Sorry the quality on this video is bad but when this happened I just grabbed my phone to start recording, I’m not video savy enough to know how to do in game recordings. This was when I noticed the blinking name plate, the stutter sync, and the model of a player not being drawn. I didn’t come to the conclusion that this player had a different Asobo aircraft than I did until the next day. My voice is really low on the video but this basically sums it up.Blinking nameplate stutter sync
FYI - in no way shape or form am I trying to “Player shame” the player with a blinking nameplate, I just want to put that out there. I am sure the player probably had no idea what was going on and as far as they were concerned they were using “default MSFS aircraft.” I don’t blame him at all he just happened to be there for this bug to show up.
This is where I am flying away from the player in my previous video and you’ll notice that at a certain distance the nameplate has become solid AND the stutters stop (I assume this is were the sim say “I don’t need to try to draw the model and livery anymore but still identify that there is a player there.” I am not certain on that but logically that is where my mind goes. Again, sorry for the quality of the vid.
@DracoRPG3979 you give an interesting new observation about Standard and DeLuxe differences !
The occurrence of flashing name tags and stuttering with 3th party liveries was seen many times before and acknowledged earlier, also by insiders, e.g.
I just want to add in something about why I did or am doing what I am doing with sharing this information and what I found with everyone here, however I am NOT a programmer, NOT a 3rd party developer, I used to work in IT Support ages ago, and I like finding solutions to problems that affect me and my friends.
The BIGGEST draw for me with MSFS is multiplayer. Period, hands down. I stumbled upon some people (a couple from the UK and a couple from the US) who were streaming MSFS on youtube and twitch. I thought how cool was that. I joined in and we flew together to all these places during a time we were basically under house arrest. This was awesome, a lot of fun, and I met some great people over the past 4 months who I, without any hesitation, would call friends.
However, it started to really become a problem during streaming and flying in these groups that I started getting plagued with CTDs notably the VCRUNTIME error. 2 - 3 times a flight. Then the streamers themselves who may or maynot be out of work and looking to make a tiny fraction of money crash during streaming with CTDs because of various things VCRUNTIME140, .NET, .EXE failures etc. I felt compelled to try to help in any way possible.
I’m tech savy enough to be dangerous and I am not a pro forum poster, video maker, etc. I know my limitations and they are many for sure. So with all that being said, that is my motivation a love of the sim, a love of flying, help other pilots/streamers, and trying to find an actual solution to the problem(s).
Try OBS. It’s free and easy to use. Install, launch, press “record” and off you go. Videos are saved to your windows “Videos” folder by default.
Like @AwesomeBlack533 already said, we were both flying a CRJ-700 in the premium deluxe edition. Only difference was the livery. I used the standard, whilst the other user had a custom livery on the CRJ, which I didn’t have in my FS Community folder.
I’m a programmer and I did some client-server and cloud stuff. Reading this, I’ve a theory.
I wonder if this has something to do with liveries that are not available on the observer’s PC… so if you (client #1) see another aircraft in MP (client #2) and you don’t have the livery installed, the server would solve that by letting you download the livery to put it on your screen ? A download that should happen in real time ? Suppose the flickering indicates you are waiting for the livery to appear… and if that download don’t work… or it cannot be initialized because of some bug in the livery… the stuttering starts…
This could also explain why Standard license users see DeLuxe users with flickering name plates. Some aircraft and liveries are not available in Standard, as a result the Standard user suffers stuttering , because he has to download and activate the texture in life gameplay… and that cannot be finished, or the load procedure used contains bugs…
The problem with OBS is, I like to use mouse look (mousewheel press) to look around, and when I turn that on, OBS stops recording, or rather, it continues to record, but, just shows the last frame before mouse look was turned on. Is there another solution that isn’t affected by whatever change they’re making to the graphics by mouse look?
Is there a way to fix OBS so it doesn’t get screwed up by mouse look?
If that’d really be the case, wouldn’t that be a privacy infringement? The game would basically distribute content from a users device without prior permission. Imagine paid add-ons. Would be troublesome imo, so doubt that this is what’s going on. But good thinking though.
In the video I’ve posted above about the bug you see me mouse look around in the cockpit at the very end without issues. That was recorded in OBS as well.
I’m surprised that the nameplate was blinking then. The stutters I can understand but the blinking nameplate is confusing because I’ve been in MP flights with people with addon aircraft with custom livery got the stutter but not blinking nameplate. Could you tell if the model of the CRJ was being drawn at all from that distance or was it just the blinking nameplate?
That would require permission from the user to share their liveries
Liveries can be hundreds of MB and not everyone has fast internet
What do you do about disk space, especially when you only need it for a few minutes and you could come across thousands of liveries, hundreds in a single session.
Do you assign a unique number to every single plane?
