Strange Effect on Textures (SeePic)

[Guest luissa]

>Mipmapping 'on', does, as you suggest remove this effect and>wow thats great!!!!>>However, why are there always down sides to things, in the>screenshots below, as a result the text on the Fuel Tank is>blurred. This may be why it was turned off, because of this>effect on the Runway centreline, although this is not as>obvious as it is on the text on the tank.Hello Dave,I had the same problem, eg, I would like to turn mip maps OFF on a texture by texture basis. I wanted to have MIPMAPS=ON but, for a particular texture, I would like to have it as a crispy texture. I think that making your own mips and importing them to your texture with ImageTool or other, will not do the job. You still will have the blurr!Unfortunately the SCASM command to turn mips OFF never worked for me. Either I had used it wrongly or it is not supported by FS2002.The solution that I used for getting a particular crispy texture was:a) make the texture 255 (not 256) colors maximum! If you have text may be you only have a dozen of colors on a background! If you have a landscape texture it is tricky to have 255 colors only, but it is possible!With PSP5 this is done by "reduce to 256 colors" and checking "the number of used colors". Take notice of the pointer (the pallete index) that represents one of the unused colors!:( save the texture as an 8 bit standard bitmap format!c) open the small programme TRANSP.EXE and browse to your bitmap! Then write the color index of the unused color and set opacity = 0!Normally FS will autogenerates the mips when it founds a texture without mips! But if the texture is 8-bit standard and "colorkey transparency" is present, FS fails to recreate the mips!I used this method for markings (text or else) as in:http://www.ptsim.com/madeira/mad835.jpghttp://www.ptsim.com/madeira/mad813.jpgThe programme TRANSP.EXE can be found here:http://www.ptsim.com/downloads/Transp.zipRegards, Luis

[Guest]

Hi LuisThanks for your reply, nice work(Screenshots), did you incorporate the the different levels(Mesh) and car parks in your scenery yourself. I always admire you guys that take on the multi-plicity of these large Airfields, with their airbridges and othe inter-conecting Dubreys....I'll try the download, and give it a try. Sounds familiar from previous searches in the archives on mip'sRegardsDave

[Shaka 2]

Another alternative is to use mipmaps selectively. In your example, use it on the hangar, but make a seperate texture for the fuel tank. With the fuel tank texture, turn the mipmaps off. This will retain the sharpness. If you are using a small-sized bitmap (say, 64x64) then you won't be hurting you framerates noticeably, since your texture is already pretty small.Also, you could go the other way, and use a large bitmap for the fuel tank, then the mipmap-bluriness-effect won't be as noticable, but this would be an ineffecient use of textures, I think.I ran into this problem with my Buriram scenery. I was using mipmap textures for my ground surface and runway, but my runway lines were useless under mipmaps. So, I created seperate textures for the lines, which I left "un-mipped". I was quite pleased with the result, but the trade-off was more textures being loaded. Fortunately, Buriram Airport is rather sparse.- Martin

[Guest]

Hi Ha shakaThanks for the suggestions, I'll give it try when I get out of hospital next weekNice web siteRegardsDave

[Guest GerrishGray]

Hi DaveSorry I didn't pick up on this earlier, but your problem with the fuel tank sign was probably caused by DXTBmp, which I notice you used to make the texture. Until recently, there was a fault in the DXTBmp code that caused DXT1 textures containing bright red colours, like your Total sign, to have 'smeared' mips. After some testing and discussion with Martin Wright, that bug has now been fixed and the latest version of DXTBmp, available from Martin's web site, no longer has this problem.The bug only affected textures containing bright red colours, and was specific to DXTBmp - it did not occur with imagetool.exe. Now that the bug has been fixed, DXTBmp creates mips as sharp as can be obtained when using the default mipping routines from DXT's (but note that Martin has also explained that the default routines always automatically introduce some smoothing into mips because they sample a 4x4 pixel block when calculating the colours for each pixel of the reduced mip - and this applies to imagetool.exe just as much as DXTBmp).CheersGerrish

[Guest]

Hi GerrishIt's good to here from you, I hope all is well. I always value your help.I have been amazed at the support the forum has offered on this issue of Mip's, you included from past threads and I have to confess that I haven't attempted to look at this, I'm due for a spell in hospital next week(Not serious), but when they let me out for the weekend I'll certainly download Martin's update for his Excellent Programme. I use his Viewer, as it views all textures, its always good to keep tabs on all Dxt's, even your own.Mip's are something I need to look into in detail with regard to my own textures and the isuue of frame rates. The 'Total' text is a wrapped image in 'FSDS', and a 'total' waste of texture memory(Pun un intended) sorry for swaring :-lol Had you noticed, I'm struggling with vectors still, Arno has persuaded me to use the a/ai s/w in the Texpoly()Poly(), bless him, he never relents with me. His advice seems spot on,and it has produced results;) I recently got access to the airfield at Welshpool, 12mths on and spoke to the owner, he was very helpful, although I don't think he realises the advances Fs has made over the years. His nice looking seceretary, seemed too, she was very aware of VFGM Scenery,(apparently manchester Shipping canel has vanished, I'm sure they would be upset if they knew). Its good to speak to him so I can feed back on my work, which I intend to:-) Thanks againRegardsDave