An excellent post, Garry, no doubt about it. Thank you, sir!

 

One note:

 

(...) use DXTBMP to resave each texture one at a time or use Imagetool to convert the problem textures to DXT1 - This is faster because Imagetool can open more than one texture at a time(...)

 

I may be wrong, but I think we, Win7 64-bit-ers, cannot use ImageTool and are left with DXTBMP.

I am just getting into this, but this conversation is interesting.

 

One point I would like to make is that lightmaps use the Alpha to control the night lighting.

 

If they have no Alpha then I suspect all your AI will be dark at night.

 

I have always used DXT1 w/Alpha for lightmaps for this reason.

 

regards,

Joe

An early posted asked whether this was available for FSX, I don't see a response....can I ask it this way...is this necessary for FSX to help remove stutters or shimmering? Would there be a benefit to trying this in FSX.

I may be wrong, but I think we, Win7 64-bit-ers, cannot use ImageTool and are left with DXTBMP.

 

I have no problems using ImageTool with Win7 Ult.

 

I do not use it for anything other than a texture viewer though.

 

I would ditto the comments about using batch files, not a good idea IMO.

 

regards,

Joe

 

Would there be a benefit to trying this in FSX.

As long as you back up your files first, you have nothing to lose but your time in trying.

 

No two people will experience the same performance change from this, IMO, too many other variables in play.

 

regards,

Joe

Thanks Joe, I am just to fully technical in my understanding of the architecture of FSX vs FS9 to know if there would be a possible benefit in FSX.

With the help of macro recorder It took me a couple hours at most to complete all the textures. With an i7 system I bet it would take far less.

 

So I haven't done any perfromance testing but visually everything is fine so far. The biggest offenders were old flytampa and all the aerosoft stuff.

I forgot to mention that 8-bit and 16-bit seems to be acceptable too (UK2000 use a lot of them) and I believe these are ok without alpha's.

I tend to convert them to DXT1 however, just because I saw on FS Developer I think it was that using too many different texture types can cause performance issues.

 

Again I can't overstate this enough, before experimenting with things back up the originals just in case. Very occassionally you will find something doesn't like what you did. I remember with Jon Gabbert's freeware CYVR, I converted a couple of 32bit textures to DXT3 and they then did not display correctly, all my lights turned into large green squares. No idea why that should happen but it did !

 

I'm also running Imagetool just fine on Win-7 Home Premium 64. I would suggest downloading the FSX SDK and running the version from that. The SDK does not require FSX to be installed as far as I am aware.

 

As far as FSX goes I am just getting myself into that platform, I really don't know enough about it to make any sort of informed comment.

What I would say is that DXT5 and DXT3 in FSX are still going to require alpha's. Any alpha-less DXT3 or DXT5 is going to stutter in FSX just like FS9 because its a graphics rendering issue and not a game engine issue. I would imagine it would be the same with any other game as well.

I would also think that DDS DXT files obey the same rules. DXTBMP has options to save DDS DXT1 with or without alpha, and DDS DXT3 and DDS DXT5 with alpha, just like it regular counterparts, so again I would be inclined to think that the same rules are in play here, although I simply cannot say for certain.

Regarding stuttering and shimmering in FSX, again because we are talking more about graphics rendering rather than the simulation engine I wouls think the same applies. I have already seen in FSX that if I don't mip sceneries then I am getting bad shimmering, so again I'm guessing that in this case things are going to be the same.

Mel,

use the macro recorder Kaan suggested earlier. You just hit start record, go through the normal process for one file then stop recording and tell it to repeat. Just took me ~ 12 hours to do all of the applicable files but doing it by hand would have been days!

 

Thanks. I will give that a try. Definitely a time saver, . . . . , there is a understatement.

 

Regards,

Mel

As I mentioned I used the alphasearch tool a while ago already and had very good results. But it was quite a task, mostly because the tool isn't very user friendly.

I started thinking that this would be a nice project to help me improve my programming skills.

 

So today I got my thumb outta my *** and made a more user friedly tool. I call it DXT3 Fixer and you can get it from here:

 

http://www.2shared.c...DXT3_fixer.html

 

It only fixes the "missing alpha" stutter issue for dxt3 textures. It doesn't create mipmaps, that you must do yourself using imagetool or dxtBmp.

 

The benefit of using DXT3 Fixer is that it automatically searches all subfolder from your chosen root folder. If you want everything fixed in your entire FS9 folder structure, then choose your FS9 root folder.

Otherwise, just choose a specific folder or a folder tree and it fixes only those. Nice if you have sceneries installed on another harddrive for example.

 

It's perfectly safe to use, you can just do a simulated run first and read the generated 'log.txt' file to see what the situation is like.

 

I'll upload it to the file library aswell, but for now you can get it from the link above.

 

Enjoy!

 

*EDIT*

Create an empty folder somehere and unzip the file there. The log file will be created in that same folder after the program is run for the first time.

Hi,

 

So with DXT3_fixer I'll be able to batch fix my dxt3 files that have had their alpha channels removed via the image tool batch converter. With a complete backup of my files just in case I run into a problem. That is unless I'm reading this wrong.

It will batch convert your files, yes, but it doesn't make any backups. You can run a simulated fix that will only report which files are bad, but doesn't fix them yet.

These results are in the log.txt file that was generated in the same folder where you put dxt3 fixer.exe.

 

To really fix the files, run the tool again with the checkbox unchecked. After that do another check if you like, to verify that everything was indeed fixed.

 

You can ofcourse backup your folders before using the tool, but there really is no need to.

Hi,

 

Ok, so the easy/fast and maybe dangerous way of trying this would be as follows.

 

1. Run AlphaSearch2: To identify if you have any problem files.

2. Run convimx to batch convert the files to DXT3 with MIP Mapping.

3. Run DXT3_fixer to batch fix any files that do not have an Alpha Channel.

 

I am aware of the danger of batch conversions, I'll have a complete backup of all files and would suggest anyone who is going to try this do the same. Looks like I have everything to give this a try, I'll wait and see if there is any feedback to this post in regards to the steps I have above and/or if there are any problems I may have overlooked in trying the above steps.

 

Thanks to everyone who responded and/or offered their insite to this topic.

No need for alphasearcher at all. Just run DXT3Fixer in simulated mode (click the checkbox) and it will identify the bad files and generate the log.txt file with the result.

And then, as I said, run DXT3Fixer gain but in normal mode (box not checked) to fix the alpha channels.

 

I think I read earlier that convimx doesn't destroy the alpha channel so you can use it afterwards to add mipmaps where needed.

 

Can also report that it works fine with FSX too :)

 

It's uploaded to the filelibrary now but not yet downloadable.

So today I got my thumb outta my *** and made a more user friedly tool. I call it DXT3 Fixer

 

My HD physically died running it in "simulate it" mode.

You gotta be joking right?!