question

It was promised that for the V update early access there will be a separate forum:

https://devsupport.flightsimulator.com/questions/1040/sim-update-v5-should-we-report-bugs.html

So far we did not receive any other news.

Officially the bugs encountered should be sent to the email address where you got the access.

I agree projected meshes are a problem in the editor too. They are loaded but after few rounds at the airport they disappear. The airport group in the editor cannot be expanded, it collapse itself immediately or even causes a CTD.

I have checked a new build and not only the projected meshes have this greenish tint. Even simobjects and normal static scenery objects.

Thanks, I've pulled the texture (Old) and rotated it and lined it up against Performance Plus (New) .. when you get really close in the cockpit the effect is very bad. But this shows it in a a high level view in 1 section. Yes the texture is 16bit and not 8bit. We have tested that and it makes no difference.

Finally had some time to get to the bottom of this.

It seems the extra compression introduced in the colour palette for 1.18.20 that is being used to render is now introducing artefacts to projected mesh.

It just so happened that our scenery was using some of these colours. The problem we all now have unfortunately is anything in the cyan to greyscale now have swapped 'near or close enough' colours being used.


In my examples here I have run several mixed colours and 3 true RGB colours in gradient to grey.

In the 1.17.30 example, you can see far less colour compression introduced.

In the 1.18.12 example, you can see quite a severe colour banding starting as the compression algorithm tries to match nears colours and swaps it with what it thinks is right. In our case a true low cyan grey for a lime green colour.

And finally to make sure this isn't being introduced in the SDK PNG -> DDS conversion I manually saved a higher resolution DDS file and pasted it back over the top of the package textures and the severe colour banding still exists. In short, the new changes introduced into the Asobo render engine are introducing severe colour artefacts.

1.17.30

1.18.12 - Introduced render engine compression artefact colour banding for projected mesh - Asobo SDK DDS

1.18.12 - Introduced render engine compression artefact colour banding for projected mesh - Nvidia PS DDS replaced file. Colour banding still exists so isn't an issue with the PNG to DDS conversion process.

You can spot other problems in the RGB range and the other mixed colour ranges, black to grey seems to have suffered the least.

In short, I have tried all sorts of things to stop our projected mesh from blending into these colour ranges but it actually causes more problems than fixes.
It would be a lot better if this bug can be looked at and fixed on the render engine side of things.
I did notice some default textures are also suffering now.

PS excuse the file version name 1.18.20 .. I meant 1.18.12.

Hi, is there any update to the restoration of the colour pallet to pre-update 5 standards (at least for PC) ? It's causing a lot of issues in the sim such as clouds, textures, sky colour banding, the golden hour is now a mess and of course, us devs are now having to flatten texture colours down (no gradients) to stop artefacts from appearing in our scenery.

Hi HybridNZ,

Thanks for your feedbacks. It help us improve our ground texture compression. To fix the issue we compress with more precision color close to grey.

Regards,

Xavier

Hello @HybridNZ
Some update on this. A fix is ready on our side and will available with upcoming updates.
As Darwikey said, we have more precision on grey colors when compressing.

That said, on your scenery, the greenish color is more diffuse and less contrasted but not totally eliminated.
Sampling your original PNG texture, it's seems there's a slight shift towards green and blue (something like 30;40;40) and successive compressions still tend to reinforce that gap so in that case, editing the source texture to fix that shift is the only solution I can think of.

Here's the object rendered as a scenery object:
and here it is as a projected mesh:

The projected mesh seems to me pretty faithful to the scenery object.
The green in the original texture is just a bit reinforced / more contrasted.

Regards,
Sylvain

Thanks Sylvain,


Good to see some colour scope has been added back in. In both the color bit depth (back to 16bit) and the grey color tones now have more depth.

It's ok, we have quite some time ago flattened the color in our scenery greyscale for our past and future scenery to get around however it will be good to be able to introduce rust stains and other colored artifacts that sit in the gray to the colored zone of the color gamet.

The examples you have posted from our PMs look like a massive improvement. Thanks for taking the feedback on board.

Cheers
Josh / NZA Simulations