Bill, Nick, Patrick, et al... updating our FS9 aircraft to FSX

[Guest Vorlin]

Ok, so I have the FSX SDK and I have my semi-broken FS9 aircraft that needs to be tweaked for FSX.I really do appreciate the effort that went into the FSX SDK. It's very obvious that the author went to a lot of trouble to make sure that in FSX we wouldn't face the same lack of information issues that we faced in FS9.Unfortunately, it's also pretty clear that by the time he got to the textures section he'd been eating, sleeping and breathing techno-speak for at least six months. I started to contemplate shooting myself somewhere between Chrome / Non-Chrome reflections and Fresnel Ramps. Fortunately, I have friends who care but then I had to deal with them trying to convince me to join a 12 step program for former Flight Sim Dev's but that's a story for another day...At the moment my main concern is simple... I have to put glass back in the empty holes of my aircraft. As I read on, I realized that I'd need to update textures to .dds and that I may or may not need to change the model to assign the material to specular rather than diffuse and then I had a thought...First: Is it safe to mix .dds and .bmp textures in the same model or are they all going to have to be upgraded to avoid having something self destruct?Second: What other caveats might I be opening myself up to?Third: This looks like a job for the AVSIM forums.... so I'm here!When I went looking into the posts, I paged back around 6 pages until I found an old thread that I'd started months ago. I didn't notice any threads about updating our existing creations but, of course, I could have missed it. I'll keep digging and searching but thought I'd ask here as well and, also, ask you all how your update efforts are coming along. Any nasty suprises or are things easier than you had feared?Thanks,Scott / Vorlin

[n4gix 4,947]

Scott, to be perfectly honest, all the detailed information you need is at http://freeflightdesign.com in "The FFDS Design Forum"...It is possible to "mix-and-match" .dds and .bmp textures in the same FSX project if you don't want to take the time to convert all of the Materials in the model to FSX type.As for FSX "Glass," follow the recipie in the SDK, but then......add to that setting the Opacity spinner to 30-40% as needed, otherwise the windows won't be transparent as expected.

[Guest Vorlin]

Thanks Bill, I'll digest this and the info over at FFD over the next few days. Looks as if your contact for the SDK was really busy over the last year or so and I can't help but wonder if it'll be that long before we can really grasp all the things we need to know because of the deep level of detail.Scott