I posted this in another thread, but was advised that this might benefit from its own. C&P ahead:

When I fly at night from Edinburgh airport (EGPH), the forth road and rail bridges are not drawn. They're there during the day, but not at night. Even though they are not visible, I can still collide with them. Any ideas what could cause this, or how I could fix it?

I run with REX, UTX europe (although deactivating this makes no difference) in DX10 mode.

Are they there, just not lite up? or are they just not there at all?
Are you using any aftermarket scenery for this area or just UTX europe? Sounds like it might be a bug with the night lighting for UTX europe, but im not sure. Can you post a pic day & Night shot of thatose bridges?

Rob

Will do just that. But it won't be for another 12 hours minimum (damn job). I don't know if it would be a UTX issue, as it happens even if I turn UTX off. Hopefully the screenshots will help.

This is an awfully specific problem. Googling it yields no usable results at all.

It could be anything from a missing texture to a terrain.cfg feckup...

So here come the screenshots as suggested:

With UTX during the day:

With UTX at night


UTX disabled during the day

UTX disabled at night.


I notice that you can kind of see the position of the road bridge (the grey one on the left) during the night with UTX. you can see something of the foundation of the suspension bridge. I confirmed that it still exists within the FSX world by flying into the invisible bridge.

To test, fly due north from EGPH and you can't really miss them. I can confirm that the real versions are still there. I cross one on my daily commute!

So, it looks like the bridge is still there at night. Its hard to see, but I think I can still see the outline of it at night and since, as you said, you can still fly into it, then it seems like there is no night lighting created for this bridge. (I assume the real one is lit up at night).

Do you have any other after market scenery installed besides UTX Europe for this area? Any nearby airport scenery? The only thing I can think of is that they did not model the bridge at night, (which would be a shame) since most bridges in FSX do show up at night.
I dont think its a scenery layering issue, because then the bridge would not show up at all and not be just a night thing.

I dont have UTX europe, but a friend of mine does. Ill ask him to check this bridge at night and see how it shows up on his system. Perhaps somene on this forum who has it can check too.

Rob

I have no other scenery unless you count REX, which isn't scenery per se. There is no outline of the bridges even up close. It's just the feet of the road bridge that can be seen. The rest of both bridges becomes completely transparent at night. It really is quite bizzarre.

Edit: further to this, other buildings in Edinburgh also go transparent at night. The castle can almost be seen, but I can't find murrayfield or meadowbank stadiums, which I know to be there during the day. I've as yet been unable to confirm this issue with other landmarks.

Further edit: I found something here: http://forum.aerosoft.com/index.php?/topic/22630-no-more-dx9-texture-issues-in-fsx-directx10/

"I read that the problem is not DX10 itself but rather that the Aces team misscoded some buildings and this resulted in them becoming invisible at night with DX10. If it is bad building coding and not DX10 itself, has anyone designed proper replacement buildings that will work in DX10? Maybe it's more complicated, but it seems like something you would see files for on Avsim or somewhere or maybe even a commercial product with replacement buildings/objects for the ones that turn invisible."

Looks like I'll probably just have to live with it, and hope that none of the invisible buildings are too tall

Interesting. I didnt think of asking you if you were using DX10, But i guess that could be a good explanation.

I guess it is someting you will have to live with, unless someone comes out with some good payware scenery for your area that incudes those bridges and other landmark buildings.

I assume youve tried this: http://www.uk2000scenery.com/newsite/My_Homepage_Files/Page15.html
Looks like its just the airport, but sometimes they include nearby landmarks like bridges.

Sorry I couldnt help furthur.

Rob

Thank you. I realised last night there's no help for it unless I start designing textures myself, which isn't likely.

Thanks for the link, though. I might pick that up. It looks pretty good. It even has the newer car park and tower.

Well, you *could* try finding the corresponding textures to the buildings, copying them and renaming them "[original filename]_lm.[texture format]". (Or "_l" instead of "_lm").

If this makes the problem go away, you can still try to turn them into night textures to keep the looks consistent.

OR:

If the buildings never had incorporated night textures per se, you could try to find the building's models, open them in a tool like ModelConverterX, assign them a night texture (a simple black one, maybe?) and save them again.

OR:

Ditch DX10.

Maybe one day I'll learn that stuff. I'm fairly new to FSX, and just learning what I can do, and learning to sim-fly. I need to learn to use that airport editor too, so I can kill the flickering runways/taxiways.

I might ditch DX10 if night-flying is in order, but in general it improves my performance and visuals.

Since FSX is pretty "big", finding pointers on how to do more advanced stuff shouldn't be too hard.

If you've already got flickering textures, you can kill DX10 from the start. Editing every single airport to fix it is an awful lot of work.

Tried that. Overall each DX version has a range of issues. I prefer DX10 overall it seems.

No wonder the community seems to have such a love/hate relationship with FSX.

DX10 is good if it works for you, as long as you remember DX10 was an unfinished FSX "preview" mode, so if you run into weird graphics stuff you have to suspect it and eliminate it as the cause first.