Bug after modifiying an scenery

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danielvelez
Posts: 103
Joined: Thu Mar 09, 2006 2:11 pm
Location: Colombia

Bug after modifiying an scenery

Post by danielvelez » Sat May 01, 2021 11:57 pm

Hello there.

I have been playing around with a Condor 2 scenery for Colombia since Condor 2 was out. The scenery is not public as it uses google photograpy. Nevertheless I fly with another two local pilots on this scenery.

A few weeks ago one of my local friends (also a condor scenery builder since Condor 1) decided he needed to "flatten" some noise that the 30m grid shows, so he edited the scenery on his computer,

Then he shared the 7 files from the main folder to us,
.apt, .bmp, .cup, .fha, .ini .obj .tdm .tha .trn

So we went for a race a few days back. I was serving the race. After 100 km into the task, my joystick lost pitch control, so the other friend that had the modified files. Nevertheless the one that edited the landscape was able to continue flying with no issues.

Then we went for some individual testing. Somehow If we think on the scenery as a 4 big cuadrants, we only can fly in the first cuadrant (top left), as the other 3 we did not have pitch control on our planes. Only aileron, ruder and maybe trim. This does not happens to the one that edited the scenery.

What are we missing out here?

He is making a full re-install zip of the whole folder to see if that fixes our issue.

Is that like a "non cheating" code embedded that is considering some differences between our sceneries and make it unflyiable for two out of three of us?

We have (of course) valid licenses. So it is not a "shared" key that makes your airplane fail.

It happens even when flying free flight without a server running. I can´t use 3/4 of the scenery. It does not happens with any other scenery, as we can join or fly on the other sceneries.

This is why I´m thinking is something missing on the scenery edition / exporting.

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wickid
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Joined: Mon Dec 04, 2006 7:32 pm
Location: Venlo, NL
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Re: Bug after modifiying an scenery

Post by wickid » Sun May 02, 2021 12:16 am

It is the cheat protection. If you modify the terrain to get better lift or a flatter final glide you'll have an advantage. Therefor a cheatprotection was added that detects if there is a difference between the server terrain and your terrain. I'm guessing your friend who made the changes was hosting so he had all the correct files.

He should re-export the terrain hash files (.THA), and make sure you also have the whole content of the heightmaps folder (all .tr3 files). I'm guessing you have the new .THA file, which contains the hashes. But you didn't get the updated .tr3 files. That mismatch causes the behaviour you are experiencing.
PH-1504, KOE

danielvelez
Posts: 103
Joined: Thu Mar 09, 2006 2:11 pm
Location: Colombia

Re: Bug after modifiying an scenery

Post by danielvelez » Sun May 02, 2021 12:49 am

Wickid, thanks for the answer.

We know about the "cheat" protection. And we where trying to have the same scenery than the modified one, so the "modified" scenery files where (i think) shared and we should have all the same version of the scenery (we changed the ini for the newer terrain version) and I think that we got all the files.

Nevertheless, the "strange" pitch error occurs even when flying alone, no server involved, not other pilots involved. I don´t have pitch authority on 3/4 of the whole scenery. Only on the upper left corner of the scenery.

I was the one hosting the race (on my local condor server) So if the cheating protection was to "kick in", it should have detected my friend´s modification. But it seems that we have the same files as we could fly with no issues. I insist: we can have a pretty good triangle race on the first quarter of the scenery. We raced pretty nice until we went 100k south of takeoff... then pitch turns off.

So we went for a test flight, alone, outside server... Crossing an imaginary line to the south inmediatelly causes the sailplane to dive, and you can only recover with autopilot.

So i turned on autopilot and turned around with rudder, so I was facing north once more... to see if getting back to the "good" quadrant would give me back the pitch control... no luck there. I just needed to "restart" the flight in order to regain pitch with the joystick.

Again, we are making a big zip installation and are going to try to reinstall to see if it fixes the missbehave, but it´s just too strange and we are wondering what is missing or why is condor behaving like this and how to avoid it / fix it would be nice to know, specially for us, scenery designers, so we can short it out fast.

danielvelez
Posts: 103
Joined: Thu Mar 09, 2006 2:11 pm
Location: Colombia

Re: Bug after modifiying an scenery

Post by danielvelez » Sun May 02, 2021 3:15 am

Update:

We deleted everything and re-installed the zipped moddified scenery from our friend and the problem is gone. Still I want to know what happened, or how it got corrupted. Where is the "check" file that we missed when sharing the moddified scenery so we don´t need to compile the whole texture scenery everytime we make a terrain correction.

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wickid
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Location: Venlo, NL
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Re: Bug after modifiying an scenery

Post by wickid » Sun May 02, 2021 8:21 am

As i said. The .THA file contains the hashes of the .tr3 files. The .tr3 files correspond to a texture tile. If you fly over a tile that has a mismatch between the hash in the .THA file and the .tr3 file you'll get the stuck pitch control.

Your friend only shared the .THA, not the .tr3. So his scenery matched. Yours didn't causing the problem.
PH-1504, KOE

danielvelez
Posts: 103
Joined: Thu Mar 09, 2006 2:11 pm
Location: Colombia

Re: Bug after modifiying an scenery

Post by danielvelez » Sun May 02, 2021 4:25 pm

Ah, ok. Understood. So on Condor2 scenery, if you modify the terrain, you need to share the modified tr3 files as same as the tha.

I was thinking that the Colombia.trn file was used on condor2, but it´s probably for Condor 1 only.

Should I delete Colombia.trn? Is that a "residual" file from our porting from condor 1 to condor 2?

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wickid
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Location: Venlo, NL
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Re: Bug after modifiying an scenery

Post by wickid » Sun May 02, 2021 7:19 pm

No, do not remove that. It is required as well.
PH-1504, KOE

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