REX Sky Force 3d

[nater]

Hey all! i wanted to point something out to you guys...I had been trying to figure out how to get better looking clouds, and started doing some research on how cloud sprites were made in FS. It turns out that nothing has changed over the years from FS9 to P3D as far as clouds go.....So I decided to test out REX Sky Force 3D and see if their cloud sprites would work...and low and behold they do! No real modification is needed either besides copying and pasting....the screens are the stock Major Thunderstorm theme. The other ones are comparison shots.

..

 

[huub vink]

Nice find, I already knew it worked the other way round as I use the original FS9 HDE clouds by Pablo Diaz in general work in FSX as well.

Cheers,
Huub

 

[nater]

Thanks! Ya...the only real difference is the header xml that is in the FS9 folder,as FS9 doesn't use GUIDs like FSX does. All versions have the cloud sprites saved as .cld models. So basically, you need three things for FS9 to use the clouds...
1.Cloudartschema.xml (tells FS to look at the next xml file. KEEP THE ORIGINAL FS9 XML)
2.Cloudartfiles.xml (Tells FS which cloud models to use for which cloud type)
3. the .cld models themselves. Right now with REX SkyForce I have 1160 different cloud types compared to the 351 of the original FS.

Now, all sims use cumulus01.bmp and cumulus02.bmp, but in my research it uses a 3d bmp called cumulusovercast.bmp. I have found best performance especially when using the new cloud types is if Cumulus01 and Cumulus02 are in the 276kb range. Anything really larger than that and you can expect your FPS to drop significantly. You "can" use SkyForce cloud textures. Make sure though that you have SkyForce install them as 32bit and use a program like DTXBMP to convert to DTX3. I have also found that if I remove the MIPs then I get nice defined clouds in the distance and fluffy clouds up close. This also has an impact on performance as the file size is kept small.