All Black Tiles Work Around Tips...

This cropped up on my system with Beta 7 and at least once so far in Beta 8 so I thought I'd post the results of some of my tests and a work around concerning the issue in case some folks are experiencing the same problem.

If you get black tiles in an area surrounding your aircraft immediately upon loading FS9 with Beta 7 DON'T FRET. Some tests I've run has shown this seems to be a temporary condition with either your "first load" of FS9, or after switching back to FS9 from FSX. Once you've booted into this "black tile" condition, changing locations doesn't seem to help in most instances. Luckily, there's a few workarounds that seem to "fix" it from happening again.

Work around 1: Disable the Preload Function

1.Shut down TP and FS9 and then "trick" TP into disabling the TP preload function by changing the preload min/max entries in the proxyuser.ini file to look like this:

preload_min_lod=10
preload_max_lod=9

Now start TP and FS9 and load a flight. Without the preloads enabled everything may load normally. If you want to you can leave your ini this way and just do without the preload function from here on, but if you wish, move on and try step 2.

2. Now here's the weird thing: After loading a flight WITHOUT the preloads enabled as in step 1, if you again shut down TP and FS9 and RETURN the preload entries back to their original settings of:

preload_min_lod=9
preload_max_lod=12

...and then load the SAME FLIGHT, everything then boots as normal (OK you say, that's not unusual because the textures are already cached right?), BUT get this, all successive flights seem to load without the black tile issue as well for some reason; and thereafter FS9 seems "fixed". I can even unload the TileProxy driver, clean out the World folder and Caches and it still loads fine.

If I change to FSX for a while however, the same behavior in FS9 repeats all over again when returning to it. (!?)

I have also found that as an alternative to disabling the preload all together (as in step 1 above) just lowering the preload max level to 11 and loading a flight in A NEW LOCATION sometimes is enough to fix the black tile problem too. If this is successful, returning to a max of 12 thereafter also seems to do away with the problem in the same way a complete preload disable does.

These observations are of course based on my own system and experiences, but I've run the scenario several times to verify the behavior and almost always gotten the same results.

Work Around 2: Reinstall TP over the current installation.

All black tiles has happened to me several times when returning to FS9 after running FSX for a while. In the cases where disabling the preloads didn't get rid of the problem, I was able to simply reinstall TP over the top of the current install and the problem vanished next time I booted into FS9. Why? I don't know. But a clean uninstall and reinstall of TP has also cleared up a variety of other problems many users have had from time to time and got them up and running again in a flash. It only takes a few minutes to do and is certainly preferable to running endless troubleshooting that is making no real progress.