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Flickering shadows on boat and plane float wakes

RobM

SOH-CM-2025
I'm sure this problem has been discussed before, but I can't find the thread.

Whenever there's a wake on the water, whether from boats or plane floats, there are extreme flickering
shadows (for lack of a better description) moving over the wakes.

I've turned off dynamic lighting, and reflections and shadows from everything, and I've deleted the P3Dv4
shader folder so P3Dv4 could rebuild it, but none of these worked.

I think this effect may has been around for awhile in my install, but I only really started noticing it when I
moved some of the Deltasim ships to P3Dv4.

I am using REX Enhanced Direct Textures, White Caps wave animations; could this be the cause? I haven't
tried changing or removing it yet

Anyone have any ideas what may be causing this or how it can be fixed? It doesn't effect performance but
it's kind of distracting.

Thanks - Rob
 
What you're describing is probably caused by the fact that in P3D v3 and onwards waves are actually 3d if you use ultra water detail. For starters check if the problem goes away if you dial down the water slider so that the water surface is flat. If it does go away, then try reverting to the default wave animation, as the REX TD ones were not really designed for this type of water.
 
Thanks for the reply Dimus. No, as usual, it's just me not being observant enough. The problem of the flickering
wakes is just with the Deltasim boats, and once I realized that, I can see why: they each have their own unique
wave and spray effect files. The spray effect files seem to work ok, but it's the Deltasim wake effect files that are
causing the problem. Once I changed the wake effect call path to the P3Dv4 default wake file, then there were no
more flickering wakes.

Mind you, the default P3Dv4 wakes don't quite match up properly with the Deltasim boats, but at least there's no
psychedelic wake effects trailing out behind.

Oh well, the boats themselves seem to work well enough in P3Dv4, so I guess I can live with the default P3Dv4 wakes.

Thanks again for taking the time to reply.

- Rob
 
Try to open the Deltasim wake effect file and see if in the particles sections the following lines exist:

Ground Normal=1
Ground Decal=1

If not, add them and see if that solves the problem.
 
Thank you! It was the Ground Decal = 1 that was missing. Adding that fixed the problem.

I opened the fx_wake file for the DSS Gemini motor yacht (one of my favourite Deltasim boats) using
notepad (in case anyone is interested). There were three particle sections. All three sections had the
Ground Normal = 1, but none had the Ground Decal = 1. Adding that line to each of the three particle
sections solved the flickering wake problem.

I haven't tried with any of the other Deltasim boats yet, but I assume the fix will be the same.

Thank you once again. - Rob
 
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