Some cockpit and pax floor/wall textures transparent

[VeryBumpy 272]

Just purchased both products, great overall.

Using the latest Ready for Pushback plane it has nice shadows and outside textures now but is missing the floor (and some wall) textures in both the cockpit and pax areas. ie I can see the tarmac surface and airport vehicles from different interior cameras.

Floor textures showed up properly without DX10 Fixer. The Fixer added shadows and outside plane texture but I lost interior floor texture.

Yes,  I have most settings On as that is why I bought this Fixer for more and better graphics. Turning Off the various FSX menu shadow options did not resolve the issue.

Suggestions?

[VeryBumpy 272]

I've found a few things. First is RTFM and this quoted bit helped me along---> "Any missing or transparent components up to and including the whole aircraft are almost certainly caused by 8 bit textures."

It had something to do with the FS8 reflection texture loading before or after the plane texture AND not being compatible with it in some way.

I used Dxtbmp.exe to examine the particular transparent cockpit texture file and it was in a 16bit(555) format where all the others were in a different format. I used imagetool.exe command line commands to change it to 16bit DXT5 and voila, textures appear normally again.

I'm still not done testing all environment and condition settings (night, weather, lights on/off, etc) but this is progress. word not allowed I spent alot of time figuring this out.

I can already see there are unrealistic shadows and some sort of shadow circle around the camera viewpoint in the passenger interior areas of the plane. Most easily notice when mouse looking and moving around in the interior areas with Ezdok.

Edited August 21, 2022 by VeryBumpy

[SteveFx 258]

From your description the aircraft you are using is built with the very old FS8 SDK ( from Flight Simulator 2002).

I call aircraft or scenery using this SDK legacy.

It is possible to get legacy aircraft to work in FSX  but they are somewhat limited - to some extent you have to take what you get with these old models  as the model designer had no concept that the aircraft would ever be used in FSX.

Eg in both DX9 and DX10 (with or without the fixer) the prop disks do not work and if replaced with a FSX texture the transparency against clouds is wrong.

The control of whether these aircraft display shadows is in the Legacy Dialog - separate to the Shadows Dialog.  

These old models sometimes contain 8 bit textures which date back to much older Flight Simulator versions.  There is a fault in the DX10 engine when handling an 8 bit texture which inverts the transparency channel. The transparency channel  can be overloaded and used for reflections in the model which means (as shown in chapter that some components can become invisible.   

I did not believe  that this applied to 16 bit textures - but its possible that there is a rare form of 16 bit that i haven't encountered that has the same issue.

Chapter 18-20 discuss how to get legacy SDK aircraft working in FSX and explains how to bulk convert a directory and its subdirectories using the supplied DX10 Toolbox and the ImageTool from the FSX SDK. 

FS2002 had no concept of shadows and the models do not really support this but I found that by accident the FSX engine draws the model into the shadowmap and thus that it is possible to have some shadows with legacy models. 

As these models do not contain a detailed high resolution cockpit model for shadow generation (FSX models have an exterior mode and a separate VC Model)  the whole aircraft gets written to the shadowmap which leads to poor quality shadows in the VC. 

If HD shadows are enabled then the fixer trims the aircraft as it it written to the shadowmap and scales it up in size to improve shadow quality in the cockpit - this is discussed on pg79 - the downside of this is that some outside views may then show false shadows and if the model has a large passenger cabin then shadows may only exist in a circular area around the current camera position.

You can tweak the settings for a particular model by editing the ( undocumented)  file.

c:\users\public\documents\LegacyDatabase.ini  

If you edit with notepad you can find an entry for your aircraft,

You can add DisableHD=1  to turn off HD shadows for that aircraft without changing the global setting.