Even though multiple people might use the same livery, how do you keep track of them. Right now, they don’t ask us to assign a GUID to every livery
They could limit it only to textures that are on the outside? But then when you get close, people would complain.
What if the user doesn’t have the plane?
It seems to me until they address the uniqueness, sharing, and size issues the best current solution would be to use generic liveries only, even though the user might have the livery in question (which would be sad).
It would be nice if they had us assign a GUID to every livery. But people not understanding the importance would pretty quickly screw this up. Maybe not.
No, didn’t see the model at that distance as it was out of LOD range, but saw the lights flashing. Prior to take off we were next to each other at the gates and I was able to see the aircraft just fine. However, stutters were there from the start till the end of the flight. I had to switch multiplayer servers in between.
And yea, it’s weird that the name was flashing, but I’ve had this stutter where no names were flashing as well. Same effect, but all user name tags were constantly visible.
I’ve no experience with MP gameplay in MSFS, but how would it be done otherwise ? When I join a group, with a non-official livery… I expect others to see my livery. So my livery texture should appear on the PC screen of all other people in the group. A livery texture is a local file. So people need that local file… and that should be created in some way, when the livery is not available. When the aircraft is a third party aircraft, the complete description is transferred. That appearently works… see above observation… But if it is livery only that has to be replaced, issues occur in MSFS (that should be solved !)
Shouldn’t the whole model sharing thing be handled by the “use generic models for AI and MP aircraft?” I’ve seen plenty of helicopters flying around that look like bonanzas. Seems there is something between the different models (Asobo deluxe and premium deluxe versions included) and how the sim recognizes them and presents them to other players.
That’d indeed be awesome, but due to the overhead and technical part of such feature, it hasn’t been implemented so far in any FS multiplayer. A solution would be, that for every aircraft and livery released, a lightweight 3D model and low resolution texture is made available for model matching. Distribution could be done through dedicated servers (extra cost and maintenance) or a nonintrusive peer to peer download (but that would cause issues for bandwidth limited or capped users). So a hard to tackle problem actually.
Yes, that seems to be “the” default aircraft for anything UFO. Seen that so many times with players I fly regularly when they use custom liveries, even for aircraft I’ve installed and fly as well.
Agreed. It depends on why FS is stuttering. If one reason is because it’s constantly looking for a livery that doesn’t exist, that would be dumb. They read every file you have. There’s no reason they shouldn’t know you don’t have the file and automatically assign a pointer to a generic livery (and plane), and there’s no reason to keep checking once they’ve done that. Maybe that’s why they turned off the ability to switch planes mid-flight (yeah, I know, that would be a stupid reason to disable that, so not likely).
I like the fact they flash the username to alert you to the issue. It would alert you to the fact you need to address the issue (right click on the plane and press “install” to get the livery?).
I think we have to remember they aren’t even close to done yet, and we just need to deal with this stuff as they get around to fixing all these details. But I appreciate your investigating this. To me, this would be a pretty important one for them to address.
Speaking of which, Jorg keeps saying every session that the way we are creating liveries “is not the way”. (He said it again in the SDK interview, that liveries are all done with shaders now, whatever that means). But, unless we have access to the model geometry, I don’t see how we can develop decals, which would very likely ease this problem and make downloading liveries much easier. Maybe this is the final plan? Giving us tools for creating decals (which can tend to take up much less space)?
Said tool would not have to write out the model geometry, so it wouldn’t be violating anyone’s copyrights necessarily.
And, yes, since we are using their software, it’s very likely they might word the license such that they have permission to share anything that is displayed in the software, kind of like your phone needs permissions.
Yeah i agree about need to use official (or generic) liveries because they are available on everybody’s machine. The procedure that contains the bug need not be activated and there will be no stutters… as long as Standard edition contains all official liveries and (maybe, hidden) all official aircraft, even your point 7 is no issue…
Good thing is: apparently, Asobo tries to support non-official liveries and non-official aircraft. It is part of the project. Thing to do is either register ALL third party stuff so that it can be put on the server… the most elaborate way is to let client #1 upload things and client #2 download things… and that is a complicated procedure, I actually think users should accept a popup and No-Go in that case. We’re not talking hotfixes… But I think the server has the Marketplace stuff set ready ! They will see my Blériot if I join in, even if they don’t pay for that.
From a technical standpoint, we as users could inspect the data that is being received during the multiplayer bug with something like Wireshark. That would reveal if the traffic is sent in an irregular interval or if the data is somehow different compared to players with regular aircraft and liveries. Because the stutters feel like the sim is not able to handle the received multiplayer data properly.
Edit: What just came to my mind is, that the sim desperately tries to load a livery and there is no error handling in place which keeps this process in an endless loop till the user quits. Might be the root of all evil here.
Indeed, then it would be relatively easy to share the model matching files. But mods from e.g. flightsim.to would be another thing, also because that site is not supervised by Asobo / Microsoft.
