I wish I was. I ran it on a small data folder with some backed up fs9 stuff and in the middle of it my drive just went offline. I can't revive it. Well all hhd die eventually I just have to deal with lost data.

Well what can I say, I have no idea how my program could have destroyed a HD! I have run it counless time on my machine without a hitch.

Please anyone report some good news so I know I haven't done something bad here.

It was just its time to go. I don't think ur program kills drives :). I'm in the process of getting over it and searching for a way to recover my data. For all of u, make a point of backing things up.

What kind of negative effects?

 

Btw, aerosoft stuff is full of alpha and mipmap problems.

CTD with EG58 and horrible stuttering and low fps with KPVD. I just copied the original textures back in and the problem was gone

This has made a huge difference for me.I had hundreds of Alpha less DXT3s and WOW what a difference.What would be the better/sharper alternative to use in VCs the DXT1 or DXT3 With Alpha?

What would be the better/sharper alternative to use in VCs the DXT1 or DXT3 With Alpha?

 

It all depends on the alpha channel of the texture. For aircraft you can do the conversion manually as there usually aren't a huge amount of textures to deal with.

I use imagetool for this. Load the texture(s) into imagetool and view the alpha channel. If it is pure white then dxt1 is the best choise. Very often you get dxt3's with a pure white alpha, which is just a waste of bytes. You don't loose any quality and cut the filesize down considerably by converting these to dxt1. If the alpha was indeed pure white, the info should now say format:dxt1 and alpha:none , which is perfectly fine for dxt1.

 

If the alpha channel on the other hand contains different shades of gray, you should stay with dxt3 as it has a 4bit alpha channel (more levels of transparency) opposed to dxt1 singel bit colorkey alpha (black & white, i.e. either you see it or you don't).

 

Prop textures are an exception. These mostly come as 32bit and really should stay that way, because they need even more transparency levels than dxt3 can provide. I've tried and the rotating props look weird in dxt3 format.

 

Atco already explained the essentials quite nicely and if you're still unsure how all this works, read his posts earlier in this thread.

 

About mipping your VC textures, I have had mixed results with this. It worked with some instrument panel textures and reduced the shimmering nicely, but some overhead panel textures turned very blurry, it could be that the viewing angle triggers the gfx card to use too low a level of mipmap.

 

Otherwise, everything you view from a distance, scenery and AI, should be mipmapped (both ordinary textures and lightmaps).

Thank you, Peter, for uploading your tool.

I tried it in simulated mode and it did not (!) destroy my HDD so far.

But would you please give an information about the searching algorithm of your tool. Does it find just every DXT3 texture without Alpha flagged, or does it exclude certain textures (for instance lightmaps)?

 

Regards, Harald

 

P.S. Now we needed a tool to identify 32bit-textures and to convert them into DXT3-textures with Alpha channel...

Here's version 1.1 of DXT3Fixer:

 

http://www.2shared.c.../DXT3Fixer.html

 

I fixed a bug that caused the program to crash if it encountered hidden and/or read-only files. It has nothing to do with the unfortunate HD crash mentioned earlier though.

It also throws an error and exits if trying to read files that WIn7 or Vista protects from the user.

 

And to answer GeyerH's quiestion, It only finds dxt3 compressed bmp's with the alpha flag set to "none". It does not exclude lightmaps.

 

I wanted to edit the link in my first post to point to the newer v1.1 but I can't see how to edit that post any more. Anyways, use this link from now and v1.1 should also be available from the filelibrary soon.

Thanks again!

 

H.

neumanix, how does your tool work? Does it resave like dxtbmp or just add the missing alpha?

It adds the "missing" alpha. I put that in quotes, because the alpha data is not really missing, it is just a byte in the file that is set wrong.

DXT3Fixer sets this byte correctly so that the alpha data is there for FS to use.

Try it on a faulty dxt3 texture and check it in imagetool before and after using DXT3Fixer. You'll see that the alpha channel is fixed.

Here is a question , I use the Skyspirit 767v5 and notice when I convert the textures from 32bit to for example DXT3, the landing light splash on the fuselage when turned on does not look as smooth as the 32bit setting. The nice fade is not there. Is there a way to resolve this when converting tex? I would like all my text to be DXT3 or DXT1. What is the difference between DXT3 and 1? And which is better?

 

Thanks

Here is a question , I use the Skyspirit 767v5 and notice when I convert the textures from 32bit to for example DXT3, the landing light splash on the fuselage when turned on does not look as smooth as the 32bit setting. The nice fade is not there. Is there a way to resolve this when converting tex?

 

This is one of the cases when you do need 32-bit textures; DXT ones are not so dégradé-friendly. This also happens with props, as someone said before.

What is the difference between DXT3 and 1?

 

Texture formats overview - FSDeveloper Wiki

32bit bitmaps have four channels that are 8bits each, Red, Green, Blue and Alpha. This gives you >16 million colors (255 x 255 x 255) plus 255 shades of gray (levels of transparency).

If you don't understand binary then all this will be a bit(pun intended) hard to grasp.

With 8 bits you get decimal values from 0-255.

 

DXT1 only has 1bit for transparency (or no alpha at all which is fine for DXT1), that means the alpha channel can only contain fully white or fully black pixels. Where there are white pixels, the image (RGB data) will show and where there are black pixels the image will be totally transparent.

 

DXT3 has 4 bits of Alpha information, which gives you 16 shades of gray (0-15 in decimal) or levels of transparency. This is better but still not good enough for really smooth transparency (like light splashes and prop textures).

 

Now on todays hardware, a few 32bit textures here and there will certainly not kill performance, so use them whereever you need best quality possible.

 

Trying my best to clarify things :)