Help with night textures

[Guest]

I fly in the northern hemisphere, Iceland. I would be interested in knowing if it is possible to change the night textures for this part of the world. At this time of year the sky is not black as it is in FS2002 but the scenery should be visible. Can this be altered or do we have to live with this. Other sims render this completely different and more natural.

[Guest GerrishGray]

Hi ArniYes, it can be done and it's quite straightforward really, but there is rather a lot of work involved. Basically, what you have got to do is to edit all the ground textures with the *lm.bmp suffix to their names in the scenedbworldtexture folder.The tools you will need are Martin Wright's DXTBmp - downloadable from http://fly.to/mwgfx - and a good graphics editor such as Paintshop Pro. For each and every one of the said texture files, you will need to load it into DXTBmp with 'Load Extended Image', export it from there into your graphics editor, use the editor to increase the brightness of the image, and/or adjust the contrast, save the edited image, re-import it back into DXTBmp, and then save the finished file in the required format with 'Save Extended Image' - the correct format being DXT1 Opaque. It is important that you make exactly the same brightness/contrast adjustment to each of the images, otherwise you will end up with an uneven appearance even worse than the 'too dark' ground that you get at present.Oh, and before you start doing any of this you should make a backup copy of the original textures!You can also restrict the use of your edited ground textures just to the required areas of the world, if you want, but this involves having 'landclass' scenery as well. If you're interested, I'll give you more details of how to get this and use it to 'localise' your adjusted ground textures, but let's get them made first ...If you are prepared to take on this rather mammoth task, I think you'll find that quite a lot of other simmers will be grateful for your efforts too.Kind RegardsGerrish

[Guest PaulL01]

This really shouldn

[Guest GerrishGray]

Hi PaulThanks for that suggestion - makes the job much easier. I had overlooked the idea of batch processing because my usual graphics editor, Jasc Paintshop Pro, is very week in that area. But as you say, Corel or Photoshop could do the job fine.Arni - The batch conversion tool you will need from Martin Web's site is called convim.exe. You'll also need his standard set of DLL's.CheersGerrish