Cockpit Window Glass - FSX vs FS9

TARPSBird

TARPSBird

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Staff member
How is glass made transparent in FSX, and how does it differ from FS9? My reason for asking came up on Saturday when I loaded the FS9 Project Open Sky P-8A Poseidon into FSX. The plane worked fine in FSX except that the cockpit windows were opaque dark gray. In FS9 the windows were transparent and you could easily see the flight crew. I came across a DXT3 texture file named "cockpit gray", a 32x32 pixel dark gray square with a pure white alpha channel. I thought hmm... let me try something. So I darkened the alpha in DXTBmp and the glass became clear. In FS9 the glass is clear with the original pure white alpha, so what's the difference? :confusion:
 
One version grades white as max transparency while FSX grades to black as max. Then there's DDS format which turns everything upside down. I blame Americans who drive on the wrong side of the road...and call it a two by four instead of a four by two...;)
 
Jafo, you're right about the DDS format. When I modify those files I have to remember what they looked like when I first sent them to Paint Shop Pro from DXTBmp. A royal pain in the *** after you've flipped them and turned them 90° a couple times. :frown-new:
 
DDS is only flipped north-south, not rotated. I do my paintkits in PSP format [usually 4096] then test for developing the paints in extended BMP [means the bitmaps are pretty big]...and when it's all done and I'm happy...the last step is flip and save in DXTBmp as DDS. In the early days I'd unflip and edit the DDS...until I realized that each time you 'save-to-DDS' you introduce 'crud', as DDS is a 'lossy' compression format. The more times you change and save the worse it gets...;)
 
Adobe Photoshop

I repaint in Photoshop. I used to use Corel Photopaint which is an excellent program, after a tough learning curve with Photoshop, I now like it much better. There is an Nividia plugin for Photoshop that allows you to "Save As" in Photoshop in DDS format. When you export a 32bit BMP from a paint program to DXTBMP be careful to create or at least change the Alpha Channel because it will start out all BLACK as mentioned above in FSX is fully transparent. White is totally opaque. Shades of gray degrees of shine in the alpha channel. Found this out the hard way wondering why my beautiful repaint was not there. I found what you did with one of Milton Shupe's S2F's original FS9 models. Flew beautifully with all the animations in FSX BUT the cockpit glass was so dark. Darkened the cockpit texture in the texture to a dark gray from light gray and it was perfect. Everything is a learning experience in flight sim especially if you begin to do something besides just flying like repaints or scenery. And then.......there's Model Conveter X. Thank you Arno. The stuff you can do!
 
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