It’s an issue that came up when I wanted to upgrade a small island - Ulithi (TT02) in this instance. It’s one of these typical lush green islands in Micronesia. For reference a photo I took a few years ago:
Now the huge problem is that in Ulithi and many, many other places around the world (mostly remote islands, including some marked as “star airports”) there is not only no grass but there is ZERO possibility to place the same there. Grass simply doesn’t load:
Initially I thought that everything that falls outside a defined EcoRegion described in the SDK (https://ecoregions.appspot.com/) cannot load grass. But even on the small islands south of Ulithi that are within an EcoRegion, there’s growing nothing.
In addition the tile debugger doesn’t show much of a difference between areas than can and that cannot grow grass.
The problem is somewhat similar to what has been described here, however it doesn’t seem to be only roads that exclude grass placement but whole areas of the globe, which is becoming a big issue.
So the big question is: What controls grass placement and how can we “convince” MSFS2024 to load grass in these regions?
For what it’s worth: Same problem applies to geomes/rock polygons, just that the areas where those can be placed are a bit more limited even.
I couldn’t even see those when placed at Yap Island (that’s where grass works, see above), but everywhere else in the mainland I tried (particularly South Korea all the way to the coast and beyond that for a few hundred meters) works fine.
@Boris Do you know about this? It would certainly help a lot to know what actually lets grass and geomes “grow” in some regions/areas, but not in others.
We were able to reproduce the issue and have logged it.
This will require some work to fix, so unfortunately, it won’t be resolved for SU2, but rather in a later update (no ETA for now).
Also, please be aware that next time, you can edit your post using the Edit button.
This helps us keep everything organized and (much) easier to track and investigate the issues.
Thank you.
Thank you Boris!
Would it be possible to get some insight on which masks/layers control the yes/no display of grass? I did some research yesterday using the tile debugger and there seem to be a few layers that could play a role here.
For now, the only thing I can tell you is that in this specific case, at first sight, there is a high vegetation surface type on the island.
However, since we lack base data (ecoregion), the fallback is used and it’s actually configured to only spawn grass on low vegetation areas.
Waiting for sometime after SU2 is absolutely not an option so I’m trying to find a local fix for this.
What I have gathered so far:
There’s a “SURFACE TYPE ML” called “ML_LOW_VEGETATION”, which is the only one that seems to control where grass is displayed, managed by VEC*.CGL like here for PTPN:
Having ML_LOW_VEGETATION in a new location however still doesn’t bring procedural grass, an ecoregion might still be needed.
Ecoregions unfortunately are not revealed by the tile debugger where they are stored, so they cannot be investigated further:
How can be update an ecoregion or write a file for it? It seems that in MSFS2024 they are stored as raster files while in MSFS2020 they were vector based and documented in the SDK.
@Boris We did some further research on what controls grass and geome display. While high and low vegetation are easy (can be defined in polygons), the ecoregions you mentioned seem to play a role but they don’t play a role alone.
What else other than the ecoregions does control where grass and geomes are being displayed and where not? Some hint would be highly appreciated, thank you!
I can’t provide any further details at the moment.
The fix requires changes directly in the code, so unfortunately it’s not something you can resolve on your end.
I’ll keep you updated as soon as I have more information to share.
I think it would be better to report this kind of issue directly on the forums, as it is not related to Devmode or the SDK, but rather an in-game issue.
