Any ideas which texture formats will FSX support?Because there are today far better options and quality available as the large BMP files? (A lot of performance to gain here...)Just curious about the rendering engine of the new FS.... Andr

I'm pretty certain that the texture formats will remain the same.

I predict that FSX will support DXT5 format, since DXT5 uses an interpolated alpha scheme. It will generally produce superior results for alpha (transparency) gradients than DXT3. DXT5 is one of the most flexible general purpose compression codecs.I also predict no support for HDR... but, I would be very happy to be wrong! ;)

We might see HDR (soft shadows and lighting) with the DX10 impemetation.It's somewhere from a dev that they have cool lighting ideas for DX10, hopefully some of which are running in emulation now.I'll be thrilled if they can make lights real dynamic sources instead of the texture tricks that we use now.Imagine shadows at night under illumination. Parked aircraft at gate, light source at 100 feet as a floodlight. Imagaine that light source actually iluminating the surfaces that it touches- any surface, building, ground poly, aircraft, dynmaic airport object- bus, bag cart etc. Imagine that as dynamic as well- the lighting might only illuminate part of aparked plane since only part is in the 'cone' thrown by that light source.Imagine as well, a landing light dynamically illuminating your aircraft- the retractable landing lights moving into position illuminating as the angle changes. We can then rid ourselves of the night masks/textures, furhter improving performance. I hope.

Thanks guys hope for HDR support but....Dynamic textures :-)Andr

I think it was already established elsewhere that "night textures" will still be required in FSX and that the only two lights that cast shadows in the sim will be the sun and the moon?

>I think it was already established elsewhere that "night>textures" will still be required in FSX and that the only two>lights that cast shadows in the sim will be the sun and the>moon?It was indeed. But, you know how some folks are; even when confronted by certifiably accurate facts directly from the horse's mouth, they still insist that "they know better." It's an artifact of having one's world view driven by unrealistic expectations and fueled by wishful thinking... ;)