Darn, now I need to go back, find my prop textures and copy back my original 32 bit apparently!

 

 

Neumanix, thank you VERY VERY Much, the help in this thread has been humbling to someone who thought his tweaking days were done!

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 :)

 

thanks for the info

Darn, now I need to go back, find my prop textures and copy back my original 32 bit apparently!

 

But shouldn't your method described above (AlphaSearcher + DxtBMP via a macro) only have detected DXT3s and no 32bit-textures?

 

By the way, there's something to do with my FS2004 every day.

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.

 

Trying my best to clarify things :)

 

Great post and I don't mean to be nitpicky, but your math is wrong.

 

2⁸=256, not 255. :P You forgot to give credit to the zero, and in binary that's half of the alphabet

 

hehehe, just kidding

 

regards,

Joe.

Yep, you got me there <_<

I always think about 8 bits as 0-255 and forget that that means 256 values in total.

But shouldn't your method described above (AlphaSearcher + DxtBMP via a macro) only have detected DXT3s and no 32bit-textures?

 

By the way, there's something to do with my FS2004 every day.

I think you are right Harald but I definitely remember seeing some "prop" textures in there....

 

Regardless, doing a night departure out of KEWR this morning resulted in the least amount of stuttering I have seen in FS9 around KEWR well since forever... No shimmering at all, very little stuttering, a very noticeable difference especially when panning around as well. I am on my way to LLBG now (Don't laugh Rafal) b/c ever since the latest LLBG scenery I have had a horrible pause when crossing the RWY 12 threshold even at 60FPS and I am hoping that is now gone! What better way to find out than a 10 hour test flight to work out any kinks along the way as well ;)

 

A real hats off and thank you again to Rafal, Ian, kaan, neumanix and anyone else I am forgetting

I am on my way to LLBG now (Don't laugh Rafal)

 

Never, Paul, never. You completely surprised me with ths destination. Don't get lost, mate!

...

Hello fellow seekers after smooth.

I swore I had given up on tweaking a long time ago...HOWEVER! How can any self respecting simmer ignore a post titled

"A Huge FPS Increase"

 

You naughty fellow Kiwi.

Anyway I have run my aircraft and texture folder through the thing utility, and will report back as to whether this is a winner or oily snake juice.

Andy

:p0502: :Cuppa:

I have no idea why this happens, but I have observed it after converting my ai textures. I use shockwave lights on my ai aircraft, and for the longest time couldn't figure out why the taxi lights only appeared on a few aircraft. After running a batch imagetool to convert everything, including props and lightmaps, to DXT3+mip, and then going through and adding the alphas to everything, the taxi lights correctly appear on every single plane. Previously, most of my ai was DXT3 and no mips, and I didn't check the alphas. I don't know if it was the mips, or converting the 32-bit lightmaps to DXT3, but something about the textures stopped the 3d lights from showing up. Now, with the redone textures, that problem has apparently been solved. I'll experiment with putting back in 32 bit prop textures and lightmaps to see if that makes the 3d taxi lights disappear again.

Before, maddog took seconds to load the vc but now its instant. Lack of alphas was the problem, this is great. :lol:

 

They were recommending converting vc textures to dxt1, which helped but now I know the exact reason.

This thread was linked in the forum of my VA, and has finally got me off my backside to join Avsim.

 

Big thanks to Neumanix for the DXT3 fixer. I didn't have many scenery textures that needed modifying, but what looked like every single texture file for the Maddog VC was without an alpha channel. Massive improvement in loading time.

 

Edit :- You beat me to it Kaan :)

It would be nice if your tool could exlude some filenames, or parts of it, so it skips them automatically.

Like prop, or _L etc...

You know what, it does that already :lol:

It only searches for dxt3 compressed bmp files and the ones that have a specific byte set wrong in the file header data.

It doesn't try to fix anything that shouldn't be fixed.

Prop textures for example, are almost always 32bit, so it doesn't touch those.

 

It will fix all your textures in a matter of minutes or even seconds, depending on how big your FS9 installation is.

Maybe I will just restore the files I spent 12 hours on yesterday and let Neumanix tool do it's thing to exclude the _L and the prop if I run into any abnormalities. For right now I haven't seen any adverse issues with having them Mip-Mapped with Alpha as DXT-3. At least I have a plan to revert those textures if necessary now :)

Neumanix, thanks again for providing your DXT3-Fix. It did hard work this evening.

Interestingly, it didn't fix all the textures AlphaSearcher identified as without Alpha Channel but I'm sure this is correct.

Ironically, now I have two complete backups of my FS2004 - one with and one without corrected textures. (A third - external - backup has to be made before I go to RW vacation next week.)

 

Good night!