Is there a program that allows one to tell whetther a texture has a alpha channel or notI suspect this may have something to do with my intermittent stuttersThanks!

I don't think alpha channel has anything to with your stutters, but Martin Wright's DXTBmp will show you the texture format, including alpha channel. Note that typical image formats in FS9 with alpha channel are 32 bit (24 bit for rgb and 8 bit alpha) uncompressed, DXT1 (compressed with a 1 bit alpha channel) and DXT3 (compressed with a 4 bit alpha).scott s..

I read at AIG that DTX3 textures without an alpha channel will cause stutter as the system looks for it... I believe that you need to have a lot of unproper file to create a stutter though...And it must depend also on your system performance.I have spent time checking my scenery and AI textures. A lot of them had issues. I think it is worth the work.There is a tool at AIG called AlphaSearcher.exe that will identify the culprits. And you can add the missing alpha channel by opening and saving the file with DTXbmp.exe...Good luck.Ghiom

Thanks for the replies.I have searched the AIG site for the alphasearcher.exe, but cannot find it there at all. You don't perhaps have a link, do you?RegardsBrian

Thanks for the replies.I have searched the AIG site for the alphasearcher.exe, but cannot find it there at all. You don't perhaps have a link, do you?

http://www.alpha-india.net/forums/index.php?topic=8581.msg92102#msg92102Did some study. It appears the problem is not that there is "no alpha" channel; rather it appears that the alpha channel is all-white but one of the tools is not setting a flag properly in the bmp file header, and presumably fs9 reads the flag and sets things up wrong which can cause problems. The fix seems to be to change byte 3F of the bmp file from 01 to 04 and the problem goes away. I don't have time to look at just what the alphasearcher tool is doing. Note that the tool author (Garfield_x) is revising it and when he drops a new version he posts it at the end of the thread, so you might need to scroll down the thread if you don't see the link to alphasearcher.scott s..

Got it, thanks very much, Scott. No idea what you mean regarding changing the byte etc. but I'm going through the textures as I write & changing the offending ones. Hopefully this will solve the issueThanks again all for the info thusfar