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Constellation texture situation

The wing textures, in fact all the textures involved, were from the L749 and L1049 template kits that are available on FlightSim. The file names are "l749temp.zip" and "1049pkit.zip."
 
Had a look at these and they were basically meant as a starting point for new repaints only and not really a finished texture file. That might explain the MIP issue.

Cheers
Stefan
 
Stefan - no sweat, they look fine to me "right out of the box." Thanks for looking into this, nothing is a waste if you learn from it - it's just that some experience is more expensive than others!:salute:
 
That's the spirit. But I believe Maarten called these Templates for a reason. They were basically only meant to give prospective color artists a nice starting point with at least some of the tedious work already done for them. They sure look nice but to be used in the sim, even without any additional paint work they really do need to be processed with DXTBmp to make them all around usable.

Cheers
Stefan
 
Gentlemen - a technical question for you both: Assuming textures you have in your sim aircraft are working properly and not giving you any problems in 32-bit format, would you still convert them from 32-bit to DXT3 format anyway? And, if it can be done, is it "always" a good idea to reduce mip-mapping of textures to "0" even if you don't have problems with them?

I ask because I am a devotee of the "If it ain't broke don't fix it" school, at least as far as FS9 is concerned; yet if the 32-bit textures are somehow affecting system performance it would be wise to clean them up. Your thoughts?
 
SSI01 said:
Gentlemen - a technical question for you both: Assuming textures you have in your sim aircraft are working properly and not giving you any problems in 32-bit format, would you still convert them from 32-bit to DXT3 format anyway? And, if it can be done, is it "always" a good idea to reduce mip-mapping of textures to "0" even if you don't have problems with them?

I ask because I am a devotee of the "If it ain't broke don't fix it" school, at least as far as FS9 is concerned; yet if the 32-bit textures are somehow affecting system performance it would be wise to clean them up. Your thoughts?
Click to expand...


If you're going to release the textures to the public, it's probably a good idea to go without mips. some graphic cards just don't play well with mips. with 32 bit you can get more color depth and the alpha gets more shades of grey to work with.
however, dxt3 is a more compact file format.
 
It can also depend on the combination of aircraft and the system it's running on. I've seen some models that ran fine with DXT3 on other systems but sent my entire virtual world deep into the blurries. When that happened, I took the original 32-bit (remember to back up the originals) and converted to uncompressed 8-bit. The color loss was minimal if any, and since the model had its own dynamic shine, there was no need for alpha reflection.

As far as the advantage of smaller filesize, if you get good frame-rates with 32-bit, then the only other difference you'll see is texture load time. When dealing with something like Hiroshi's 777-300's, you can easily have six texture files @ 1024[SUP]2[/SUP] and 32-bit each. Add separate files for each wing and more for the other bits, and you have one massive set of textures. When you switch to spot view it may take a few second for all of it to load. Converting 32-bit to DXT3 reduces the filesize, and therefore the loading time, by 75%.
 
Basically with modern PCs and for textures used on user flown AC vs AI the general consensus is MIP = 0 ....there is virtually no benefit to having them and lots of potential for problems.
32 bit textures are capable to be much more detailed and nuanced....so if you are going for a particularly detailed paint job on that special aircraft I would go with that. I would however put the disclaimer in the README that this texture format can on some PCs cause the dreaded blurries and maybe a helpful hint on how to re-format the textures if that is the case.

Some textures I have seen lately at the major sites have two options in the zip files one High-Res and the other a more system friendly resolution. Of course that increases the size of the download which makes a whole new crop of people a little mad because they pay for every bite the move across the lines.

Cheers
Stefan
 
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