[BUG] Removal of Trees question - extremely hard to reproduce problem

Questions & Community Discussions Airports & Sceneries
1

Hi guys! First of all, i am NOT a developer, so please have mercy on me, if
the following may seem a bit awkward-ish presented. I am just a sim user on
pc, trying to find some possible solutions, to forward them to the developer
of an addon and to maybe help him to solve a strange “phenomenon” i have. It´s
all about my home airport LOAV, located in the eastern part of Austria. I´m
sometimes getting trees placed in the middle of the runway and also nearby.
The problem is, this happens “sometimes” to me, but seems not to happen to
other people using the same scenery. As i tested a lot, i also had these trees
placed at the same locations in the vanilla default scenery for LOAV. So i
started to think, it´s not a problem with the scenery itself but with this
region in general. When i deactivate photogrametry and activate it again,
these mis-placed trees are gone. What makes it even harder to re-create this
problem is, that i have a very special configuration, i am flying with. I use
a streaming service named “Shadow”, they have serverfarms in Germany near
Frankfurt, in France near Paris and in the Netherlands near Amsterdam. I am
hosted in the Frankfurt region. I am connected from my home location in
Austria to the serverfarm in Germany. I think, it is a problem on the server-
side, that these trees are being streamed to my rig in some misplaced
coordinates or so. Whenever this problem occurs, those trees seem to be the
very same on the very same location. So something out there in the world seems
to believe, those trees MUST be placed there… which is wrong. But others,
who are using the sim from completely different locations are getting
different routes or server-hops, when they are connected, not getting those
mis-placed trees it seems. So it´s hard to search for a fix for people, who
actually can´t see the problem on their monitors. For an better reference,
some screenshots from different camera positions: https://ibb.co/G0vd8GR
https://ibb.co/crfX3tR https://ibb.co/pR5TcG5

1920×1080 297 KB

1920×925 268 KB

1920×970 295 KB
I have rolling cache and manual
cache deactivated. When these trees appear, i found out that deactivating
photogrametry and activating it again seems to remove those trees, as long as
the sim keeps running. When i shut down the sim, reboot my rig, start the sim
again, it´s very much possible, i got the trees again. Is there anything, that
can be done, to suppress those trees “hard coded”, no matter what the servers
wanna stream to this position? It´s no matter, if some trees are misplaced in
the scenery… but exactly there on and nearby the runway is a really terrible
thing to have. Reporting via a support ticket does not seem promising to me,
as this special phenomenon is probably very hard to recreate. So testing, if
it´s fixed, maybe needs to be done via my rig… Any hints or ideas would be
extremely welcome. I´d collect them all and forward them to the developer, who
understands things much better than me. I´m just trying to support him to
maybe solve this issue. Thanks for listening and hoping for a successful bug-
hunt. :wink: Edit: to be sure, i´m NOT in the SU10 beta, i´m just in the released
version ,also have done a complete uninstall and fresh install of the sim. I
have also tested without any other addons except my LOAV addon. Those trees
are coming back over and over again. It maybe needs some “Digital Napalm” to
teach those trees a lesson? :wink:

2

Here you go, digital napalm applied. LOAV Tree
Fix
The trees are there if you go into scenery editing mode so I’ve just put some
polygons around the trees to remove most of them. Drop the folder into your
community folder and you should be fine, The link is hosted on my own
googledrive. Just shout if you want anything else tweaked The trees problem is
very very common in MSFS so I wouldn’t overthink it too much, it’s just the
way it is lol Kev

3

Hey Kev, first of all: thanks a lot for your help! These evil trees… they
are at the edge to drive me totally crazy soon… I use AddonLinker to manage
my sim. I activated your Digital Napalm and did a first test flight. The trees
where still there, as if they where laughing at me. I reset my grafics
settings for the sim, deleted my rolling cache to be sure - it was deactivated
anyway - i deleted anything from my
\Appdata\Local\Packages\Microsoftblablabla\LocalCache folder and renamed the
folder of your Addon to start with “zzzzz_”. (is renaming it a good idea?) I
rebooted my rig and did a couple of test flights from LOAV. So far, all seems
to be nice and chilled. 'I Love the Smell of Napalm in the Morning", if you
know what i mean… :wink: I don´t wanna start my celebration too soon, as i had
this some time before already, when it looked like as if the “Voodoo” had been
sorted out, but then came back again. I´ll keep this updated here, to report
back, how things are going for me and my “tree-buddies”. Thanks a lot for
letting me know, that there definitely ARE trees on the runway of LOAV. I
really had thought, that it would be some insane special thing, that only
happens on my rig. So if you can see them too, i´ll call back my psychiatrist
to let him know, my upcoming sessions with him are all canceled . :slight_smile: Just to
undertstand, what you have created in the Napalm Addon, could you please
explain a bit, what it was? I assume, it was something about an exclusion? Was
it a polygon or a rectangle? What exact exclusion did you use? Anything else
to note about it? Not that i would understand too much about it yet, but i´d
like to inform the dev of the mentioned scenery, how you managed to solve this
issue, if the trees are fixed and stay disabled. If it´s not too much to ask,
could you please also create something alike for the runways of LOXZ? I was
allowed to beta test a very nice addon from the same dev and had a small
amount of vegetation at the beginning of the runway once. So i thought, my rig
would be completely mad, but i am pretty sure, it´s the same issue than with
LOAV. I seem to be “blessed” to still get vegetation in front of my nose at
very creative places. The exclusion polygons, built into the LOAV addon
already with highest priority (as i was told), did not seem to fix it for me
properly. Maybe it works better with your solution. I will have to reboot and
launch the sim pretty often to see, what happens and if it stays nice and
tree-less. Thanks again for your help, i have the hope to get this “Voodoo”
banned finally. … to be continued, as soon as i have more news …

