Blurred Textures

We keep getting emails about "blurred" textures on The Clipper.

Therefore I want to clarify on the occurance.

Please note, this is NOT a Clipper problem! It is a FS problem, which comes up on certain graphic cards and aircraft under certain circumstances and is NOT generally reproducable. Mostly it is found an cheaper graphic cards (such as MX types or non NVidia ones. Please note: the GeForce 4 MX is NOT a real GeForce 4! From the technical side it is more a GeForce 2! The name lures you into believing you run a No 4. We have users running FS2k2 on a 4 MB card! Please do yourself a favour and buy a new one!)

We have intensely tested and have no clear result to what exactly causes this. I have this effect on my GeForce 4 4400 from time to time. It can be fixed in most cases by zooming full in and out again. But sometimes even this does not help. When I then restart my PC and FS2k2 it is gone. This leads me to believe that some kind of texture memory problem causes it. Maybe the texture memory does keep unused textures or whatever. We keep testing. If you know something, please comment!


"Why don't the others have it?"

Oh yes, they have! Even default MS aircraft! But of course these aircraft do use less textures of smaller size and texture memory of the graphics card is not that used. Therefore the effect comes up not that often.

And there are some third party aircraft which do use textures without MipMaps. They don't have the effect, they can't have it! The idea with MipMaps is, to always draw the texture with the best fitting resolution in FS. MipMap textures do carry the same texture in 9 different resolutions (and thus sizes). At The Clipper the largest texture has 1 megabyte the smallest 90 bytes (!). All are packed into one file. Depending on your viewpoint FS should draw the one which has the best visual appearance. Too high resolution means flickering if the object (B314) is too far away (moire effect). On the other hand too low resolution means blurred textures if the object is too near. This is the case on the described occurance. It might be a problem when calculating the viewpoint (sometimes my textures are HR and then jump into LR; so obviously FS CAN draw it, but does not) or it may be a problem with texture memory. FS has the HR texture but gets a terrain texture, which does not fit in the memory. So FS might compromise and draw LR on the aircraft to be able to draw the terain texture. Or a combination of both or something completey different. In any case, it is beyond our control.

However, we have compiled a new set of textures, which DO NOT HAVE MIP MAPS. So they are ALL HIGH RESOLUTION. You won't see the blurr problem on them. Please use them only, if you really suffer from that problem. It is an 11 MB download. Registered users will get an email shortly with the download link.