How to get RID of Annoying Flashing Clouds

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This fix is courtesy of Mike (haldir) over at AVSIM. It gets rid of the issue of cloulds popping in and out of scenes...

Here are the instructions from him and my notes below

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Quote:

The ultimate culprit lies in the material handling of the cloud shader.

Go to this folder:

FSX\ShadersHLSL\misc

There you will find a file called SwarmCloud.fx. Make a backup copy of this file somewhere. (as always no crying if you don't do this step) 

Open the original SwarmCloud.fx in notepad or wordpad and then look down about 20 lines down from the top. You will see this entry:

bool NewMaterialUsage = true;

Change its value from true to false. Make sure to keep the semi-colon. then add the following below the entry

    bool   NewMaterialUsage = false;
> = true;

The entire section should look like this

const bool EffectDeclaration
<
    string Name     = "SwarmCloud";
    string Class    = "Basic";
    bool   NewMaterialUsage = false;
> = true;

Save and close the file.

Now, go to C:\documents & settings\<your username>\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\FSX\

(If you can't get to this folder make sure that "show hidden & system files/folders" is turned on in your windows folder options.)

(This is the XP path by the way, Vista users will have to hunt for their equivlalent in the users folder.)

You will see a folder there called: Shaders.

Either move that folder out of there or delete it. Don't worry, FSX will build a new one the next time you run it. It contains a cache of the compiled shaders. This folder must be removed to ensure that the change you made to the cloud shader file above will be compiled and used on FSX's next run.

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Note: This fix can be undone by simply editing TRUE into the line as noted above. 

Also, I suggest you not delete the entire SHADER folder from 

C:\documents & settings\<your username>\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\FSX\

as suggested and instead simply empty the contents of: 

C:\documents & settings\<your username>\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\FSX\Shaders\Misc

Of course be sure to backup the MISC folder I noted above before trying this so it can be restored -and- backup the original SwarmCloud.fx file in the Flight Simulator X\ShadersHLSL\misc directory.

I do not know if anything is truely lost using this method but so far its has cured the clouds popping in and out here.