Problem with edited terrain textures

hairyspin said:
If you use the FSX version of ImageTool, it flips the bitmap 180deg before saving - a requirement for FSX .dds files. You have been warned!
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Hi

Yes I noticed that when testing, and I tested both the SFX SP1 and SP2 version as mentioned above. But those versions of ImageTool are not good if you want good quality Mipmaps in CFS3, not on my computer anyway! :frown:

The result is very similar to those I got using the Nvidia plugin.

Cheers

vonOben
 
Hi

Some more info from Martin Wright:

"I have a sneaking feeling that imagetool does something special with the mipmaps that is optimised for FS/CFS.

DXTBmp uses the nVidia DDS library to output textures. The Photoshop plugin uses the same libraries and I wouldn`t be surprised if the other programs also use code based on the nVidia library. I would expect all these methods to create very similar results
I remember using the commandline options in imagetool and there is a flag you can set to specify that the output is to be used for terrain. My guess is that it sets something in the file that tells FS/CFS to switch mipmaps at a greater distance than normal so making it look slightly sharper for longer. Its not that the image data is any better just that it holds on to the higher mipmaps for longer. In the same way that aircraft can be made to look sharper by removing the mipmaps (so forcing the use of the full image at all distances) delaying the switch to the next mipmap will extend the distance before terrain switches to a smaller (blurrier) mipmap.

On the other hand it is possible that the mipmap scaling algorithm used by imagetool is different to nVidia and creates mipmaps that are particularly optimised for terrain. The nVidia code is not FS-Specific as most games these days use DDS. There are options available in the plugin (and DXTBmp) to use different scaling algorithms and it may be worth experimenting with these to see if they make any difference in this situation.

Or just use imagetool (for the final output at least)."

The whole thread is here:
http://pub9.bravenet.com/forum/static/show.php?usernum=743074977&frmid=74&msgid=753640&cmd=show

Cheers

vonOben
 
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