They did test, but thy can’t test eveything.
Plz stop posts/threads like yours one.
After 4 months defending here and in other forums the MS and Asobo policy about this sim, telling here an there that most problems are caused by users, I have reached my trust limit, hence my post. No answer from Zendesk maybe due to holidays.
They can not test everything but in this case spikes are not everything, are everywhere (417 votes in 2 days) they should have easily seen them.
I’m not accusing them of not testing. Rather, I was hoping to provide some clues, and I hope there was no confusion.
Because this huge scene must have used some algorithm to generate the landscape, they may have something in common. As with the water elevation error we encountered in Alask， Norway， and iceland etc., they could be triggered by a particular parameter or setting.
There were some errors in my previous post, and these stings came after the US scene was updated. I have flown the system recommended “fly over Japan” twice, and these spike(at near 33° 7’ 49.24" N 130° 5’ 21.35" E ) was spaced after US scenario updates. So, if you’re looking for the source, you can probably trace it back to that point in time.
Yes, I agree with you that if the problem is spreded, it is clear that is a generic problem. This is an important reason showing that they are lost in the MSFS world.
I’m sorry to recognize that against my fierce defence of Asobo-MS, finally I give up.
Considering the VFR capabilities of this sim, I’m not worried if some landscape areas are not better that in other sims but if they don’t control their own algorithms… Difficult future.
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Thanks in advance.
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Thanks, title changed
This again??? The post the other day with like 400 “me, too” follow-ons wasn’t good enough for you?
Look, this is a minor, almost certainly transient issue. It cropped up at the last minute when Asobo was probably already working with a skeleton crew, which has become even smaller since then. They probably noticed it before the patch went out, but their choices were to make a mountain out of a molehill (which you and some 400 other people have already done), and delay the entire patch/upgrade because of a minor scenery anomaly, or to release it now and fix it later.
I dare say making people wait for their VR because of a couple of pop-up random “hills” in places where they shouldn’t be was the worse option.
It doesn’t break the game (sim), it doesn’t make it “unplayable”, it’s a minor scenery anomaly that will go away soon after everybody gets back to work after the holidays.
Alternatively, if those anomalies are really that big of a deal to you, then just go back to whatever decade old sim you perceive to be “better” and enjoy. No need to announce your departure with yet another repetitive whiny thread about a nothingburger bug.
When they start appearing when you’re on short final with no warning and causing you to crash into them (something that I have not heard about happening), then maybe you have something to complain about. Until such time, you’re just making pointless noise.
Grow up and save your squeaky wheel for things that need it. This ain’t one of those things.
Only talking about different communicaton policies.
Learn, pay attention, and don’t imagine what I haven’t said.
Minor issue of 800 km
@SlippedSheep437, yes, even at 800km, it’s a minor issue. It’s a transient scenery glitch, and nothing more. It doesn’t affect your game play (unless your goal is taking screen shots without transient bugs in them), it doesn’t affect your flying, and it doesn’t prevent you from getting from Point-A to Point-B in any way whatsoever, much less a meaningful way.
I saw a couple of them myself, made a mental note along the lines of “Hmm, that shouldn’t be there”, and went about my business. No. Big. Deal.
Yes “Hmm, that shouldn’t be there”, but I’m unable of thinking this in a VFR during a total of 800 Km water wall.
Departure LETD RW6 arrival LERJ, en route LEZA (unexistent, instead the real LEZG still not in MSFS).
So what? Stop skimming the treetops and pull up a little bit, and you don’t have to worry about it.
Oh, and here’s a little piece of good news for you… I don’t know about this particular scenery glitch on that particular river, but if it’s the same root cause as the one’s causing the “spikes”, then you can’t hit it even if you wanted to. See, I took a long flight from Havana to Port-a-Prince yesterday, and after some 4+ hours, I got established for a long final on a visual approach and what do I see…
One of your beloved spikes!
