vtp2 texture format?

[Guest a.savarese]

Hi, i'm building a photoreal scenery based on vtp2 method, with Sbuilder by great Luis! there's a little bug in the program so far, it split the main bmp into photo tiles, but cant' mix the "su" ( summer slices) and alpha slices, so in my scenery i got a full opaque photo tiles ( alpha mask isn't working).I tried another way, getting all summer and alpha photo tiles by resample, then converting to dxt1+alpha ( fs2k method) with fs texture converter, but fs crash!I've seen only dxt1 8bit is allowed, so i must use imagetool only?how can i add alpha mask with imagetool?many thanksalex

[arno 1]

From test with a Dutch VTP scenery we noticed that it worked best if all your textures were DXT1 with mipmaps. Otherwise it would indeed crash while loading the textures. Did you maybe not add the mipmaps?

[Guest luissa]

Dear Alessandro,In the project file that you sent me, you had something like this (the following is from one of my works, because I have not yours anymore):...[Map.1]Name=MAP01BMPSu=C:azoresterceiraCalibratedterceira.bmpBMPSp=C:azoresterceiraCalibratedterceira.bmpBMPFa=C:azoresterceiraCalibratedterceira.bmpBMPWi=C:azoresterceiraCalibratedterceira.bmpBMPHw=C:azoresterceiraCalibratedterceira.bmpBMPLm=C:azoresterceiraCalibratedterceira.bmpBMPAl=C:azoresterceiraCalibratedterceira.bmpBMPLC=C:azoresterceiraCalibratedterceira.bmpBMPME=C:azoresterceiraCalibratedterceira.bmpCOLS0=3375...If terceira.bmp is the bitmap from which I want to generate all the seasonal tiles and if alpha.bmp is the bitmap with the alpha channel information (same size but with grey shades only - for example you can use PSP tool to convert any coloured bitmap to a gray image), then the export section should look like:[Map.1]Name=MAP01BMPSu=C:azoresterceiraCalibratedterceira.bmpBMPSp=C:azoresterceiraCalibratedterceira.bmpBMPFa=C:azoresterceiraCalibratedterceira.bmpBMPWi=C:azoresterceiraCalibratedterceira.bmpBMPHw=C:azoresterceiraCalibratedterceira.bmpBMPLm=C:azoresterceiraCalibratedterceira.bmpBMPAl=C:azoresterceiraCalibratedalpha.bmp <<<<< attentionBMPLC=C:azoresterceiraCalibratedterceira.bmpBMPME=C:azoresterceiraCalibratedterceira.bmpCOLS0=3375...In the files that you send me there were 2 problems:1) your alpha.bmp was not an 8-bit grey bitmap2) you were using the seasonal bitamap as the alpha (as in the 1st listing above)I generated the photo coverage of your island with one click as soon as I corrected the 2 referred errors. I got bitmaps with 43KB (DXT1 opaque - no alpha) and with 87KB (DXT1 with alpha). SBuilder itself resamples the seasonal bitmap (makes the slices) and adds an alpha channel if it finds any non-white pixel in the alpha.bmp on the tile location. The output of SBuilder is 8-bit bitmaps with/without alpha. The final operation is to convert from 8-bit to DXT1. For that, SBuilder uses Imagetool from MS. Imagetool must be in the ../sbuilder/tools folder.I have sent this info to you, possibly with different words.I hope this will help you in finding what is causing your problem.Regards, LuisPS: crashes can be caused by a texture referred to in the BGL and not existing (or in an non acceptable format) in the main FS texture folder.