BiggerBoat

Re: the black screen issue.... I am using the ArmA II Launcher program. On a whim, I changed my "Default World" Option from "None" to Chernarus. I had this option checked as none previously because it allowed the game to load up faster. Since making that change, I have started three different LOST missions on two different maps and every one of them loaded up properly. No black screen. (Shrug). Not definitive yet, and changing that option might be coincidental, but it's another data point. As an aside, thanks for this mission and for Apocalypse. I love open world single player missions. Your hard work is much appreciated. Hopefully this issue will stay sorted for me.

Was just jumping into the forum to research this issue. Just downloaded LOST today and having the same problem. I played for a bit (and had lots of fun) just thinking that my office was overly bright and that it was nighttime in the game. The goggles worked fine, but I soon realized that it was pitch black without them no matter the time of day (tried advancing by several hours as well) Tried some other game mods and scenarios without issue. Made sure that LOST was the only active mod (aside from some maps). I reloaded and restarted several times, and was only able to load a LOST map a couple of times without the black screen.

I have posted some screenshots that I think represent what TakeOn can offer when "it all comes together" over here on AVSIM. I'm still trying to find a happy medium with settings. Free flight performance is good, but the missions have moments of jittery frame rate that make it hard to maneuver (as if it wasn't enough of a challenge already!). I wish I could go in and run some color filters on the terrain to try to reduce that yellow-green tint. I've harped on it about 10 times in this thread, but it just hurts my eyeballs (especially with the distance terrain).

Also don't forget post-processing. Anything beyond low, I believe, adds depth of field effects which makes the background blurry. It can be a nice effect, but I usually prefer sharper textures.

Agree with memory "Default". Any other setting plays havoc with texture blurriness on my system.

I have continued to fiddle with settings, and things are getting a bit better. I have some issues/suggestions: * There is a green tint to the terrain textures. Even building shadows (I'm talking shadows hard stamped into the photo textures) are green. Were the satellite textures artificially recolored or run through some sort of filter? All-in-all, the landscape colors just feel a bit off and cartoonish. It's pretty easy to see the difference when comparing google earth to a piece of the map. Everything has a yellowish-green tinge in the TakeOn map. * Turning down object distance really helps frame rates, but the pop-in is very noticeable. Is there any possibility of an alpha fade, perhaps combined with a bit of haze in the distance? * There are a few 3d freeway interchanges, and these really help. I'd love to see a bit of this detail through downtown Seattle. * The airports are a bit of a mess. I would have imagined that at least a few of the airports would have got artificial runways, taxiways, etc. overlaid on top of the photos in order to make them look less like a bad photo. Looking across the water at the downtown skyline is sublime. I wish things looked as good from a few thousand feet, but I think there is hope here.

PIP makes a big difference in performance (I assume this is the mirrors)? Turning it off adds about 10 fps for me. This keeps me at 30+ fps when setting all of the dials pretty high. Making some other adjustments easily gets me to 50-60 fps. The textures do get a bit sharper as you make sure your system has some headroom. You can start to see a bit of the detail in roads and railways. However, the quality of the textures still tops out pretty low for me, no matter what I do with settings. Seattle-Tacoma airport looks like it's been ravaged in some sort of war. And since all of us are going to be buzzing between buildings in downtown seattle, I'm not sure why we're not seeing a bit of 3d detail to the freeway interchanges (maybe coming in the final release?) More worrisome is that, even at 60+ fps on a pretty robust system, I am getting constant shifting of textures from kinda' blurry to very blurry and back again. If any of you are familiar with FSX and the constant battles to avoid "the blurries", this is that situation compounded 100x. It's pretty distracting. I'd love for this to be unique to my system. If anyone is seeing something dramatically different, please post screenshots.