4

I didn’t realise you were using a scenery mod for the airport so yes making my
mod load last by renaming the folder made it load on top of anything else. I
just added polygons with vegetation set to zero scale and density over the
tree covered areas, a very simple fix. I’m away in the motorhome until early
next week but I’ll put a mod together for the other airport as well. Kev

5

Hey, no worries, sitting in front of a motorhome is pretty sure much more fun
than sitting in front of a Monitor, busting evil trees… :wink: I wanted to
report back about the actual status. It might be wishful thinking, but it
seems to me, your addon suppresses those trees a bit more effective than the -
probably same - exclusion pologons and rectangles, that have been integrated
in the scenery. But it still happens, that the trees come back, laughing in my
face with their evil, dirty smile… The mentioned scenery addon for LOAV
(sorry, if i did not mention this good enough) seems to have it´s runway built
by many, many different texture patches, that are overlapping with
transparencies, to finally create the needed “worn” look, the real world
runway has. Somehow it seems to me, my rig occasionally isn´t able to arrange
all those layers for the runway in the proper arrangement, resulting in some
geometric effects and edges. I also think, therefore those exclusion polygons
may get interpreted in some lower layer, resulting in vegetation being
displayed. Again, i´m not a dev, i have more of a photoshop and image editing
background, where we also would build up larger structures by lots of
“blended” elements. So it´s all just some theory, but the endresult looks like
that to me. Is this a standard, that runways are built in addons with many
different elements? I think there are some different runway textures available
in the dev tools. Is there anything, that could be done by a scenery
developer, to “simplify” a runway of such a construction, maybe into a single
2-dimensional image instead of layers over layers over layers… ? Maybe this
could help my rig to have an easier time with this scenery?

6

knock knock Are you still on the road? I hope, you are ok?

7

re the 1st question do the trees reappear with my mod loaded on LOAV? Have to
tried to disable the main scenery mod for LOAV to see if the trees reappear
with only my mod installed? re runway textures. The SDK has a number of runway
and taxiway textures but they are pretty basic , with a few exceptions, so
some developers create their own textures including me. They can contain
multiple layers with blend, opacity and colour adjustments to get the right
visual effect. You will see the default runway if you disable your main LOAV
scenery. Kev

8

Hi again, sorry for my late response. Too many things to test in too little
time… Ok, i think your idea got us a good step further. I did a test with
the sim´s default LOAV, without the payware addon. It´s got those evil trees!
So it´s not a problem of the payware scenery, it seems to me, but the sim in
general. I had your “Digital Napalm” addon also active, but the trees are all
over the place for me. https://ibb.co/rHgtx8q You can see by the insane,
huge airport tower at the left top of the image, that this is the default
airport. When i do the “deactivate photogrammetry, activate it, only then
“save” the changes” in my ingame prefs, the scenery gets “cleaned up” and the
vegetation get´s “reduced” to what´s the desired placement.
https://ibb.co/QkRRhp9 If you open those two screenshots and switch from one
browser window to the other one permanently, you can see very well, how much
the vegetation changes between the two screenshots. So, my current conclusion
seems to me, that it´s a problem with the vegetation placement of the sim in
general. Under some - so far not definitely narrowed in - circumstances, this
misplaced vegetation appears and can not be suppressed by those exclusion
polygons. __ By deactivating photogrammetry, activating it again and then
saving the preferences the sim manages to suppress unwanted vegetation
correctly again. In an different kind of interpretation it seems to me: the
trees are basically present. The sim then uses “something” to remove unwanted
vegetation in a second step, to get airports free of vegetation. THIS
procedure may be the same as manually set “exclusion polygons” … but under
certain circumstances they simply don´t work. Not for the vanilla scenery (=
“Default LOAV”), also not for additional Addons (= “your digital napalm addon”
or the “Payware LOAV addon”). Deactivating photogrametry and activating it
again “repairs” the function of those “exclusion” functions again and
therefore manages to suppress unwanted vegetation correctly. Reminder: when
having photogrammetry deactivated, those misplaced trees never appear to me.
So it might be some rare conflicting situation between active photogrametry
and the sim feature(s) to deactivate/suppress unwanted vegetation. __