8km Terrain Issue (and possible fix)

[Runsliketurtle]

When messing around trying to convert my 8km terrain, everything worked perfectly except for one issue, the terrain was super rough, even outside of fields. It almost looked like the terrain had ridges from one end to the other. Through trial and error, I have discovered it is due to the terrain deformation feature in FS25. My terrain has 4097x4097 resolution DEM, 2 units per pixel and 54.96 heightscale. While editing the map.i3d in notepad++, I looked at this line:

<DisplacementLayer name="terrainDisplacement" size="16384" tileSize="16" numChannels="6" cellSize="4" viewDistance="25" blendOutDistance="5" maxHeight="0.2" densityMapShaderNames="terrainDisplacementMap"/>

I discovered that the "size" portion of the line, had 16384, which I can assume is the resolution, for a default size map. For my 8km terrain, I experimented with just multiplying that number by 4 (16384 x 4 = 65536) and the ridges have completely disappeared, and the terrain deformation still behaves at it should ingame. I will experiment more and see if this affects anything else negatively and post my findings.

[Snake Man]

The last I checked (which I thoroughly documented in dev diary) 8.1km terrains are not working, if you got one working in-game Farming Simulator 25 (FS25) properly, please tell us the actual steps you took to achieve that?

Feel free to be as precise and thourough as possible, remember that what is obvious to you is not necessarily obvious to anyone else.

For example there was some chatter about 8.1km terrains working with 128gb RAM hardware, buying a computer with 128gb or more RAM is obviously not a fix, I remember from my own tests that there was some major RAM usage issue (would have to look it up from dev diary).

[Runsliketurtle]

I just did the usual Make new mod from game, loaded mapUS. Deleted and flattened everything, removed all foliage and objects from the map i3d. Then, I saved it. Once saved, I moved over the 8.1km DEM which has 4097x4097 resolution, reopened the map.i3d, changed unitsPerPixel and heightscale, and saved. I then deleted the cache files for the map.i3d, resaved the map to recreate them. Then, I changed resolutions of all weight files to 4096x4096, some GDM files to 16384x16384 and others to 8192x8192 (can't remember which ones were which) and then changed some of the grle files to either 2048x2048 and 4096x4096. That seems to have made everything work. I have not encountered any issues yet and have put in some hours testing the terrain. Do you mind letting me know some of the errors you encountered? I'll see if I can recreate the issues.

[Snake Man]

Thank you for posting that info, much appreciated. Also obviously thanks for posting the terrain deformation info earlier, very nice.

Yeah sounds like the basic steps, I wonder if giants software changed something on the newer FS25 game engine versions because as I wrote in my terrain experiments dev diaries I could not get it to work. And since then I have not played let alone edited fs25 garbage.

But just to check, how much RAM do your computer have, are you running 16gb? or 32gb? or perhaps more?

Its unrelated but if you have any info please let us know, does unitsPerPixel values with decimal points work now or are those still broken?

But yeah really great that you took the time and came to post this info, much appreciated, I sense that there are bunch of folks in the community who have learned this but they apparently have zero interest of sharing info like you, so much respect and thanks for that

[Runsliketurtle]

Not a problem, I spent lots of time searching the internet but found no fix, so I assume no one bothered to post a fix like you said. I have a 32gb system, and I was running solid 60fps even when cultivating and changing multiple ground states at once. I haven't tried the decimal unitsPerPixel. I had the same issue as you with my 10km terrain, tried using unitsPerPixel of 2.5, and it was just blurred mess. It definitely seems like Giants has made things easier for larger terrains.