VC Textures: Is it just me?

F

Fleet Canuck

SOH-CM-2016
I'm using my username from the old Mike Stone days. I've just joined here, having been out of sim forums for several years. The Fleet Canuck, by the way, was first developed as the Noury in my hometown, and it was the first freeware aircraft I downloaded, a beauty for FS2002 by Bill Lyon.

Having followed sim forums at Mike Stone's site, I thought I was up to speed on the basics of MSFS, but I was astounded recently by something. I tried checking back on the forum threads here, but there are so many I didn't get too far, so forgive me if this has been mentioned before.

The reason I got into freeware downloads was because the VC of default aircraft looked so blurry. The panels were okay, but all the other textures were awful. I wondered how freeware designers could do such a nice job, but Microsoft couldn't.

Then one day, using Martin Wright's DXTBMP program, I noticed that the aircraft with crisp VC textures used 256 colour file formats, while the default planes were in DXT1 16 bit. When I converted to 256 colour, I couldn't believe the difference!

As one who had spent too much time on sim forums, how did I miss this issue? Or, is this just unique to me? I also didn't know that FS2004 would have better framerates than FS2002, or I would've switched over years earlier! Looks like I don't know as much as I thought I did...
 
Welcome back to simming, and welcome back to SOH...or welcome to SOH if you had not been here before.

You are not imagining things.....DXT1 formatting subjects texture files to the most extreme level of color compression and detail compression...this high level of compression degrades the quality of the image on the texture sheet and gives us those ugly, fuzzy, blurry VCs (and other things...like ground texturing in some cases).

256 color does not subject the texture files to such a high degree of compression....the end result is a larger file size but a sharper, more detailed diplay in the sim.

Wait until you see a VC that has 32-bit 888 formatted textures....they are really really sharp and detailed. Because files in that format are quite large (4 meg for a 1024 by 1024 sized image), some systems can have a delay in rendering those textures and overall frame rates can take a hit.

It's a shame that the FS2002 Fleet Canuck by Bill Lyons will not work fully in FS2004...it will load and fly, but has no prop. Such a neat little plane..and it comes in a float version as well.

OBIO
 
Thanks for the quick reply, Obio!

I wish I'd known about that before. Anyway, it's like having new aircraft to enjoy, since I didn't bother with default aircraft for years, and I haven't downloaded any freeware or payware aircraft in quite some time. It seems like the pace of innovation has slowed considerably since the boom times of 2003 to 2006 or so.

I had the opportunity to fly in a real world Fleet Canuck a few years back, so I was sorry it didn't fully work in FS2004, but the Bill Lyons Luscombe helped me put that aside. That's a great plane to fly.
 
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