:-zhelp I am in need of help when it comes to repaints. First of all, most of aircrafts textures will not come up on MSPAINT for editing. Second, those that do, when I edit them, in the game the whole aircraft is a flat grey. Do I need a special program to do paint editing?

I just finished my first repaint & like u was confused about the various graphics formats and the grey textures. The short answer is that to view the textures in MS Paint or other graphics viewers/manipulation pgrms u have to convert the textures to 24BIT BMP's. Then u can open them and manipulate them (paint, erase, add etc). After u are done u then convert them into a DXT format, usually DTX3 and put them in ur acft folder and then u can view them.To convert back & forth I recommend u use the free DTXBmp converter by Martin Wright. It can be found at: www.mnwright.btinternet.co.uk/programs/dxtbmp.htmGood luck and hope u have some fun. JoeT

Allow me to explain....DXT is a compression method for bmp files that is like a ZIP file.DXT1 Uses an alpha channel ( A grey scale layer like) to produce transparencies. an alpha channel in a DXT1 is black for transparency and white for opaque.DXT3 is simular to DXt1 except that it uses a gray scale. That gray scale produces a shine. DXT3's are typically larger than DXT1's in size.MS Paint will not edit these formats as you found out. There is a program ImageTool the MS has avalabile in the SDK. I believe that someone uploaded it to avsim. A search might turn it up. This program is supourior to DXTbmp, I think. But, DXTbmp will allow you to create a alpha "on the fly" by sending the alpha ( Thats not there, it's white) to an editor. Paint Shop Pro 7 is great for this. PSP 8 will not start with a bmp by loading it. The program must open the bmp when you double click on the bmp. Then you can apply a gray scale shade to it with the paint bucket. A shade of 200, 200, 200 is a good starting point for a shine.Then just save ( It's a temp file) then open DXTbmp and update the alpha, then save as extended format... Be sure to uncheck the MIP Map in the image column... Thats it.... you just made an alpha channel DXT3 bmp.Joe W.

Hi Guys,One little tip here, don't convert back and forth between extended and non extended bitmaps, every time you do this you will decrease the quality of your bitmap, and it will become "mashed".The better way is to always keep an unextended "master" and just use this to "extend" fromDan.