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?