BMP textures from the *Scenery/World/Texture* folder

[Guest Rosin]

Hi there!I'm all set and determined to change the textures of FS2004. I don't like these "jaguar spot"-like looking hills with trees, some fields of shrubs etc. I will use some other textures and overlay them to some parts of the old ones.However I have this reoccuring problem: each time i want to open these textures in a image editor i get the message of incompatabimity of the specific BMP that FS use. On other instances, however, all these textures suddenly become browsable and usable as any regular BMP--i can open them on Photoshop.So, i can't figure, which is the factor that makes these BMPs switch to normal BMP format? I simply don't know after which of my actions they 'change'. All i know is that FS doesn't care if they are regular BMP or 'special' BMP...thank you for your attention and Happy New Year! ***

[Guest cwright]

>Hi there!>>I'm all set and determined to change the textures of FS2004. I>don't like these "jaguar spot"-like looking hills with trees,>some fields of shrubs etc. I couldn't agree more. Many of the textures are covered by black blotches that look awful from low or medium altitude. I think they're designed to look good from high altitude - but as I generally fly at low altitude, that doesn't help. With the aim of getting rid of those black blotches, I made about half a dozen of my own textures for my scenery design. I may be a bit biased, but I think my textures look several million times better than the default ones! (only joking). They're not perfect and they do show some tiling effect (i.e. the joins along the edges of squares don't match perfectly). It's well worth having a go yourself. The textures are of the DXT1 format with mipmaps. Most paint programs won't load these, which explains your problem. You need the Microsoft Image Tool program, which is available in several of the SDK's, including the autogen one. You can get it here: http://www.microsoft.com/games/flightsimul...wnloads_sdk.asp Image Tool will load the texture. After creating your new texture, load it into Image Tool, add mipmaps and convert it to DXT1. Save the texture to FS and you're ready to go. Best regards and happy new year, Chris

[Guest Rosin]

thanks Chris! I'm absolutely sure you textures are much cooler than the default ones.Concerning the tile effect, i was planing to overlay patches/blotches of new texture over the old, yet without erazing the edges of the default texture. This is because i noticed they use 'generic' edges--same edge for a whole bunch of textures to avoid tile effect. For example if i want to put some nice photographic trees and bushes over these black dots "jaguar skin", i thought of overlaying the new trees on large 'spots'/patches that resemble islands where you have "vains" of the old texture inbetween them, plus the old edges...but these are not essential things-i'm sure you have fun and don't even notice the tile effect when you fly.I have the microsoft tool for their textures yet i know that for some reason, at different times these bitmaps suddenly used to turn to ordinary, browsable with photoshop BMPs. I don't know if this was happening as a weird side effect of my using Ground2k (extremely cool program:) or something else. My point is that, if i am to use the Microsoft Image Tool program, i have to open each texture file, save it as an ordinary BMP, open it again in Photoshop, do my overlay operation, then save it again in FS world/texture folder...As if these BMPs were again being able to be opened straight into Photoshop this would be much simpler for me (especially if i do like 60 textures)...so who knows which thing makes these BMPs suddenly turn into ordinary BMPs. I noticed the same shift of format in my "clouds" textures: after adding some clouds, all clouds turned to normal BMPs. Then suddenly they all turned into the other nonbrowsable format. I don't know what triggers that...***

[Guest cwright]

I actually spent a bit of time on overcoming the tiling effect. First, I cheated. Of course, each texture has about seven different versions. I created them by simply rotating or mirror-imaging the base texture. I wrote a little VB program that takes the base texture and automatically creates the rest and then calls Image Tool to convert to DXT1. The program also cut out an edge section and pasted it onto the other images in an attempt to solve the tiling effect. In theory this technique would make all the edges match. Not completely successful, but in FS the tiling isn't too obvious. And anything's better than those ugly black blotches! Good luck with your own textures. Best regards, Chris

[Guest ChrisD]

Greetings.To differentiate between browsable and non browsable textures, just look at the size.xxxxxxSu.bmp textures 43 Kb in size are coded and non-browsable.xxxxxxSu.bmp textures 192 Kb is in plain OS2/Windows format.Want to convert from 43 to 192 Kb?The program convim can do it for You, it can even convert a whole folder in batch mode.If You have enough free HDD-space to spare, You don't need to convert back to coded 43 Kb textures. FS reads the plain bmp's just as easy.Hope this helps :)ChrisD

[Guest ChrisD]

Editing period had expired so here goes again:>Greetings.>>To differentiate between browsable and non browsable textures,>just look at the size.>>xxxxxxSu.bmp textures 43 Kb in size are coded and>non-browsable.>xxxxxxSu.bmp textures 192 Kb is in plain OS2/Windows format.>>Want to convert from 43 to 192 Kb?>>The program convim can do it for You, it can even convert a>whole folder in batch mode.>>If You have enough free HDD-space to spare, You don't need to>convert back to coded 43 Kb textures. FS reads the plain bmp's>just as easy.CORRECTION:Seems that my FS install has fooled me to believe that FS reads plain bmp's, but it don't. SORRY..I converted a whole texture dir to plain bmp's and altered the path inside scenery.cfg, but it seems that FS kept reading the old dir containing the compressed textures fooling me to believe that FS could do with plain bmp's.Now: Anybody know a program that can convert a single .bmp to coded format? (besides fs-texture converter).>>ChrisD>

[rhumbaflappy 113]

Hi all.From a batch file or a command line, imagetool can do batching:http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/55798.jpgImagetool cannot create an alphachannel, but it will mip one correctly and change the format correctly of an existing alphachannel.Dick

[Guest Rosin]

Chris you're a maverick to create the VB progs:)Thanks Dick and ChrisD! I got to look for this program "convim".only one strange thing: in those many cases when my texture BMPs turned to brousable (probably for the reason that you cite--change in size and resolution), they were perfectly usable with FS. There was no need for them to be in the alfa ch. or mip format.However another strange thing was that: when at one point i imported resized clouds textures (this time in the /texture folder, not world/texture) the game started to crash and the only way to fix this was to go to the "options" screen and change one option in the graphic card section--something like "read textures". Then all the reduced size clouds worked...***

[GHD 21]

Rosin, go to Martin Wright's site for a complete set of FS graphics utilities http://fly.to/mwgfx/George

[Guest Rosin]

Thanks a lot George; very helpful--i found the browser and the converter there!thanks!***