1 hour ago, chickster25 said:

It would appear that the batch resizing is the issue.

Never tried batch resizing DDS, but here is an old method to do it, there are many ways though...

Taken from the below forum post, just open that forum link and search for "batch commands".

"

Batch Commands

You can automate the conversion process by using so-called batch files in either Photoshop or Imagetool.

This next section will explain how to create and use batch 

"

As far as batching out only certain file sizes, just separate the smaller files and run 2 separate conversions I am guessing, but don't know without seeing the issue. Some of Arno's old tools from fsdeveloper.com may have had a batch resizer as well (cannot recall).

Photoshop is kind of ancient for dealing with DDS formats, so there is probably a better way. Actually Photoshop has gone downhill in a lot of ways in the past 2 years or so, it's not as stable as used to be.

 

Edited October 4, 20223 yr by Alpine Scenery

Disregard my previous post. Upon further testing the black textures still show up.

Edited October 5, 20223 yr by Ado198
doesn't work

Resized images folder to 1024, ai planes still look great, better fps and reduced the community folder to 2.2GB.

1 hour ago, blueshark747 said:

Resized images folder to 1024, ai planes still look great, better fps and reduced the community folder to 2.2GB.

How did you resize the textures?

Can you share what process you used

Thanks

I think the right play is to encourage the developers to do the change themselves and they could deploy them again through the installer. 

Interested to know how you did it... Back in the FSX days when I scenery designed I used to batch convert textures and add mipmaps using the ImgTool.exe program that came with the old SDK

Edited October 5, 20223 yr by flyhalf

6 hours ago, blueshark747 said:

Resized images folder to 1024, ai planes still look great, better fps and reduced the community folder to 2.2GB.

 

Please done leave us guessing how you did it?

Im assuming these reduced size images cannot be shared, unless agreed by the FSLTL developers?

57 minutes ago, chickster25 said:

Please done leave us guessing how you did it?

Im assuming these reduced size images cannot be shared, unless agreed by the FSLTL developers?

I would say that is the safest assumption.  

I know they must be very busy at the moment, but the way to do it would be to ask them nicely if (at a later stage) they can offer a cut down pack (2048) as an option to help people with performance issues on less capable PC's. 

I have a decent PC, but even I would rather go for 2048 to preserve performance and VRAM.  I just want to see populated airports with the correct liveries on the planes as I land and taxi about.  Up close, I would make allowances for a bit of blockyness for the sake of preserving performance.  Everything is a compromise.  

19 hours ago, Alpine Scenery said:

 

 

 

Here is a link to the PDF version of my mipmapping document including the missing images from this Avsim post, which I cannot update...

https://drive.google.com/file/d/173yMoD-PwVkJuk9VE4eN_CcSboz-inRu/view?usp=sharing

I have no experience of this at all and have no idea if this works or even makes sense (disclaimer now out of the way!) but the following is from a post on the FS2020 forums, from someone who claims to have converted all of the textures to 1024x1024

Quote

INSTRUCTIONS TO BATCH EDIT ALL THE .DDS FILES WITH ONE CLICK

with XnViewMP (one click wonder, takes about 20-60min to complete the task):

Menu Tools->Batch conversion

Input panel: Select Add Folder and choose FSLTL SimObjects directory

Wait, until all the images has resoltion info. Then put those in order, remove all the 1K and 0.5K stuff. Do convert only for the 2K and 4K images.

Action panel: Add action->Resize with Fit / 1024x1024 pixels / keep ratio / follow orientation / Reduce only options

Output panel: Output to source folder, filename to {Filename}, replace if already exist, keep extension, preserve metadata Press Convert!

Remember to backup FSLTL first. Then you will fo that with you copy and it will resize to something like 2-3gb in total

A link to the full post, with some performance comparisons and images:

https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/fsltl-fs-live-traffic-liveries-is-live/546014/578

May be worth trying a small sample to see if it works.

Edited October 5, 20223 yr by Vel
Added original post link

9 hours ago, flyhalf said:

I think the right play is to encourage the developers to do the change themselves and they could deploy them again through the installer. 

