Pondering a Texture Question
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Thread: Pondering a Texture Question

  1. #1
    SOH-CM-2024 Mick's Avatar
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    Icon5 Pondering a Texture Question

    David's sent me the models for the AI B-45 and I have to edit the textures and assign them to the models. First step will be to delete the unused interior textures and those for external stores not carried by the AI planes. I'm wondering about one more thing.

    The skins on the flyable B-45 are in 32-bit format, which I've used since I learned how DXT textures begin to get corrupted right from the start, with the original save, with the "jaggies" appearing along every slanted or curved line and misplaced pixels of color on complex items like the American national insignia. But DXT3 textures have a much smaller file size than 32-bit ones and the degree of corruption from only that first save might be acceptable on an AI plane that probably will rarely, if ever, be seen from close enough to notice. It would make for a considerably smaller download and take up less space on a computer drive.

    On the other hand, in these times of high speed interweb for downloads and drive capacities measured in terabytes, I don't suppose file size really matters anymore, at least not for most folks.

    One thing that has me scratching my head is texture loading times. 32-bit files are big and I wonder if that affects how quickly they load in the sim. DXT3 textures are much smaller in size, but FS has to decompress them to display them, and that must affect how quickly they load. Between this and that, I don't know which format loads faster in the sim.

    I guess the fastest loading speed is what I should try for, if I knew which format loads faster, but I don't even know if the format actually affects loading speed. And I wonder if that even matters in this day of processors so fast and capable that we don't even need video cards anymore.

    If I knew that DXT3 textures loaded faster I'd go for the conversion. Otherwise I'll stick with 32-bit, avoid any corruption, and save myself a tedious and time-consuming task.

    Does anyone have any thoughts or comments about this?

  2. #2
    Keep them as 32 bit. I personally have never noticed longer load times between 32 and dxt, apart from in virtual cockpits
    Alex

    Brisbane, Australia

  3. #3
    I think you answered your own question when you talked about the speed of today's processors. Back when FS2004 was first released some systems could be marginal, so DXT textures were the best solution; David Maltby's models still have the imageconverter.bat & Imagetool combi which used to take the strain out of things, and Martin Wright was (and remains) a god amongst men for DXTBMP (and all his other tools) in my book. How we all agonised over the mysteries of mipmaps and anti-aliasing. When Matt Wynn and I were working on the Alpha TSR.2 repaints we also did, but never released, some DXT textures for the AI TSR.2 (which model I can, frustratingly, no longer find).

    Now things have flipped the other way. I downloaded the MAIW Hellenic Mirage 2000 set today which has DXT32 BMPs as standard but offers 32bit as an alternative .... no hesitation these days, swapped straight out.

    My two pennorth.
    Andy

  4. #4

    Icon5

    But don't forget folks, it's not just about the speed of your CPU/GPU, it's also as you say Mick, how fast does the sim itself handle and load certain tex formats. If you ran Fs9 on a super computer, it wouldn't run any better than a good home pc rig, as the sim itself has a process limit.

    The original tex format of the default ac in Fs9 was 1024x1024 and DXT3. Then FSX, which uses .dds, and they were 1024x1024 DXT5 to allow shine. There's nothing wrong with DXT3, but it's how you get there, if you're converting current texs, then there will always be losses, if making your own tex and saving as DXT3 then less so as you can up the initial detail.

    Fs9 was therefore designed to handle DXT3 from the off, as for size with almost unlimited HDD/cloud storage sizes and band width, it's not a problem to up/download or store. I'd go for the 32bit and be damned!

    Cheers

    Shessi

  5. #5
    SOH-CM-2024 Mick's Avatar
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    Thanks Guys!


    I guess I'll stick with 32-bit since that's what I've got in the flyable B-45. That will save me a lot of tedious fiddly work. And the planes will look flawless even from up close.

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