At first, I was thinking I was gonna have to fly around that sucker to make the airport without the deaths of everyone on board, but it turns out it wasn’t that close to my final approach course. But, and here’s the really good news… I wouldn’t have needed to fly around it anyway. That’s because as I got closer and closer, it disappeared!! But, when I turned around to taxi to my parking spot, what did I see?
Yup, the spike was back!
And guess what happened the closer I got to it enroute to my parking spot? Yup, you guessed it, it disappeared again! It seems that it’s like chasing the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow, that just when you think you’re about to get to it, it’s magically gone! Meaning, of course, that you couldn’t have crashed into it had you tried.
Is that not the best news you’ve heard all day??
Now, it is of course possible that your little river anomaly and the spikes had nothing to do with each other, meaning it might have been possible to actually hit your river if you were trying to follow along at too low of an altitude. I ran into about 4 or 5 of those myself just yesterday at the lower end of the Grand Canyon, which I had been flying through at up to 160 kias (and pulling as many as 4 Gs to do so) that shouldn’t have been there. So, I figure better safe than sorry and I pulled up and flew over them rather than risk ending my flight prematurely by hitting a scenery anomaly that shouldn’t have been there.
I finally made it to the Hoover Dam, which was my goal in the first place, and it turns out that flying under the bridge to the west of the dam is a bad idea, because despite not looking like it at all, it’s one of those bridges that is a solid wall from the road surface down to the ground underneath it, and sadly, I crashed into it with the complete loss of the airframe and all souls on board.
Good thing it was only a sim, no?
Now, my point in relaying this story to you is to point out that, other than this post here that I used to make a point, you will find no entries from me on this entire forum whining and moaning about this scenery glitch. I may fill out a zen report later today, after all it is the responsible thing to do, but I have to imagine such a high profile place as this, they already know about it. However, by not filling out a report, I’m kind of acting like an entire neighborhood worth of people who it turns out nobody called the power company to let them know about a power outage, while they all just figured one of their neighbors already did!
And then, when hours go by and the power remained out, instead of going ahead and filing a better late than never official report, we all just went on some random internet forum to express our displeasure with the power company, when in fact they didn’t even know the lights were out in the first place because none of us told them!!
Now, the reality with the state of technology in 2020 is that the chances are the power company knew about the outage sooner than you did. But the same cannot be said about attempting to find every single scenery anomaly on the entire planet because it’s just too big. There’s never been a beta test time ever assembled by anyone big enough to tackle that task without missing a lot of them, so in a very real sense, they rely on us to report them when we find them, because we can simply cover more geography than their beta team ever did, or could have.
So, please, let’s drop all the drama, and stop turning molehills into mountains. Which is what you and all the other whiners have most assuredly done in this case. I’d bet it’ll be fixed if not at the next patch, but surely the one after that.
And a month or so from now nobody will even remember it ever happened.
Look folks, it is relatively easy: you are looking for an “official answer”? I cannot give you one, but the simplest explanation is usually the correct one: “It’s a bug.” Plain and simple. Well, wasnt’ that obvious 
And the developers were most likely even aware of that. But as others have pointed out already: it is not a “show stopper”. Yes, it’s ugly. Yes, it shouldn’t have happened. Yes, it somewhat “kills immersion” for some (others - and that includes me - just take a “mental note” and be done with it).
But I imagine they had to make a “judgement call” just before Christmas: either delay the VR update - and all the other fixes, and there are PLENTY, including the autopilot fix - remember? - until sometimes early 2021, or just accept the fact that a few users are going to be a little bit upset about it. But that’s that. It doesn’t really prevent you from flying! It’s a visual glitch, yes - a “cosmetic issue”.
Look, the “world building algorithm” (and I am pretty sure there is not just one algorithm behind all that), mesh generator and all that is a “creative process”. Requesting that “Asobo control their algorithms” is like asking a painter to “control his/her colours” when doing “experimental mixing with a new type of colour”. It is a creative process.
And I guess the input data - world mesh - they get is “far from perfect”. There are “glitches” in the “real world sample data”, inconsistencies and whatnot. And some of those might become only apparent (visually) once you tweak some parameters…
And did you know: re-calculating the entire world (based on some “world generation parameters”) takes two weeks. Not on a single computer, but on an entire cluster of computers - two weeks! (According from some developer interview that I remember, but do not have a proper link to right now…).
