Distant Black Flicker

[greendragoon]

I've noticed with a couple of times where a distant object will flicker black. In one of those cases, I could see that the black was actually the fog. Now the objects in question had no mist turned on. Is there anyway to fix this artifact?

[greendragoon]

Nobody's seen this? I've noticed it in other ages, like on a couple of rocks in Andy's Zephyr Cove. Is this a plugin bug, an Uru bug, or just a glitch with my graphics card and you all think I'm nuts?

[Robert The Rebuilder]

In case you don't hear anything from anyone, assume the latter.

Honestly - I have not seen this on my desktop or laptop.

[EDIT]RETRACTION I just did Zepher Cove last night on my laptop, and I did see the rocks flicker black when I was at the other end of the beach.

[Nynaveve]

We had it in Zephyr Cove, and I'm not positive what causes it. Andy covered a good deal of ours up by throwing in a bunch of extra boulders. (SHHH!! You're not supposed to tell the judges that! ) I think it might be a texture mapping issue, but I'm not positive. I'm still too new to Blender.

[greendragoon]

Man I'm glad it's not just me. For a while there I though I might have to write a nice small padded age for my avie.

I have it happening on a big giant plane that is my ocean, and it doesn't totally go black. I'm reasonably sure that it's the fog that we're seeing. Maybe if I was to set the fog to something really huge. I'll have to go back to the tutorials and see exactly how to do it.

[Aloys]

I'm not sure if it's related but there's some other similar thing in Zephyr Cove as well, the sea turns black for me with the distance.. As if the mipmap generated grew darker with distance.
And I've also noticed it in some other Age recently, can't remember which one right now. At any rate this is definitel a recent problem.

[andylegate]

Sorry, I saw this posted this morning, but didn't have time to reply.

yes, I've noticed that when you get to a certain distance, the large boulders suddenly turn grey. Then they either stay that way, or will flick to the correct light/texture.

I think I've seen this in one other Age, and considering I have a XFX 8500GT video card that's ePCI with 256 MB of DDR2 ram, I seriously doubt it's the video card. Now it might be a problem with DirectX or yes, it maybe something that goes on with Plasma.

Thing is, if you go into Uru and go to lets say....Ae'Gura, I've never seen anything like that over long distances. So maybe it might be how things are getting compiled in the PRP. Sadly we are not using the exact method that Cyan uses to make the PRP files, so it may be hard to tell what's going on.
Since it seems to be fan Ages that do this, then I'd say it's something that's going on with either Blender, the plugin or both.

Then again, I keep thinking of MOUL and how my water flickered all the time in Er'cana......near the giant windmill. Of course I haven't been there since I've upgraded my computer.

[greendragoon]

I still think it might be related to the fog. I'm going to go in and play with it tonight. I'll let you know the results.

[D'Lanor]

It is the old zoffset problem again if you ask me. Edit: It doesn't only affect those rocks but my KI as well.

[greendragoon]

Update:

I tried setting the fog distance to a really huge number (100,000) and it seemed to fix the problem. I couldn't get my ocean to flicker anymore. I wouldn't mind getting some corroboration though. Someone else who was having the same problem what to give it a try?