"Shimmering" instruments in vc

[Evan Banalian 5]

Can anyone post a video showing before and after these changes... Thanks for the hard work guys. Evan Banalian.

[WebMaximus 372]

I read some people have had good results by mipmapping scenery textures, haven't tried that myself though buy maybe I will.As for downsides and why companies don't include mipmapped textures I can't say, maybe there is a reason we haven't yet discovered but as long as you keep a backup of any textures you convert it's really simple to get back should there be a problem. The only "downside" I've heard of so far is that you need to have a GFX card that can handle a rather high AF setting like 16x otherwise mipmapped textures will look blurry.

[WebMaximus 372]

Can anyone post a video showing before and after these changes... Thanks for the hard work guys. Evan Banalian.

Would have loved posting a couple of videos showing the difference but I don't really know how to make good quality FSX video captures so maybe someone else with the right software and knowledge could?

[B777ER 2,486]

I have dual ATI 5870 cards. I have a few of ******* tweaks in the fsx.cfg. Believe it or not, I have my AA and AF set to application controlled within my Catalyst Control Center with AA ticked on in FSX with AF selected in the pull down menu under it. With these mipped textures, it looks very very nice...no blurriness at all. For those looking to do scenery, you can either use this program or use what I do for the scenery textures and that is the FSX SDK imagetool software. I mipped all Imaginesim textures and I also did Flightbeam Studios KSFO. I hate shimmers and mipping makes them all go away for me.

[ZKOKQ 984]

I have dual ATI 5870 cards. I have a few of ******* tweaks in the fsx.cfg. Believe it or not, I have my AA and AF set to application controlled within my Catalyst Control Center with AA ticked on in FSX with AF selected in the pull down menu under it. With these mipped textures, it looks very very nice...no blurriness at all. For those looking to do scenery, you can either use this program or use what I do for the scenery textures and that is the FSX SDK imagetool software. I mipped all Imaginesim textures and I also did Flightbeam Studios KSFO. I hate shimmers and mipping makes them all go away for me.

Good one Eric, I am off to do imaginesim sceneries, they are shocking for shimmers. And thanks to Richard. BTW, if you have UT2 ai package, I mipmapped the ai aircraft, wow, what a differnce, you can now see the liveries nice and sharp from a distance, and improved the frame rate.

[paulnd 0]

Good one Eric, I am off to do imaginesim sceneries, they are shocking for shimmers. And thanks to Richard. BTW, if you have UT2 ai package, I mipmapped the ai aircraft, wow, what a differnce, you can now see the liveries nice and sharp from a distance, and improved the frame rate.

Just a word of caution, not all textures should be mipmapped such as lightmaps. Also, as the OP has found out, some textures with alpha layers for reflections or opacity are destroyed if they are converted or reduced in size. Always backup your original textures before making any changes. There's a discussion on the UT2 forum about mipmapping AI aircraft with a link to a batch file that mipmaps the correct UT2 textures. http://ultimatetraff...rcraft-properly Apologies for contributing to any thread drift... Paul

[ZKOKQ 984]

Hi Paul, I should have mentioned I used the Batch file at the link you provided, not as described above. sorry for any confusion..

[wanabflyer 53]

Good one Eric, I am off to do imaginesim sceneries, they are shocking for shimmers. And thanks to Richard. BTW, if you have UT2 ai package, I mipmapped the ai aircraft, wow, what a differnce, you can now see the liveries nice and sharp from a distance, and improved the frame rate.

Both UT2 and NGX is my project for this weekend. If the results are so impressive including some FPS improvement (which seems to be the case), Why aren't these developers putting this out as an optional install with there software?Thanks to all for sharing this and to Richard for his hard work on our behalf.

[IFR7700 228]

I'm a little confused. For the textures that you resize, you export the alpha channel at the original size, resize the texture, then import the alpha channel back into the smaller size texture at the original alpha channel size. How is this right?

[WebMaximus 372]

As I understood it when you import the alpha channel it will be automatically resized to fit the new texture size.

[ZKOKQ 984]

Both UT2 and NGX is my project for this weekend. If the results are so impressive including some FPS improvement (which seems to be the case), Why aren't these developers putting this out as an optional install with there software?Thanks to all for sharing this and to Richard for his hard work on our behalf.

One good thing about the UT2 batch file Rick, it is darn quicker than doing the NGX. Anyway have fun mate.

[IFR7700 228]

As I understood it when you import the alpha channel it will be automatically resized to fit the new texture size.

Excellent, well then, I did it right. Great improvement. All I did was mipmap the textures. Will do some resizing today.

[mbunjes 1]

That sounds very promising. Will this trick also work in FS2004 ?

[WebMaximus 372]

That sounds very promising. Will this trick also work in FS2004 ?

I only use FSX so can't say but I guess this would work for FS9 as well.

[mbunjes 1]

I still fly the old one because I have to many CTD's with the NGX. The AI traffic in FS9 is just a blurry mess so I'll give it a try.