Yes, that “visual glitch” might also be a simple “level of detail mesh generator bug” and may not be related to the “word data”… the better.
But again, there was most likely a call to be made before the well-earned Christmas holidays to delay VR and the other fixes - can you imagine the outcry in the community? “What?! No VR for Christmas? How dare you…!”, or “live with the visual glitch”.
I’ll tell you what this forum is not for. It’s not for pointless repetitive whining by a bunch of immature kiddies who in all likelihood haven’t even bothered to send in an official bug report to the people who are responsible for, I don’t know, doing things like fixing bugs!!!
We can’t help you with that. Sure, after you’ve sent in an official report, this might be a useful place to find solutions if other people have actually done so, but the way this particular topic has been beat to death by immature whiners should clue you in that nobody here knows how to fix it.
Imagine that! And yet, I suppose because you just like hearing yourself whine, you (and many others) keep bring it up again and again to the point that it makes those of us who are mature enough to see it for what it is (which is a transient inconsequential scenery bug) want to puke ourselves, and I suspect even stop coming here.
I’ve given that considerable consideration myself, but I’ve decided (for now anyway) that the benefits outweigh the hassles of dealing with immature children.
Here’s what “we” know. We know these molehill into mountain scenery anomalies started at the last patch. I know that since then, I’ve seen 3 of them, one in California, one in Georgia, and one in Haiti. I know what whenever I’ve gotten relatively close to one, they go away, which means they can’t possibly disrupt my flight.
Why?
Because they’re inconsequential scenery glitches that will almost certainly be fixed in the next patch or two. Like the gold at the end of a rainbow, you can’t get there because they go away before you do. But also because their other choice was to delay VR and other more consequential fixes contained in the last patch so that your fragile little ego didn’t have to look at a few scenery spikes. And because it’s the holiday season, and people would rather be with their families than quashing inconsequential scenery bugs in their scenery.
Boo, hoo.
Anyways, I’m gonna go spend my time doing something productive, like flying. And if I see any scenery spikes, I’ll do what I always do (and what you should do, too), which is to ignore them.
I can’t imagine the levels of immaturity it takes to get this hot under the collar over somthing so completely meaningless and trivial, but if it makes you feel better to keep whining, by all means, be my guest. At least I don’t have to worry about sharing the multiplayer skies with you.
Primary issue is with project management approving releases before proper QA testing coverage is completed. This is a common industry practice to avoid missing (slipping) release date schedules. Typically, a “risk assessment” is performed and specific QA test coverage get eliminated. In other words, they don’t bother to check if the software changes they made didn’t break something else.
QA testing is gatekeeper role in SDLC. Not sure which SQA tool they are using, but their test coverage is completely inadequate.
Another obvious issue is that inexperienced H-1a and offshore software developers are being used to cut costs. This commonly results in very poor coding practices (aka ‘bugs’ or defects). A good real world example of this is Boeing using this practice for their 737 MAX “Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System” or MCAS(1). It resulted in a couple of 737 MAX’s crashing, killing hundreds of people(2).
Thankfully, MSFS 2020 is only a flight simulator. No real aircraft crashed and no real people were killed.
(1) Safety Recommendation Report: Assumptions Used in the Safety Assessment Process and the Effects of Multiple Alerts and Indications on Pilot Performance
(2) Boeing’s 737 Max Software Outsourced to $9-an-Hour Engineers
Then fly somewhere else. Go look for the chinese wall, follow the grand canyon, circle around shiprock… these topics are utterly pointless and spam the forum with the same nonsense all the time. Asobo has created something new, Asobo experiences issues, Asobo works on it. I recommend FSX at 100meter mesh settings. No exposed rivers, promised.
Zendesk is primarily being used as a bug reporting portal and not a support desk. That means for the most part, you will not get a reply unless the developers need more information or you require genuine support that requires a reply (such as billing, or account issues).
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