Interested to know how you did it... Back in the FSX days when I scenery designed I used to batch convert textures and add mipmaps using the ImgTool.exe program that came with the old SDK

I asked on the FSLTL Discord and do not get the feeling that they are interested in optimising their textures to 2048 sizes, which is the Asobo default for MSFS.

It is a very manual process to convert files in nested folders without Photoshop, you need to open each folder and edit each texture individually, and I am still trying to figure out a way to do it with ImageMagick, which I use to convert and resize DDS textures.

Additionally, every time FSLTL update the root package, any new textures will need to be updated again but we won't know which ones are new or have been changed, so we will have to edit them all again..

Grab a cup of tea if you are interested how textures work in your flight sim... ☕

ASOBO upgraded from the FSX default of 1024x1024 resolution to 2048x2048 for aircraft textures in MSFS 2020. The textures use DXT1 compression (no Alpha channel) and are in DDS format. Ideally developers should use this size and format too for optimum performance.

The textures should also open in the FSX/P3D SDK ImageTool application, which was created by the ACES team at Microsoft to manipulate these kind of textures (laboriously). If they don't open in this application, what do you think that means for the sim? extra CPU/ GPU time spent converting/ decoding/ decompressing etc.. The more optimised your textures are, the smoother and faster your sim will run. 

N.B. Some developers use different and/or custom tools to prepare their textures in DDS format. While these display in the sim correctly, they will not open in ImageTool. 

 

Currently there are 967 unoptimised textures in the FSLTL installation. There are only 58 individual texture sheets, the rest are variants i.e. liveries. This is not a dig at the many developers who provided their work free of charge, it's just a statement of fact.

- 4 x 8k resolution textures for the B763

- 961 x 4k resolution textures

- 2 unmipped 4k textures.

 

The benefit of optimised textures should be clear. Your sim will run more smoothly, is less likely to crash, the liveries won't shimmer, your VRAM usage will go down which will allow you to balance or increase your other settings i.e. more eye candy - and the sim will load optimised textures more quickly too, meaning less stuttering on your final approach for example.

Below is an example of what optimised textures mean for your VRAM if you have 100 AI aircraft in the air around you... This only shows VRAM gains with optimised textures but the real world gains are much more. i.e. stability, smoothness, speed etc YMMV

(i) 100 textures at 4096 resolution = 100 x 21,846kb = 2.2 GB VRAM

(ii) 100 textures at 2048 resolution = 100 x 2,731kb = 270 MB VRAM

 

Edited October 5, 20223 yr by toby23

24 minutes ago, Vel said:

I have no experience of this at all and have no idea if this works or even makes sense (disclaimer now out of the way!) but the following is from a post on the FS2020 forums, from someone who claims to have converted all of the textures to 1024x1024

A link to the full post, with some performance comparisons and images:

https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/fsltl-fs-live-traffic-liveries-is-live/546014/578

May be worth trying a small sample to see if it works.

This does not add mip-maps, which are required unless you like shimmering textures and your sim crashing unexpectedly.. see my post above..

20 minutes ago, toby23 said:

This does not add mip-maps, which are required unless you like shimmering textures and your sim crashing unexpectedly.. see my post above..

Thanks for the information @toby23. I have not read the full thread. I just happened to have recently read the FS2020 forum posting and wondereed if it was of use.

If I can figure out a way to optimise these textures easily with a batch command with free software, I'll share it here for everyone to follow..

5 minutes ago, toby23 said:

If I can figure out a way to optimise these textures easily with a batch command with free software, I'll share it here for everyone to follow..

Thanks Toby - that would be great!  And would maybe take the load off the developers. 

It's a shame they don't sound too receptive to the 2048 suggestion, but basically they are providing something great for free and they can do what they want.

1 hour ago, bobcat999 said:

Thanks Toby - that would be great!  And would maybe take the load off the developers. 

It's a shame they don't sound too receptive to the 2048 suggestion, but basically they are providing something great for free and they can do what they want.

I also echo these sentiments,

I have been doing some testing and even with my PC I see quite a hit once traffic is injected. I have yet to play around with the settings as some have been updated and you can now set a radius as well.