YoYo - Your pictures show a bunch of rural areas, which don't look too bad because of the relative lack of detail. Fields and rivers tend to look nice at low resolution and reveal some of the advantages of satellite terrain. However, the urban areas just don't hold up. THere's too much of a contrast between the detail of the buildings and the muddiness of the terrain. It was actually a couple of your videos which made me first go "uh, oh." Here's a couple of screenshots. Notice the general gray blob that represents the I-5 corridor through downtown Seattle. If you go a bit south, have a look at the Sea-Tac airport as well. Also note the sort of sandy green underlying color of the terrain. This seems really off to me. This area is defined by deep browns, deep greens, blues, and (through the I-5 corridor) the gray of concrete. None of the colors in the sim seem right. Trying not to be a downer. I love Bohemia games. But this is just a deal breaker for me. Other people will probably think it's fine. I'm hoping what I am seeing is system-specific and/or indicative of the beta.

The rurual textures don't look quite as bad, because there's less detail involved. It's the urban textures that just look terrible to me. Case in point: Take a look specifically at the last two images. Seattle-Tacoma airport is the center of Puget Sound aviation, but it's just a blob here. The last image shows the I-5 corridor through the center of downtown Seattle, which is just a gray blob. Note: these images are all a bit dark. I guess that's a factor of the cloudy skies, though I think it's a bit overdone. Are you guys seeing better quality than this? Sea-Tac would be easy to compare, since the runways and markings can be used as a reference. I've played with the detail settings quite a bit, but can't find anything that looks reasonable. The downtown buildings look wonderful, and most of the other buildings look good (though I'd argue the house colors and roof colors are wrong for the area) but the detail of the 3d objects is in stark contrast to the lack of detail in the underlying terrain.

Yeah, it would appear to be a big photo texture laid on top of the terrain, and then overlaid with 3d buildings and a few other 3d elements. However, I've seen high resolution photo textures work just fine in FSX and other sims. There are plenty of scenery products for FSX which cover huge areas with very high resolution photo textures (take a look at the Horizon stuff for England/Scotland/Ireland for example). They take up lots of hard drive space, of course, but performance and quality is great. If high resolution satellite scenery wasn't an option, then I'd argue that TOH shouldn't be using them .. perhaps something more like repeated textures (as in FSX default), with some photo scenery for specific areas (i.e. downtown, key mission areas). I'm generally hoping I'm having some system-specific issues here, and I don't want to completely discourage people until all of the facts are in. I understand that everyone may have different levels of tolerance for this as well. For me, a low-level helicopter sim focused on a specific geographic area absolutely must have crisp, immersive scenery. I'll post a couple of screenshots later today.

I gave the preorder beta a try this morning. I hate to focus on the graphics, but for a sim that is focused on low-level flight, I am pretty disappointed. Simply put, the terrain is a mess. Ground detail is very low resolution, even with all settings cranked to their max. Roads have absolutely no detail. Buildings pop in the distance rather than using some sort of alpha fade. You get bubbles of blurry terrain that sharpen very obviously as you fly (but only sharpen a bit, unfortunately). The colors seem all wrong for the area (I live here, and know what it looks like from the air). It sort of looks like black-and-white satellite imagery that has been recolored (like what I remember from Flight Unlimited 3 from 1999). The scale of the houses and trees seems off. Frame rates with everything cranked up (i7 2600k overclocked to 4.5 with two GTX570 in SLI) are OK but not great .. around 20 in demanding situations. 30 or so for most flying. Downtown Seattle buildings look great. The sky is beautiful. Water is great. Lighting is nice. The detail and animations of the helicopters themselves are great. But the muddy, blurry, oddly colored terrain just ruins it all. I can only compare to FSX, which came out more than 5 years ago and wasn't exactly cutting edge at the time. The terrain textures have much more detail. With addons such as Orbx/FTX, the gap is widened even further. I love the ARMA games, and I didn't expect the same level of detail at ground level, but I sure didn't expect anything this bad. I really want a solid flight sim with a fun, underlying game. But, I just can't find any immersion in the actual flight when looking at this scenery. I'll leave open the possibility that this is a Beta issue or something specific to my machine. I'll certainly revisit things with the full release, but at this point I'm deeply regretting the purchase and disappointed that this may not be the sim for me.