The aircraft I had the wrong texture issue with is the Boulton Paul Defiant available here, third aircraft down: http://www.mrjmaint.com/RegsHanger/Regs%20hanger%20main/CFS3%20Aircaft/Defiant/Defiant%20main.htm

It has no problems in external view, but in the gunner's seat all of the external texture is wrong except for the rear turret fairing. In the pilot's seat, looking back, the horizontal stabilizer has the wrong texture, but the rest of the plane is fine. The texture appears to be one of the interior cockpit textures. The plane had no damage at the time of testing. Also, when I deleted the aircraft's .mos file, everything worked correctly again, though this is not an ideal solution as it disables the bullet holes when you are damaged. Sorry, no screenshot yet as it isn't on this machine.

I was able to adjust the terrain brightness back to normal by setting the multiplier to 0.0. I'll probably play with it more later to tune it for the add-on scenery we have. Auto-gen trees and buildings were still brighter, but I think they look good as is.

I also adjusted the reflective values you mentioned. It seems to adjust reflection only on aircraft that use an *_s.dds, which is exactly what I hoped.

Bump mapping and disable mod both work as advertised here.

Also, I got it to crash for the first time. Extended firing guns into the water (so that there are lots of splashes from the bullets hitting it) consistently caused the game to crash. Firing into the ground or other objects under the same conditions did not produce a problem, only when firing into water. If I fired into the water in shorter bursts, so that there weren't as many splashes at any one time, everything behaved normally. The March 25th version did not produce this problem.

As an aside, this thread has nearly 100,000 views!

I love these dialogues between those who know! It's like a graphcis 101 course for me! Just love understanding how things work!

I know, I know, I'm anal!

Ankor

Just a report back..both new versions crashed my missions after 10 seconds or so.

Had not had any problems previously with earlier versions.

Flew an entire mission, no problem for me and rather better framerates, specially in accelerated time while climbing. I had 45 fps at 4x when I had more around 30 before.

Regarding the haze, I think I found where WM modified the files to add haze to the horizon. In the weather folder for the weather conditions, most files contain a precipType which is either "LightRain" or "HeavyRain." I don't know where those parameters are defined, but by changing them or deleting them here's what I got.

The first is Clear Sky in quickbattles with "HeavyRain," then "LightRain", then none:



So it looks like the top of the horizon is pretty much where it needs to be, and thus isn't too high. Rather it looks like the haze, from the HeavyRain especially, just makes it look like a tall wall since it's brings the low end of the horizon much closer. It's still there a on low/no settings, but is only discernible from that solid line against the sky, so perhaps that isn't the issue for shadows as I had wondered in my first post. I'm mostly clueless about all this anyway.

As an aside, though, I really like it with less haze, so will be modding my files to reduce it except in extreme weather, as the HeavyRain setting seems to be used quite a bit for various weather conditions. Of course, planes may be harder to see when seen against the ground without the hazy silhouette, but the realists may like that. I just like being able to see the ground further.

Ankor, I am using your updated DX mod and don´t see any drops in framerates any more when looking into the cockpit, they stay steady at 60! Well done, Sir, thank you very much!

The improved ground shadows look very promising indeed, would be great, if you could implement them in a future version!!!

By the way, what would you think, would it be technically possible with this graphics engine to enable shadows caused by the clouds? (Theoretically, one day, of course...)

Really much appreciate your work, WOFF is as beautiful and as fast as never before at this time, love it how the own shadows run over the airframe when cranking your crate around the sky, it´s increasing the immersion to another level, indeed!

Flew a whole mission yesterday with the June 18th version, no problem, saw the white foam on the waves while over Dunkerque. High FPS all the time even when looking down in cockpit.
Only thing I saw was some flickering of shadows on my flight leader's plane ahead and left of me, but nothing bad. Was only at a certain distance and stopped as soon as I came closer.
System specs under. I use ENB on top of the DX9 mod.

AnKor, I flew a mission with your latest version, and it mostly worked fine!
I had fraps around 60 all the time, even when looking into the cockpit.
Only when looking back, my tail fin shadow on the taiplane came on a bit late.
Also had some flickering shadow on a comrade's plane at mid-distance.
But all stable!

Fantastic version, and I too have 60+ FPS on interior and exterior views. I to have noticed a flickering shadow on Flight mates planes at mid distance.

Edit:
When I turned on the interior cockpit shadows on for the 20140325 version, these same flickering shadows exist, so no change from the last stable version when it comes to the flickering shadows.

Another full mission today with last version 18.06, no problem to report.

Here are my full config settings and my findings from playing with a couple of them.


When I initially reported the performance I was getting, the red and blue circled options were selected below. Switching them to the settings shown brought framerates inside the cockpit when looking down (looking straight ahead or up has never been much of an issue) all the way up to the high 50s. However, I did notice that it dropped down to around 30 if there were lots of shadows being drawn across the where I was looking. Highest framerates were experienced when the cockpit was in full shadow. I wonder if others have noticed similar changes? I later reset the blue circled option back to sharpen up my textures with no loss of performance. This is definitely a major improvement!

A few more findings, in no particular order.

I forgot to mention earlier, I found a fix related to the black holes issue for the instances where a texture with transparent parts had the opaque part blacked out while the transparent part remained transparent. The textures in question were all DXT5. Looking into the m3d with a hex editor I found that in each case the part of the model the texture was applied to had an untextured color of black (hex 00 00 00 FF). Changing the color to white (FF FF FF FF) allowed the texture to display correctly. I plan on experimenting in WOFF and CFS3 to see if I can find a similar fix for other black hole issues as remodeling those parts would be very time consuming for the devs in WOFF, and in most cases impossible in CFS3 as the source files no longer exist.

I have also noticed that the black holes only appear on textures inside the cockpit. I have a few DXT1 external aircraft textures in CFS3, and none of them have this issue.

Here is the pic of my issue with the Defiant's texture you requested. It appears to be a fairly common issue on several aircraft. It only happens when in cockpit view, and in some cases it depends on what angle you are looking at a given part as to whether or not the correct or incorrect texture is displayed, and they will switch back and forth as you pan around.


I also saw that the shoreline texture remains brighter than everything else at night, such that bodies of water seem to have a glowing outline.

Final thing, I found this odd bug in both WOFF and CFS3.


I encountered it in external and cockpit views in WOFF, and only external in CFS3. The weird panels were both vertical and horizontal and remained at right angles to each other, though in CFS3 they were flat black. In both cases the sun was at a very low angle. It seems to be trackIR related as when I put my hat away, the panels reduced in width until they were really just lines, and when I turned trackIR completely off it went away completely. I only tried this in CFS3 as I encountered it first in WOFF and hadn't thought of it yet. I have not been able to reproduce this problem and have only encountered it once in each sim after several hours of testing.

Flying with the latest version of AnKor's mod again today, I had the impression,
that my performance was much improved. TrackIR view had never been so smooth
and free of micro-stutters for me before. At least that's what it seemed like.
I'll report again.

Oops, just realized I had forgotten to update my WOFF install with the new version. So the WOFF side of that bug is from the march version, still quite similar to the cfs3 bug with the current version though. Will report if I encounter it again in WOFF.

Gecko,

You double posted the Z Bias. What are your Texture Limits?

Oops again! Here they are:

First mission today in the Spad challenge, with version 18.06. All went fine, no bug to report, 60 fps all along at speed x1.

While playing around with the precip types I discovered that horizon fog and the death star shadow are related. When preciptype NoRain in the given weather.xml is used the death star shadow is invisible, but if LightRain or especially HeavyRain or Snow is used then it is clearly visible.

I was working around with some Settings in the ConfigOverrides.XML, because since weeks I was trying to get rid off all those Microstutters I was playing with.
So I disabled the VERTEX and INDEX BUFFERS. And guess what, the Game runs smooth and fine even with all Sliders on 5 ! NO MORE STUTTERS.

As a bad result, however, I can not use Ankor's fantastic Shadow-Mod any longer... When I use this Mod, combined with the disabled VERTEX and INDEX BUFFERS, I get these strange Ground Textures:





When I disable the Mod (by pressing the 0-Key), the Game looks normal and fine:




Well, I can live with that, but I really don't know what these Vertex and Index Buffers are doing, and why the Game runs fine when I disable them.